Vegas 9.0 Pro review after 7 days and 13 episodes

gwailo wrote on 5/26/2009, 11:41 AM

After editing 13 episodes of a talk show, here are the things I discovered:

New Things I love;

Much smoother shuttling/jogging with contour pro (than ver 8)
4 point audio edits
When Quantize to frames is on - Audio can be extended / shortened non-frame based
4 tracks of audio not truncating to 2 tracks in the trimmer
The glow effect rocks :)

Minor Annoyances:

Timecode custom colour display does not save and work as a default.

Playback slowly gains momentum to get up to full frame rate

Zooming and movement of timeline during playback freezes the gui when the going gets tough (this never happened in 8, zoom and movement was always fast/smooth) the gui can be frozen for a few seconds at a time before it comes back to normal

When Quantize to frames is on - Moving audio that is not aligned to frames, from 1 track to another will shift the audio back to a frame (seems counter-intuitive that you can drag the audio so that it's not frame based, but shifting between tracks will shift the moved audio to the nearest frame)

Major Problems / Things I had to work around to get the project done:

Secondary monitor video corrupts after rendering a preview (must restart to get it working again)
- work around - never rendered previews

Video Clips / Title Clips - randomly link to different clips - this happened a lot to the titles
- work around - had to find / fix / replace wrong clips every time I re-opened the project - pain in the a**!

Mask Layer - Having a mask layer over regular DV Pal footage occasionally corrupted the DV Pal footage showing black boxes
- work around - had to replace the mask layer with another identical mask layer with a different name - occasionally had to replace and re-render even if the preview was okay - another pain in the a**!

Recommendation stick with 8c until 9 fixes the major bugs

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Comments

jetdv wrote on 5/27/2009, 8:16 AM

I just tried to duplicate this "playback slowly gains momentum" issue that everyone keeps talking about but I haven't seen...

Dropped DV-AVI on the timeline - did not notice it.
Dropped some stills on the timeline - did not notice it
Dropped WMV on the timeline - did not notice it
Dropped MTS on the timeline - it stuttered slightly on startup - maybe up to 1 second
Dropped M2T on the timeline - did not notice it
Dropped MXF on the timeline - did not notice it
Dropped MPG on the timeline - did not notice it

So it appears this is highly related to whatever format you are editing. Is it MTS that everyone is seeing this with?

gwailo wrote on 5/27/2009, 8:21 AM

I typically had 2 tracks of Quicktime DV PAL files (4 channels of audio embedded). One of the tracks had the Sony brightness / contrast filter on. With a single track, the frame rate gains momentum much faster (very hard to see). When I pressed play in an area with bugs/travelling mattes it really showed the gradually increasing frame rate issue.

It really reminds me of adjusting audio buffering for responsiveness vs. stuttering playback in Vegas 3 or in Cubase/Nuendo systems.

Seems like a new buffering system in 9 may be the issue. Any ideas on what to play with to adjust the buffer? And which way to go? I listed it as a minor annoyance, not a major bug. I still got the work done, it was just annoying that ver8 responded much better.

oh yeah... forgot about the red thumbnails. In previous versions of Vegas the red thumbnails were a warning sign that Vegas was unhappy with the video and was about to really screw up your project.

I got the red thumbnails in about 3 episodes, but they would mostly disappear after a little zooming.

Was using Quicktime DV PAL files (4 channels of audio) mixed with AVI DV PAL files.

All of the projects survived long enough to get a good render, so I forgot to complain about it :)

xberk wrote on 5/27/2009, 9:02 AM

So it appears this is highly related to whatever format you are editing. Is it MTS that everyone is seeing this with?

I work strictly in SD but I downloaded some raw AVCHD footage. I see the "slow start" thing in V9 64 bit.
I used file 00011.MTS. My system is a Q6600 - 4 gig ram running under Vista 64. Weird. After playing the clip
about 4 or 5 times, the slow start thing goes away but a copy of that same clip elsewhere on the timeline has
the "slow start" thing again.

Raw MTS files

General
Name: 00011.MTS
Folder: C:\Users\Paul\Downloads\00011.MTS
Type: MPEG-2 Transport Stream
Size: 29.84 MB (30,554,112 bytes)
Created: Wednesday, August 08, 2007, 4:01:10 PM
Modified: Monday, May 25, 2009, 11:52:11 AM
Accessed: Wednesday, August 08, 2007, 4:01:10 PM
Attributes: Archive

Streams
Video: 00:00:15.015, 29.970 fps interlaced, 1440x1080x12, AVC
Audio: 00:00:15.015, 48,000 Hz, Stereo, Dolby AC-3

Plug-In
Name: m2tsplug.dll
Folder: C:\Program Files\Sony\Vegas Pro 9.0\FileIO Plug-Ins\m2tsplug
Format: Sony M2TS
Version: Version 1.0 (Build 2187)
Company: Sony Creative Software Inc.

cliff_622 wrote on 5/27/2009, 10:32 AM

I often wonder about much code is removed and rewriiten and how much of it is "stuck-on" to existing code.

It seems as though the differences between 8 and 9 are only minor changes and small upgrades. (I can't imagine SCS spent much budget on the developement of Vegas 9)

Unfortunatly for me, the new 4k support and pretty color are not enough to make me want to upgrade. What I was really hoping for was a render crash/ memory handeling solution in 32bit OS and maybe some better AVCHD encoding,... Looks like we didnt get either. I just got a Vegas 9 render crash last night in my XP 32bit. (Very disappointing)

Anybody know when Vegas 10 is comming out?

CT

kentwolf wrote on 5/27/2009, 10:34 AM

>>...First million passengers fly at half price, travel insurance
>>not available :)..

That's pretty funny! Great analogy!

Terje wrote on 5/27/2009, 3:44 PM

>> I often wonder about much code is removed and rewriiten

Hardly any in any project.

>> and how much of it is "stuck-on" to existing code.

Almost all of it.

apit34356 wrote on 5/27/2009, 5:35 PM

>>...First million passengers fly at half price, travel insurance
>>not available :)..

The old joke about USAF test pilots getting the first paycheck on a new assignment before being "replaced" was considered a major achievement---------- was more true that not.

Harold Brown wrote on 5/27/2009, 9:18 PM

..."so irritating that today I'm going to uninstall 9 and see if they fixed the bug in 9a. If they don't, at least I'm happy I kept my money in my pocket"

I see you are talking money again Sebaz.

TimTyler wrote on 5/27/2009, 9:30 PM

> Maybe the guys doing audio with Vegas should be grateful they've
> basically added no new audio features

Yes, but too bad there's still no real Broadcast Wave File support. :(

rmack350 wrote on 5/27/2009, 10:02 PM

Yes, it's perfectly valid. Sony can't possibly test it using the literally billions of different possible configurations of hardware and already installed software and drivers.

While you can't test every possible setup, you go into testing with the goal of finding and eliminating problems. If your customers find a handful of blatantly obvious problems in the first few weeks of the product's life then you've failed and you need to rethink the plan.

Rob Mack

John_Cline wrote on 5/27/2009, 10:30 PM

If ANY of you can write a better NLE, I would be more than happy to beta test it for you.

rmack350 wrote on 5/27/2009, 10:31 PM

...but then let's see you release an initial production that's glitch free.

Blink, I couldn't do it. But in my own daily work I get pretty close and I know it takes extra work and a lot of attention to detail. When things are wrong I fix them the same day. In a team effort all this would be a lot harder.

I also do QA on my colleagues' work. It takes me a lot of time and they hate it. I hate spending the time. We all hate it.

I go into the QA lab of of one of our clients fairly frequently. They keep about 20 people and maybe 30 systems in it (best guess). They do both hardware and software testing and each component or program they test has a routine to go through. Never-the-less, things slip through.

They focus a lot on the "Out Of Box Experience". This is another word for first impressions. The product has to work well for "a while" before bugs start showing up.

So, how do you think SCS did with their "OOBE"? We're all saying that the "a" version always fixes the warts of the first release, so why doesn't SCS put that first release into a customer beta program and then make that "a" version the public release? It can't be good for their reputation or morale to release a warty version, get flamed publicly, and then release a fixed version.

If SCS announced to this forum that anyone could sign up for the beta program, sign an NDA, run Vegas through an assigned test routine and then bang through it on their own for a month, all for that $50.00 discount, I think a lot of people would do it. The difference between what we've got now? SCS gets to control the message a bit more and the testers have a certain amount of buy-in.

Rob Mack

gwailo wrote on 5/27/2009, 11:11 PM

If this is the release candidate, i'm not sure if a $50 discount would be enough incentive to try out a real beta.

I made my list above, to gather consensus on which bugs are in Vegas9 and which ones could possibly be system or workflow issues. If you have found any ways of working around the major bugs I listed, please let me know.

I also really want to put pressure on Sony to get the problems fixed, because I'd rather use Vegas for video if possible. As for the audio side, I'm certainly not going anywhere else. The audio side is what makes me most of my income, and it didn't have any bugs, just a couple of small but nice improvements.

It was a bit crazy to do so much work on a new release, but it got the job done. The software never crashed and never corrupted any projects.

I think the improvements in render time balanced out the time it took for me to hunt down and fix the mis-linked clips.

But the bad render on the masking portions did increase the time it took to complete the project.

If they want me to do Beta testing on an OMF import feature, I would do that in a heartbeat.