You do jump to conclusions, don't you?

I've spent hours and hours on this, trying various settings SYSTEMATICALLY. I was trained by one of the world's best broadcasters to fault-find, so I don't jump to conclusions (which you imply).

The logic, however, is that other video renderers just work in my configuration, and whatever Sony is doing does not (on similar or identical material). Furthermore, Sound Forge, from the same stable, also just works, as does CD Architect (although I haven't used it for a while).

Regarding posting anything else, firstly, yes, I have posted on other things, and secondly it's hard to be helpful if you can't get off first base, in other words produce usable output.

If it makes you feel better, I'll have another go at contacting Sony directly, but I'm not holding out any hope for a resolution via that route.

I feel your pain.... I bought this latest V8Pro after skipping version 7 to get some of the latest features in Vegas, like the titler (FINALLY- although it is way to complicated) , multicam editing, and blue ray DVD's

This was an ambitious release by Sony but they HAD TO KNOW OF ALL THE BUGS prior to release.

The fact that it is taking 8c so long to be released is because there are MAJOR FLAWS and issues.

Hanging renders, memory managment, 32bit render, ac3 render, poor support for quads, no official Vista support...... Im sure there is more but I pretty much don't edit with V8pro because its so flakey.

I was once a VERY proud Vegas supporter and fought tooth and nail with other Adobe, Final cut, Avid users to try Vegas cause it's such an awesome peace of software... But sence Sony took over Sonic Foundry it has been a steady downfall. Support is virtually non-existent, remember when Sonic Foundry owned it we actually had the coders them selves talking to us on the fourms and trying as hard as they could to help us out.

This just sucks sony - try harder!!!

You said "Also shows that you're not willing to actually TRY to figure out what is wrong as this is your 8th post on the forum"

Multiple posts aside it is NOT the responsibility of the customer to solve any problem with the product. The product is the responsibility of the product manufacturer and it is their sole responsiblity to fix it.

A product is a product, you won't try to re-engineer a toaster would you. I think if we all started holding software makers 100% responsible for the quality of their products instead of downloading the responsiblity on the user community we would start getting much better product quality.

There needs to be a better ability for users to sue companies who make software that does not work as the maker claimed it would. These licence agreements that say "AS IS" need to made a thing of the past, perhaps legislation is required to allow the user to hold companies finanically responsible for producing crap, just as there already is for most other products.

BigRockies.com Your Home in the Rockies!

"I've spent hours and hours on this, trying various settings SYSTEMATICALLY. I was trained by one of the world's best broadcasters to fault-find, so I don't jump to conclusions (which you imply)"

But, have you described your system here? The files you are rendering, where does it stop, are there any error messages? Have you rendered any small test projects? Can you render with only some generated text? Does your project have a lot of still images? Have you tried re-installing Vegas? You leave people here who have a lot of experience with little more than 'it don't work'.

I have used Vegas for five years on hundreds of projects with not a single crash. There's a lot of us here with the same experience. If there was a systemic problem with Vegas, then there would be more than a small number of people experiencing problems.

In all likelihood, it is Windows crashing, not Vegas. Vegas is extremely processor and memory intensive. As such it will run the CPU pretty hard and push the temps up. If your rig is overclocked then it could be over the edge. If you have less than 1G of RAM, then any reasonably sized project will crash Windows.

Simonm,
You need to take it easy.....Sony Vegas Pro 8.0b is not unstable....something you have
on your system is conflicting with the software.

Sony is well aware that there is a problem and is working on it. In fact if you HAD read through the various posts as you have stated then you would have come across a post entitled "HDV READER" by forum Admin.

In this post contains a new HDV reader dll that is being tested. You will find a download for it as well as instructions for its install about 1/3 of the way down the post (Forum Adim's third post I believe)

In this post contains a new HDV reader dll that is being tested.Unfortunately, that original post was on July 2, and the Sony admin hasn't posted since July 7, despite over 200 posts (213), many of them reporting great improvements, but some still reporting problems, including new problems apparently created by the DLL. So, yes Sony is aware, but from a customer perspective, they appear quite detached and remote, and certainly don't seem to be at all engaged in the process.

You can tell a LOT about a company by how they interact with their customers.

So, it may or may not be true that the original poster is just a chronic complainer who hasn't done enough to avail himself of the helpful posts available on this forum, but that doesn't diminish the fact that the problems in Vegas 8 have been reported for close to a year by lots of people -- many of whom can hardly be classified as complainers -- and Sony's response has been slow, inadequate, and not customer-friendly.

Others in this post seem to be under the mistaken impression that the original poster is asking for help. Seems clear enough that it is nothing more than venting. Nothing wrong with that, just don't mistake the intent.

it is NOT the responsibility of the customer to solve any problem with the product. The product is the responsibility of the product manufacturer and it is their sole responsiblity to fix it.

True! However, it does help to do your own initial troubleshooting if you want to skip the preliminary steps (i.e. the "did you plug the toaster into the outlet?" type questions).

There needs to be a better ability for users to sue companies who make software that does not work as the maker claimed it would. These licence agreements that say "AS IS" need to made a thing of the past, perhaps legislation is required to allow the user to hold companies finanically responsible for producing crap, just as there already is for most other products.

Certainly understand the frustration (in general). In practice, this would amount to nothing more than a way to redistribute revenue from software vendors to the lawyers. Also, software would always be 10 years late and 6 times more expensive because vendors would be too scared to release anything until they had gone triple overbudget doing QA testing. Technology advancements would stall while vendors try to perfect the existing feature sets. Seems much better to let the free market punish the vendors that get it wrong on the quality...

SimonM - you are NOT alone here.

I've quit posting about the crashes (freeze-ups? lock-ups?) or whatever you want to call them. Bottom line, working with non-HDV HD material, on my 92-minute timeline, straight cuts and a few cross fades, I can only get about 15 minutes to render (to anything, including MPEG-2 for DVDs). I've worked around by rendering in reels, and putting those rendered segments into a 7.0d timeline, but I shouldn't have to.

There was a time that I could simply render a timeline of any length in Vegas without worries. But not now. I have beens using Vegas since version 4, and will continue to use it, but please, please don't tell me and others that it is somehow our fault we're having problems, or our responsibility to troubleshoot buggy software.

And don't tell me Vegas has nothing to do with it. It's Vegas error messages that come up, not Windows messages.

Some of you have been lucky enough to not have problems. Great. I'm happy for you. But don't discount the dozens of people who have posted issues with Vegas 8. The problems are a reality. Period.

I have posted numerous threads seeking solutions to these problems, including posting a thread where I solicited system specs of people who are NOT having problems, as I suspect the problem may be rooted in conflicts with the Vegas software with only certain motherboards, memory, etc. So I feel like I'm doing what I can to solve this.

But ultimately, it is not my responsibility to figure this out. I really wish Sony would do that. OR at least a little more feedback would be wonderful. My support tickets have gone unanswered, and I haven't seen any real input from the company here on the forums. So I, like many others, do feel pretty abandoned by Sony.

But the icing on the cake is when other Sony Vegas users tell us it's somehow our fault, or that we're crazy. If you can't be helpful or give real advice, just keep your fingers away from your keyboard.

Mark,

Your post is exactly correct. I don't have any problems either (mostly because I was too scared to update to 8.0 because of all the reports back in October of problems), but I respect those that do have problems and have been desperately trying for a large fraction of an entire year to find a solution and have not gotten much if any help from Sony.

Reminds me of when I started video editing back around 2000 when using the Pinnacle Studio program ...

It would be interesting to know how many users who continuously have problems with Vegas 8b are using home built computers, overclocking, etc. Or are trying to use laptop computers for editing.

I have a Dell XPS720 Quad Core/Vista 32 and use it daily for Vegas HDV and SD editing and I cannot remember the last time it crashed. Vegas works without problem! Previously I had a Sony Pentium 4 Desktop and had no problems with Vegas crashing.

If you are experiencing problems with Vegas crashing then you have hardware problems or conflicting software problems. Or you may have corrupt video input files.

Major computer manufacturers have a wealth of resources to determine what components will work reliably with others, a crucial necessity that is not available to home builders.

With 25+ years experience in heavy electronics/computers/software I do not build my own cars, refrigerators or computers! It's a crap shoot to buy a name brand but it is russian roulette to build your own!

I have to agree with the OP as well.
I have raised this issue since October of last year (starting with the relase of 8.0)
My work around, like Mark, is to cut up in small portions prior to rendering, then stich them all together.
I also quit posting my problems related to those issues, as there are always those who will reply that they never have an issue and it must be your system.

As reported, I think Sony knows its problems, but is having a difficult time fixing them, as it has taken the better part of this year to come out with 8.0c (that is, if they make it this year?).

But again, my main problem with Sony in all of this is the lack of communication on this board. I thought they were trying when they announced the beta of the new HD reader here, but then they became silent again....... oh well rant is over

Ted

"It would be interesting to know how many users who continuously have problems with Vegas 8b are using home built computers, overclocking, etc. Or are trying to use laptop computers for editing."

Well, I for one, am not using a home-built computer. It is a Velocity Micro system, built for gaming, but only used for editing, not for internet (except for updates). It is not overclocked, souped up, or modified in any way. All updates to Windows XP Pro have been applied.

In retrospect, I would have bought a workstation from HP. But given that the computer is only a year old, I'm not rushing out to replace it. I would rather try 8.0c, when it appears, to see if that makes a difference.

<"built for gaming">

Probably overclocked by mfg.

Reliability is often the trade off when optimizing for speed!

Send me a file set that crashes... I'd like to try it.

"Probably overclocked by mfg.
Reliability is often the trade off when optimizing for speed!"

NO, NOT OVERCLOCKED! Have double-checked this in the BIOS. Stop assuming that people having problems with 8.0 are technical morons.

Being a long-time user and proponent of Vegas, I appreciate your enthusiasm and support of it, but this continual blaming of the users and systems is counter-productive. There are problems with the current iteration of Vegas. Period. End of story.

(to both Steves)

Since you ask:

ABIT motherboard with Intel processor; 2GB RAM; three disks (one ATAPI and two SATA. about 250GB of free contiguous space. Operating System and data files on separate disks (and buses) . There's a legacy Adaptec wide SCSI card, but it's very standard and has no BIOS loaded (used solely for tape backup.

It's fully patched XP Pro. I honestly can't remember the processor speed but it's irrelevant (it's not how long it takes that matters). The machine is powered 24x7, and otherwise very stable indeed. The graphics card is NVIDIA, but again that's irrelevant for rendering. There's a stereo Transit USB sound 'card'; Wacom tablet (Intuous series) and a big Kensington serial trackball. That's it.

I have .net 1.5, 2.0 and 3.0 installed, but there are no known conflicts between these of any significance, and they really relate to GUI RAD, and should have no bearing on a rendering engine. Vegas runs with root equivalence, sorry, administrator privileges.

Prior to attempting to render I run through all the processes in Task Manager, and kill anything that might be hogging memory, or which has interrupts that could interfere, such as SQL server, SQL browser etc. I also disable the network. interface and unload its stack. Vegas is set not to attempt multi CPU rendering etc.
As for the projects, they're small and involve cut edits with no titling nor complex effects. The most recent one, which is still crashing on render (I haven't yet got a satisfactory output) is 4'25" duration. It has one mirror shot (laterally reversed, used in a couple of places, and most shots have been graded (contrast/color correction applied). There are four audio tracks, two carrying sync sound (mono radio mic - one channel used of a stereo pair), and two background atmos tracks, essentially just two WAV files.

There are no video transitions, nor still-frames, nor titles. Input is from a Canon XL1s, via Scenalyzer Live (because I need the third channel for the radio mic), and the files are captured as bog-standard "PAL" DV (25frames/s 1.09xx ratio 720x576 in 'square' pixels).

I admit I *have* been trying to de-interlace, as the output is destined for YouTube eventually (output from Vegas in AVI will do just fine, however), but even if I don't do that it still usually crashes in the middle of the process, and always* crashes at the end of the render if it gets there.

I've posted the crash error message (or at least one of them) in an earlier thread, but generating another is easy :-(

I really do appreciate any help, genuinely.

Regards,

s.


*I do mean 'always'. It is every single time, not 'very often' or 'it feels like always'.

"It would be interesting to know how many users who continuously have problems with Vegas 8b are using home built computers, overclocking, etc. Or are trying to use laptop computers for editing."

I don't think it has much to do with the machines, or overclocking.... etc, etc. I have one of those overclocked machines and I WAS one of those chronic complainers with regards to crashes.

But NOW... I have no problems at all.... they've vanished. And I'm doing 2 hour HDV timelines for Blu Ray disk with 300 to 450 scenes.

I know for a fact that it has something to do with scene splitting... capture an entire hour of tape and manually scene split on the time line and you will rarely have an issue. But I'm now pretty much convinced that although the present HDV reader may be quite a bit more finicky than before.... the scene splitting on the fly causes a lot of scenes to be written some what erroneously.

I use HDVsplit (and had crashes with its hdv splits as well)...... UNTIL... I stopped scene splitting on the fly. I now capture a tape in its entirety and then do the scene splitting AFTER the capture (HDVsplit has an option to scene split a file on the HDD). Ever since I started doing this the crashing has just COMPLETELY vanished.... and I used to crash at least 25 times during one render (no joke!).

Same here, I can crash V8 regardless of the media. No audio, nothing from a camera. Just build a basic composite, push a slider too far and Vegas renders a red frame during preview and crashes with a memory access error.
Even projects that don't crash I still get the odd black frame pop up.

Bob.

Likewise: At one point recently I tried:

1. audio without video (to WAV)
2. video without audio (to AVI)
3. combining the two, so that no actual rendering was necessary, merely adding
the audio into the AVI container.

It worked, but the sync drifted horribly on YouTube (started about 5 frames out ended up about 5 secs out after 4'25"), so I had to pull it. As of today 2325hrs GMT, I've been trying for three days to redo it with a forced 'interleave' (sync point) every quarter second or every frame, but that doesn't render successfully.

The earlier attempt rendered but crashed at the end, per usual, so at least I had some output. So far today I haven't produced enough for GSpot to return meaningful results for analysis (because the end of the file is effectively missing).

Ho hum...

Vegas doesn't lock audio to vision. That's the very first limitation I found back in V4 days. That might explain your drift problems. It assumes X samples = Y frames and treats interleaved audio just like another audio track. It'll by default group the interleaved audio to the vision from the same file but that's about it.

What's possibly happened goes to another long term problem with Vegas. Your 4 channel audio is 12/32K which Vegas doesn't do natively.

edit: try rendering your audio to 16/48K first and use that.

Bob.

"And don't tell me Vegas has nothing to do with it. It's Vegas error messages that come up, not Windows messages."

How do you know it's not a Windows system call returning an error code that Vegas is trying to describe for you? I.E., it could still be a problem in Windows.

Simon,

You say
"It's fully patched XP Pro. I honestly can't remember the processor speed but it's irrelevant (it's not how long it takes that matters). "

Since you do not have your system profile displayed it makes it difficult to help you.

On the Sony Vegas Pro8 box it recomends XP SP2 or Vista.
Do you have SP2 installed?

Vegas recomends a 1GHz processor (2.8GHz forHDV).
You say it's irrelevant. Not true. Also how large is your Pagefile?

IMO you can't do much with a 1MHz processor. Right Click "My Computer" then it will show you what processor you have.

Craig





I also run "EndItAll" and specifically STOP the antivirus program before rendering large projects.