Thanks Jay,
Add your requests here. I don't think we will be poo-pooed. And if a few do it, so what? We are directing the thread toward the software developers, not those few who can't see that these are legitimate requests.

John

Video Capture:
make destination directory settings per vidcap project instead of global

In addition to listing things here, you've really got to submit them as product suggestions. Many of us have had specific suggestions implemented (Although sometimes misinterpreted) because we suggested them through the suggestions page.

The real hope is that the software developers would follow up on suggestions, asking the person who makes the suggestion to expand a bit.

As far as product suggestions go, I'd look at this forum and find the common problems that people have. Some of them are real problems with Vegas, some of them are just problems with presentation (people get the wrong idea about how things work and the interface could be retooled to clarify things). Then start looking at other product forums for ideas as well.

Rob Mack

If the goal is to actually get the Sony development team to do something different, rather than to simply vent, I would suggest taking a different tactic. In particular, while I am certain that many Sony engineers and marketers read this forum from time-to-time, this is not their main source of ideas, nor is it particularly influential.

Influence comes from different quarters.

1. Magazines are influential. If a product gets a bad review, product management will often react. This then suggests a tactic that involves targeting specific reviewers and getting everyone to write a letter. This needs to be coordinated: you can't have everyone writing a different letter asking for something different.

2. Consultants are even more influential than magazines. Most magazines look to consultants to provide the quotes that set the tone for the article. Decide who the key consultants in the industry are and then contact them.

3. People listen to their boss. This may sound old-fashioned, but you'd be surprised how much influence a good old-fashioned letter has when sent directly to the person in charge. Imagine having several dozen of them. If you coordinate this with the first two above, you would be amazed at what can happen.

4. Show up at events and talk to people in person. Buy a ticket to Las Vegas this week and go to CES. Search out Sony people and talk to them directly.

I can go on, but the point is that posting in this forum is simply going to leave you more frustrated. There is not one single feature that has been added to the product in the last several releases that is in that release because some Sony engineer read about it here in this forum and said, "wow, what a great idea, I'll get started writing the code today."

There is not one single feature that has been added to the product in the last several releases that is in that release because some Sony engineer read about it here in this forum and said, "wow, what a great idea, I'll get started writing the code today."

John, would you agree or disagree that the above is a sad commentary?

He's probably right. How many times does Sony even bother to chime in here? Sometimes people specifically ask for Sony to help and they don't even answer. Before you start knocking me for knocking Sony, I like their products, I don't like the way they distance themselves in customer relations.

"There is not one single feature that has been added to the product in the last several releases that is in that release because some Sony engineer read about it here in this forum and said, "wow, what a great idea, I'll get started writing the code today."

John, would you agree or disagree that the above is a sad commentary?"

Not speaking for John, but I would not call this a "sad commentary" . In fact, I would worry if user wish lists were the primary source of new product features. There's a LOT more that goes into a feature decision than merely the desires of a few dozen users. (Admittedly many of the forum members here constitute a solid core group of Vegas users, and some beta testers, but we're still a tiny minority of Vegas users). You have to determine if theres a market need for a feature that would pay for the software development and testing. Would the feature give the product a marketing advantage? Would the feature conflict with a channel partner and possibly alienate them? What are the competition doing in this area?

That said, I would think that any company would look to their current users for ideas to kick around in the feature decision meetings. If they are smart, they would also be looking at the competition's users to get an idea of their needs as well.

So, the bottom line is: cost of the feature, time to develop the feature, marketability, competetive position, and most important - is the added cost to the end-user justified? In other words, if feature "X" adds $50 to the cost of the upgrade, but only 10% of the users would ever need it, is it a wise marketing move to make the other 90% pay for it?

Steve Mann

If the goal is to actually get the Sony development team to do something different, rather than to simply vent, I would suggest taking a different tactic. In particular, while I am certain that many Sony engineers and marketers read this forum from time-to-time, this is not their main source of ideas, nor is it particularly influential.

========
First of all, if you really believe that then why did you add your suggestions to the Time for those Vegas 7 wishes thread?
How is that thread going to be read any more than this one?

Second of all, I do believe that Sony reads these threads despite what you may think. They may not chime in, but they have said in the past that they do read them.

Third, since the other thread you participated in is up to over 150 responses, I think it is safe to say that I am not alone in believing that they read it.

Regards,
John

Steve, all I can say is that I disagree with your statement. We're not talking about a "wish list" here. We're talking about ongoing issues that have not been addressed since version 2. I'll leave it at that.

I know you're asking John but I'd disagree. This is not the primary place where this stuff gets attention. It's a good place to talk and look at ideas, but it's more effective to report bugs and product suggestions on the forms provided on this site. Seriously, there's too much noise here.

I had a similar thing happen with another large software vendor. I complained about a bug in a product for three versions, but only on their forum. It was only after I described the problem in detail on a bug report form that they called me, sent a group of engineers to visit us, looked at the problem, assigned an engineer to it, and together we fixed it. Granted, part of this was to pick our brains about what we'd want to see in the next version, but none of it would have happened if I'd stuck to the forum.

The other noteworthy thing was that they wanted feedback for their next version of the software within a month of releasing the current version. By that standard I'd say we're waaaay late if we're asking for things in Vegas 7 now.

Rob Mack

isues have not been addressed, bug reports been sent ,,,,,,,

only one they ever fixed that i sent was the duplicate file deal which would lock up a veg file,,, and they did fix it.

Okay, how about leaving it at this and moving on to listing the longstanding bugs and gripes-- talk about it here and post it as a bug report. Posting here certainly doesn't hurt but skipping the bug report for doesn't help.

My longstanding gripes are black frames, non persistant prerenders, and the Vidcap program in general. I posted a product suggestion about the prerenders.

Rob

John, would you agree or disagree that the above is a sad commentary?

You were referring to my comment that no feature has resulted from requests in this forum. It is not necessarily a sad commentary because the worst thing a company can do is listen to its customers.

Now that's a provocative statement, no?

What I mean is that a really good company takes a leadership position to take its customers to places they never would have thought of, with innovation and ideas beyond what any customer can imagine. That's why a person goes to engineering school: to learn how to invent.

Having said that, Sony should definitely have addressed some of the long-standing deficiencies in the product, which have been listed in this thread and in dozens and dozens of other threads that preceded it. That they haven't done this is the sad commentary, whether they read about the problems in this forum or found out about them elsewhere.

First of all, if you really believe that then why did you add your suggestions to the Time for those Vegas 7 wishes thread?

Mostly to inspire other users to submit their ideas to the Suggestion Box link at the top of this page, something I often encourage them to do. Also, I'll admit to venting more than a few times in this forum.

Second of all, I do believe that Sony reads these threads despite what you may think. They may not chime in, but they have said in the past that they do read them.

Yes, I agree that they read them. In fact, I know that they read them. They just don't do anything useful with the information. Many people fall prey to the "inbox syndrome," an idea I came up with many years ago. The idea is that many people get to the point where they just try to deal with what is in the inbox. As a result of the steady deluge, they lose their ability to prioritize and to understand what is important. The memo that talks about a part number change gets the same attention as one that describes a competitor's product introduction that just made your product line obsolete.

Sounds like some of you have found this, but... For product suggestions, scroll up to the menu bar on this forum site. Under Support, there's a menu item for Product Suggestion. This leads to a form you can fill out. I'm guessing that would be a good place to start for posting bug reports too.

Taking the software developer perspective (since that's what I am), I would suggest:
* one suggestion / bug per submission unless it's a closely-related set of attributes for a single bug / suggestion
* for bug reports, if it is at all obscure or difficult to reproduce, list the steps to reproduce the problem
* for new feature suggestions, if you think there's any chance someone might not get why you want that feature, it may help adding some context around your suggestion.

Oh, and whoever mentioned about it being too late for V7 suggestions, I tend to agree. I'd be surprised if the main feature changes weren't locked down by now. My guess is that only critical bugs or showstopper mistakes / omissions are being addressed at this stage (assuming an April rollout).

David

We could suggest some changes to the product suggestion and bug report pages...I find the prospect of filling out a lot of information, coupled with the small text boxes for suggestions, to all be a little discouraging.

Rob Mack

How about if you guys just complete this thread, then I'll put a link to it in the suggestion box when it seems done?

John

Better than nothing, but I gotta tell you it won't be so appreciated.

One suggestion per submission makes it a lot easier, although the current process is a bit convoluted.

I used to run a software and hardware development department with 44 people, the only way I could efficiently deal with customer requests was by using human intelligence to extract the wheat from the chaff. This, like security, is not a minimum wage job.

You will always find people asking for features that are already in the product (happened here too), this is good for improving the manual (hint, hint).

Many suggestions are impractical for various reasons, or actually don't make sense (worse than what was before), so this must be sorted out also.

The only way to get through this is by having somebody with a real understanding of the overall product think through the submissions and how they would be implemented. This type of understanding is a rare thing to find, but it is amazing what successes it makes possible...

The specific problems and requests have been posted here for years. The suggestion that they aren't aware of them because they haven't been submitted as product suggestions is ludicrous at best.
Since many of them use the software themselves, do you really think we have to tell them the Credit Roll generator (for example)is garbage and should have been improved years ago?

Those of you who are suggesting this had no problem submitting your desires every year in the wish list threads such as the other one concurrently running which is now up to over 160 responses, yet you find fault with this one. Sounds a bit hypocritical to me. I don't have a problem with disagreement from anyone as long as they are consistent.

John

I think that the only way to separate the wheat from the chaff in this thread is to include more descriptive subject lines. And I'm going to assume that complicated solutions wouldn't get implemented 'till version 8.

People have long complained about how prerenders disappear if you so much as look at the timeline sideways. Here's how I'd approach the fix.

First of all users need to get their heads around the idea that a prerender (as it currently stands) is of the timeline and not the events on the timeline. So if I prerender frames 5000-6000 on the timeline and those frames change then the prerender disappears, even if all I did was move the content of those frames down the timeline.

What I think Vegas needs is a small "prerender track" area. It could be in the same spot and of the same size as the current prerender indicators. The main reason to consider it a "track" is to change some of the thinking associated with it. Prerenders on that track should be just as splitable as the underlying footage, and should be subject to ripple edits just like the underlying footage.

I think the current thinking from the programming point of view is way too literal, that the prerender is tied too closely to timeline coordinates and is unmovable.

In addition to timeline prerenders, there are two other possible ways I can think of to do prerenders. The first is at the media clip level. In this case you'd drop a clip onto the trimmer and apply mediaFX to it. Then save it as a prerendered subclip. This sort of prerender ought to be very persistant.

The other method would be "sequence prerenders" and this ought to leverage the nested Veg feature. The idea here would be to select a sequence of clips on the timeline and convert them to a nested veg-essentially a sequence. Then you should be able to prerender the sequence. Again, I'd think that this sort of prerender would be very persistant.

Adding more ways to prerender things would probably require more space to store prerenders. This might require a few new options in Preferences -- and maybe this would nessesitate changing the layout of the preferences tool. It's getting pretty busy these days anyway.

I posted these ideas as product suggestions a few months ago and I'm going to do it again right now, just in case I've explained it any better.

Rob Mack

Unless my eyes are deceiving me, I've spotted something I didn't realize had been fixed.

In preferences, under the "Edit" tab, there is a setting for the default still image length. The setting may be set down to the thousanth of a second.

The problem with this was that while setting a default duration for NTSC at, say, 5 seconds would equal somewhere between 149 and 150 frames. There would be one partial frame at the end of the event if you dropped a still on the timeline.

Now it looks like Vegas rounds up to whole frames. If I set the pref to 5 seconds, drop a still on the timeline, and set the ruler to "time" I can see that the still is 5.005 seconds long. GOOD! If I set the ruler to "Absolute Frames" it is 150 frames long. GOOD!

Even if I have the pref set to 5 seconds and turn off quantize to frames, when I drop a new still on the timeline it is 5.005 seconds long, 150 whole frames. GOOD!

I think it's fixed. This was a pet issue for me for a while. Glad I submitted it as a bug. I'll assume others did as well.

Rob Mack

sometimes sony fixes bugs in updates and does not list it as fixed

case in point the duplicate file issue,, pretty sure it was never mentioned but fixed.

still many more to fix,, but i bitch and still use it,, 5 that is. However our other editors have jumped ship and have a good time giving me sh$%,, but I'm stubborn , and as long as I can do "most" things quicker than them, so be it.

Jumpted ship to what?