I still remember when I enjoyed editing in Vegas between 2007 and 2010. It was innovative and original software, way better than FCP or anything else. But with each subsequent release it became more unstable, to the point where now it has turned into a sad joke.

I had bought all the upgrades until version 10, when it was so unstable that it became aggravating. Of course plenty of users here would tell me that my computer was the reason, but well, when every other software works perfectly fine and Vegas is the only one crashing, it's obvious where the problem lies. So I never bought version 11. I switched to Edius, which would crash once a month at the most. But one day in December I got an email from Sony saying that Vegas 12 was $99 for one day, so I decided to buy it, especially since version 10 would not install anymore, possibly because now I had 3 TB drives with a GUID partition.

But even $99 is too expensive for something that doesn't work. I normally edit in Premiere CS6, which can go days without a single crash, and previous to that I was editing in Edius 6, which goes months without a crash. But I got some Vegas nostalgia so I decided to edit a short home video in Vegas 12. It's just two black solids, one at the beginning and one at the end, and 6 clips in between, AVCHD from a Panasonic HMC40 at 1080i. The only two filters I applied to each clip are curves and saturation.

I wanted to post it on Facebook, so I went to the render as dialog, choose the Internet 1080p template and changed just three things, upper field to match the footage, then I switched from VBR to CBR at 20 Mbps, and finally set Encode Mode to CUDA since I have a GTX570. Other than that, I set rendering quality to Best. What followed is proof that this has to be the most unstable software in the history of computing.

First of all, their implementation of CUDA is a joke, since it takes forever to encode, even for this one minute and fifty second sequence. It actually doesn't make a difference between CPU or CUDA, both say they're going to take like 9 minutes to encode. But, it doesn't even finish encoding, either in CUDA or CPU. Sometimes it goes up to a certain point and gets stuck forever until I kill the process because the cancel button doesn't cancel anything except the joy of editing video in Vegas. Other times, it just tells me that an error occurred while creating the file, and the reason for the error could not be determined. Then when it actually encodes all the way through, it does two passes even though I set it to CBR, which has only one pass in this encoding module, and still it took like ten minutes for a 1:50 sequence. The only way I got it to encode all the way on the first try was using the Sony AVC encoder to an m2ts file, and that also took like 6 minutes. This is on a i7 3930k, six cores at 4 Ghz and 32 GB of RAM.

It's obvious to me that SCS just doesn't care about this software anymore. When a simple timeline of 2 solids and 6 clips with 2 filters each takes ten minutes to render or can't render at all, when in Premiere CS6 something like this encodes in almost real time (or faster than real time when I use the Matrox MXO2), it's obvious that this is not even a Pro NLE anymore, it's not even a consumer NLE, it's just a bad joke. So I'm going to email Sony asking for a refund, and if they don't give it to me I'm going to try to sell it for $99, at least to recover the money I wasted the last time. And I will never buy anything from Sony Creative Software, ever again.