OK, so here we have the long awaited Vegas Pro 8.0c. It was supposed to bring a myriad of fixes, including better support for AVCHD, including, among other things, the ability to export to 1920x1080 AVC to import into DVDA 5. Well, I can tell that the timeline playback has improved a bit, although it's still far from the smoothness of HDV. Sometimes it plays at 29.97, then for no good reason it drops down to 14 fps, then goes back to 29.97. This is in Preview quality, full size.

But the AVC export module is a bad joke. You can now export to 1920x1080, but you're constrained to a maximum of 16 Mbps. And no, I'm not saying that because it's the maximum bitrate in the bundled presets, but because if you select anything bigger than that, it will give you an error and render nothing. So what's the big advantage of 1920 at 16 Mbps when compared to 1440 at 15 Mbps? Probably nothing. I would have to do the math and my brain is too tired for that, but I'm guessing one more Megabit per second of data is not enough to make up for the increase in frame size, and it might be probably worse.

But that's not even the worst part. I started a new project, imported a few AVCHD clips that I had on my hard drive from my Canon HF100 camera, and selected a one minute loop. I started rendering it at 1920 16 Mbps AVC, using the bundled preset, not modifying anything. I was happy at first seeing that it used about 70% of my processor power, better than the 45% average that DVDA 5 uses. However, when it finished rendering, one of those nasty Microsoft Visual C++ error dialogs poped up, and goodbye Vegas.

Second try, also selected a one minute loop and rendered using the same preset. This time, when it finished rendering, it didn't even give me a BSOD. It simply crashed Windows so bad that it rebooted without warning, same as if I had pressed the reset button.

The third try I selected a 30 second loop . This one worked. The only render in 8.0c that worked so far.

Fourth try. I started a new project, imported files from a different card, and selected a one minute loop. Again rendered using the 16 Mbps AVC preset. It didn't even get to the end of the render. It rebooted the computer in the same way as the second time.

So after seeing this it's obvious to me that Sony and the people at Sony Creative Software don't see this as serious work. It's just a joke for them. Because don't tell me that they tested this thoroughly and their
computers didn't crash at all while rendering to AVC. I have an Intel Extreme series motherboard retail, an Intel Core 2 Quad also retail in box, OCZ Platinum RAM, so I would say I have a reliable computer, and in fact it is for everything else. Even if Vegas couldn't render to 1920 AVC in version 8.0b, I rendered about 90 minutes of footage from an MPEG-2 TS to 1440 AVC at 15 Mbps and it took forever, but it did not crash, and I rendered several other things to 1440 AVC 15 Mbps without a hitch.

And how is it possible that DVDA 5 can encode AVC at 20 Mbps in 1920x1080 but Vegas cannot? Shouldn't they be using the same dll or module or something? Shouldn't the encoder be shared? I was hoping that version c would spare me from having to render a long project to Huffyuv to then import into DVDA 5 and wait forever for it to encode to 1920 20 Mbps AVC, but obviously I'll have to keep waiting.

Then there is one very important issue for me, which is the absence of AVCHD smart rendering. I still don't get how is it possible that a toy editing software such as Pixela Imagemixer 3, which comes bundled with Canon AVCHD camcorders, does an excellent job at smart rendering AVCHD video and audio, and Sony Vegas doesn't provide that capability. Pixela is a small company, while Sony is a huge multinational that along with Panasonic created the AVCHD specification. So how is it possible that a tiny company like Pixela provides a basic capability such as smart rendering, and Sony doesn't? You can give me all the excuses you want, but to me there's no valid excuse for that. When I just shoot home videos, or videos from places I go as a tourist, instead of editing in Vegas, which I would find much more enjoyable, I'm forced to edit in Imagemixer, which is close to torture. Why do I have to do that? Because Vegas, the suposedly professional NLE, doesn't give me smart rendering, so if I have to render a one hour video to AVC again, it would take me about 4 or 5 hours, and the picture quality would be degraded. But with Imagemixer, while a torture to edit in, I render the whole hour in a few minutes, and the resulting video has the exact same quality as the original, except maybe a few frames around cuts, but to be honest, I have never spotted lower quality in the frames that are supposed to be recompressed.

But going back to the actual bugs, I think that this is downright pathetic. They wasted time including new features such as the trimmer monitor, that while it may be nice to have, took time from fixing bugs, and we keep having a product that we paid money for, but it doesn't do what it's supposed to do. To see one simple example of their lack of care and testing, go no further than selecting the AVC export module and then the Blu-Ray 1920x1080 60i at 10 Mbps preset. Then go into the preset itself and you'll see that even though the title says 60i, the preset has PAL 25 fps preselected. The same preset, but at 16 mbps, has 29.97 correctly selected. How can you release a update to the public without checking each and every export preset of every module to make sure that the settings are correct? I doubt that I would ever use that bitrate, but what if I needed to use it and didn't bother to actually check inside the preset itself? Then I would end up with a useless PAL video.

Here's another example of this train wreck, at least when it comes to AVCHD. I wanted to see if it behaved any better when using the new module to import files directly from the AVCHD camcorder, so I connected the HF100 and used the new importer. After it finished importing I dragged two clips onto the timeline. I began scrubbing over those clips, and one second later the system crashed, again doing a straight reboot, not just a program crash, but the entire system. That's the quality of this software. I don't know what it may have been in the past, I heard lots of good things about it, and after I started using I liked the interface a lot, albeit not everything in it, but many things of it, enough to make it my favorite NLE if it had a lot less bugs. But as it is, it's useless for anything serious, at least when it comes to AVCHD. I really wish it wasn't, because I really like editing in Vegas when it works. But then we wait several months for the update that suposedly it's going to make it better, and when it finally comes, it crashes worse than Windows 95 when it just had come out. I might even have to go back to 8.0b just so I can edit AVCHD that I can output to DVD!!!


I think that I will start putting money aside to buy a good Mac Pro with Final Cut Studio on it. At least Apple takes their software more seriously. I don't like the company too much because they sell hugely overpriced hardware with few choices and they have a big head, but at least when it comes to software, they are more serious. I've used Final Cut Pro at different stages in the last few years and I've had a few crashes here and there, but for the most part, it works. It allows you to do your job. Vegas just doesn't.