Various annoying Vegas bugs

philfort wrote on 7/10/2004, 3:50 PM
This past week, I just had my first long "session" with Vegas 5. In the course of the evening, I ran into several bugs:

1) When you remove the last piece of media from a track, the track motion glow (and probably shadow, but I didn't check) gets reset to the default value. For instance, I had a light green glow applied to several tracks, and I was moving clips back and forth between the tracks, often leaving a track empty. Whenever that happened, the glow reverted to bright red (the default).

2) When you have a complex composition that takes a while to render a frame, and included in that composition is a Text Generator that you're editing, the UI hangs while the frame is being composed, so you can't see what you're typing. Very frustrating, it should really be done on a separate thread.

3) Colour picker: When you move the arrow to the right of the colour bar on the bottom right, the alpha is reset. Frustrating! I had set the opacity, I just wanted to keep readjusting to a different level of gray, and the opacity kept going back to 100%!!

4) When you undo while editing a keyframe, it resets the scale of the keyframe timeline... so if I've zoomed in to adjust some carefully placed keyframes, then undo - bam! I'm zoomed all the way back out. Very disruptive to workflow.

5) Vegas crashed while I was undoing a delete media operation. Can't repro it though...

6) The + button to add a keyframe does not work unless you a *really* zoomed in so that the keyframe is a good distance away from where your cursor is. Seems like if you can set the cursor position to a certain spot, you should always be able to add a keyframe with '+'. It's been this way ever since Vegas 3 though.

Other bugs I encountered that appear to have been fixed when I installed 5.0b:
- Alt-tabbing to another window on the desktop did not work when I was editing track motion.
- I had two clips abutting each other, and a track motion keyframe on the last frame of the first clip, and another one of the first frame of the next clip. However, Track Motion was not applied *at all* on the first frame of the second clip. So there was one frame where the video suddenly jumped back to default track motion (e.g. 100% size, no x/y offsets). Since installed 5.0b I couldn't repro, although maybe there was something more to the repro steps that I am missing.

Anyway, these were the 7 issues I ran into over the course of a few hours, which made for some frustrating editing. It seems things went much more smoothly back in Vegas 3. I remember being impressed at what a stable program it was, and how the workflow was so smooth. Vegas 4 seemed to regress and bit, and Vegas 5 even more - I keep finding that keyboard focus is never where it should be, and I have to click on things a lot more, interrupting workflow - maybe it's just my imagination, I dunno.


Comments

philfort wrote on 7/10/2004, 3:55 PM
After comparing with Vegas 4, it looks like only #1 is a regression.
And #2 is a regression from Vegas 3. Not only does Vegas 3 seem a lot faster, but even when it is not, I am not prevented from manipulating the UI in a properties window, while the current frame is being composed.
jbar wrote on 7/10/2004, 9:13 PM
Related to bug #4 you listed..

In Video Event FX window with 2 or more effects...
Zoom in (to get a less cluttered look at the keyframes)

Switching between effects (by clicking on effect at top, to the left of keyframe timeline, or on the keyframe timeline to set the cursor) will cause the keyframe timeline zoom/scale to get reset.

I guess one could claim that this is a feature, but seems like a bug to me and is very annoying - especially when trying to sync up keyframes between effects.