<<I also bet we can't find 10 people on this forum who are planning on buying V12.>>

If Sony releases Cool Aid I will drink it.

I've been using Vegas for about a decade and this is the way it always seems to go: new version, new features, new instabilities. The instabilities with Vegas 10 got fixed in rev D and now more folks swear by it than at it.

My $.02 is that Sony went a "Bridge Too Far" with Vegas 11... And I'm good with that.

I think that their overall strategy of implementing Open CL vs. CUDA could pay off in the long run IF the kinks get worked out, and I am by no means implying that the kinks are all on Sony's side. Frankly, it seems an impossible software engineering feat to make every Vegas feature and every supported CODEC work perfectly with every conceivable combination of nVidia and AMD GPU and driver, let alone with a new GPU acceleration standard (Open CL).

Last week I was hating life, and then I installed ver. 296 of nVidia's drivers and Vegas "miraculously" became much more stable. I am surprised (and quite pleased) that V11 works as well as it does, both at home and at work and I DO plan to pre-purchase two copies of Vegas 12 as soon as it is announced. So that makes 1 down and just 9 to go...

The instabilities with Vegas 10 got fixed in rev D

Oh how I wish this were true. Or does that not count as "instability"?

v11 683, and... my scripts icons still disappears at random... ;P

this was the first clue i had that vegas should stop incrementing functions until fix old problems...

when i saw the announcement that vegas would have gpu acceleration, i was like "psssssssss"... if they won't fix simple things from 3 vegas generations, the bugs will pile up, and eventually, make the program unusable.

or they implement something that works, or don't implement at all.

or a few months from now, like its happening now, a bunch of people will ask for v11 build "900" to fix v11 problems, but it wont come out, cause v12 was already launched. :(

I hoping vegas 11 would be a solid step forward. I brought it early on but have not install it yet. But then I haven't really did any video editing for a while. I re-installed V9 when V8 when it was unable to handle H-264 I was recently trying to edit a little. :-( I think there are some great tutorials on getting around vegas issues.... it be nice to have one site/posting/ listing them.

I'm sure Sony are doing their best to make VP 11 stable as possible but I'm looking at switching to Premier Pro CS6. I watched the previews and Adobe have really tried to improve the interface and speed everything up. PPro looks very enticing at this point. I use After Effects so it makes sense especially if I want to continue updating my BorisFX. Atm I'm paying out for two BorisFX upgrades with AF and Vegas. It doesn't make sense.

I put on the NewBlue update, installed the latest AMD drivers for my card, and installed Build 683 on my WIndows 7 64-bit machine.

So far, no crashes and no problems.

I agree that SCS over-reached on 11 but I also believe that the new and improved features and performance enhancements have been worth it. I am not a pro and if I had been slammed against a deadline because of software that wouldn't run, I can't say I would feel the same.

<<Oh how I wish this were true. Or does that not count as "instability"?>>

If it keeps you from getting your work completed then yeah, it's definitely a problem. Thankfully I've never had clips randomly replaced, that would drive me nuts. Is it possible that your setup - Vegas 10 hacked to run on Win XP-64 - might be a factor?

the replaced media is simply a bug that's been around since 9 (in my case). nothing to do with running a 'hacked' version.

this release makes NO mention of fixing the problem, though they said it had been in the last - NOT so, as i experienced it on the last build as well.

i really can't believe that scs seems to be ignoring one of the worst bugs i've ever encountered in an nle - there simply isn't any reliable workaround, and yes, i save often, but that's NOT the point is it....

have just ordered cs6.

I never, never see the "replaced media" bug.

How many users suffer this bug?

Hey boys, change Vegas for CSx?

PP CSx is for rigid minded users. Avid too.

Vegas is for free minded users. That is.

Go in peace and silence, please.

Erni (sorry for my poor english)

I spoke too soon; I have had two crashes today.

I have never seen the replaced media bug. I went from 9 to 11.

I wonder why Vegas doesn't swap every event on the timeline when media replacement happens. You'd think it's working off of data tables of timeline events with unique ID numbers. I guess it's not doing something like adding +1 to each ID.

Rob

Guy S. wrote - Is it possible that your setup - Vegas 10 hacked to run on Win XP-64 - might be a factor?

I don't believe so, because of the proportion of other users on supported OS who experience this bug. I get it when I copy and paste between projects, and I've been working on big, complex projects. In fact, I've now totally lost faith in copying and pasting in 10e. I'm too terrified to do it. So my workflow is completely crippled. Yesterday I was actually writing down edit details and drawing the shape of envelopes out on paper so I could recreate them in another project, because I was too scared to copy and paste the events. I'm lucky that I can go back to 8.0c for my next projects, because for the time being I'm only working with DV and HDV.

Well, maybe it's fixed now in V11 682/683.

When I was doing major shuffling of clips between instances of Vegas I got video clips mucked up, but the last few times with quite modest trimming and minor swaps I have only had the generated media captions spoilt. Since the generated media was added after the video, it makes me think that problems with media pointers (handles) are more likely to occur with more recently added events. (The captions are text, of course, but they get replaced with video.)

This is with Vegas Pro 9c 64 bit.

@rmack350 - I like the way you think. It seems simple enough from a programming perspective.

I'm a newbie to Vegas, but dread the thought of the "replaced media bug." My worst fear is that I wouldn't catch it right away. I wish Vegas had some type of automatic versioning built in. (Maybe it does?) I use the poor-mans way of versioning by saving with new rev numbers in my filenames on a regular basis...

V11.683 - So far so good...

I took a very large project that had trouble with render-to-black issues in both V10e & V11.595 and let a script render-out smaller subclips overnight. None of the subclips appeared to have any portions that rendered to black or swapped footage.

I also noticed that in the color correction FX the sliders respond correctly vs. taking large jumps like they did in early releases of V11. The NewBlueFX appear to work without crashing although I haven't tried the titler. After updating Vegas I also reinstalled my FX & 3rd party codecs. I find that installing them after Vegas always increases stability.

V12: As long as Sony allows us to upgrade for a mere $139 I will continue to buy the upgrades during the discount window.

So, regarding replaced media, I was forgetting that this was happening when copy/pasting between projects. While no amount of guessing will fix the problem, I'll make some guesses just for exercise.

A vegas project must contain at least two tables (most certainly more). One table is a list of all the media in the project media window, the other is a table of all the events on the timeline. Since you can use project media over and over on the timeline we'd say there's a one-to-many relationship between the media table and the timeline table.

So, why should the timeline table even bother to look at the media table? Well, for one thing, there's such a thing as MediaFX. These are assigned to the project media rather than to events and so the timeline event table has to get it's info about media from the project media table. The timeline table can't just look up the media on the disk because if it did that it'd miss the fact that there's a MediaFX applied.

Typically, in my very limited database experience, a table has an index of unique key numbers. So your media table might go like this:
Media00001 = myMediaFile1, myfilepath, myComments, myMediaFX, ...
Media00002 = myMediaFile2, ...
etc.

Your timeline event table might go like this:
Event00235 = Media00001, ...
Event00476 = Media00002, ...
Event00002 = Media00001, ...
etc.

So what happens if you copy an event from one project's timeline to another? You could have the same media in each project media table but it could have a different index number, so Vegas needs to confirm and consolidate the media somehow. It can't use the old mediafile's index number, it has to look at the filename and path and check to see if it already exists in the new project and then (hopefully) change the Event record to point to the new Media record.

At some point this is failing. The timeline event table probably holds information about the path to the original media AND the index in the media table. Perhaps several programmers have worked on this over the years and some used one reference while others used the other reference.

So, I wonder what happens if you apply different MediaFX to the media in each of two test projects. Say you grade everything red in project A and blue in project B. And I'm assuming that the two projects have the same media in their project media tables. So what happens to the MediaFX after you copy and paste between the projects?

<edit>Well, on a really simple test where the media exists in both projects but has different MediaFX, the pasted event adopts the MediaFX from the new project, as it should. Where the media doesn't exist in the destination project, the MediaFX doesn't come with the pasted event. Again, as it should.

So, when you paste, Vegas checks the receiving project's media pool to see if the clip is present, and if so the pasted clip adopts the current MediaFX. I'm not sure how useful this info is... and a discussion of file swapping probably should have it's own thread</edit>

Rob

The newly copied media assumes the MediaFX already in the copied to project.

Yep. I wish there was a foolproof way to make these swaps happen.

The reason I assume that media and events have index numbers is that a) the usual wisdom of this is that databases run faster this way and b) it used to be that if you create a subclip, rename the sublip, and then copy the subclip to a new project, that subclip would revert to it's original name. Which then just makes me wonder "what's in a name?".

Rob

Just deleted post due to repeated info after your edit!.. same findings. I have no idea what this could mean. If anything. Not sure about the two database idea. Not even sure it uses 'any' database at all. To me, its just entries in a list -> think EDL.

Paul.

<<I get it when I copy and paste between projects>>

OK, I get it now, thanks for the explanation. I've done a fair amount of copying and pasting between projects - including Vegas 10>11 and 11>10 - and have never experienced this, but it sounds like you might copy/paste more than I do.

I can also see a very big difference in the way we work: I break long videos with a large number of media assets and timeline events into smaller segments, each with its own project file. I started doing this soon after I began using Vegas (~10 years ago) because timeline performance and general stability seemed to degrade when projects became longer and more complex.

My last project was 5-minutes in length and had just 123 media assets, 79 of which were used in the timeline. Before that I completed a ~10-minute video broken into 3 segments. The longest segment was 5:30 and had 78 media assets, 58 of which were used on the timeline.

Breaking a complex video into shorter segments may not appeal to you and really shouldn't be necessary, but it could be a viable workaround to your problem. FYI, I render each segment to a Sony MXF file using the HDCAM EX preset, and then I place these rendered segments into a new timeline and render to my final output format. The quality level is just fine for my purposes but better CODECS are available. Also, I often copy/paste between projects with no issues.

BTW, really enjoyed the Andaman Sea video and looking forward to watching the others. I thought the narration turned out especially well, did you do it yourself?

The reason I think it's more than a flat database is that mediaFX exist. If it were a flat table then the veg file could repeatedly point to filepaths, but those can't hold information about mediaFX. So one table points to another within the VEG file. It's relational.

The point about subclip names...I just created a subclip and gave it a different name than Vegas offered. I then pasted it to a new project timeline and the default name came back within the project media list...BUT, my custom name shows as a take name. So there's at least two name fields although I can't see the second one in the project media window. Which demonstrated that there's more data in the table than you can see.

Rob

Rob,
the one time I've had the swapped medi bug happen I had not copied and pasted anything.

It was a typical stage show. I started editing as a whole project, realised that was getting unwieldy and decided to split it into First Half, Second Half. All the media was already on the T/L.
I simply created two copies of the original project, First Half.veg and Second Half. veg.

The First Half project, I just selected and deleted all events after interval. No problem.

Second Half project, selected all events before interval and deleted them.
To move the start of the second half to the start of the T/L I selected that region of the T/L, turned on Ripple and hit delete. Ooops. I had a piece of audio that overlapped the break and now I had lost audio sync. No problem, hit Ct;+Z, turn off Ripple, trim the audio and repeat. All looked good. A while latter and a few incremental saves later as wel,l I discovered one piece of media, from the B camera, was in fact a clip from the first half of the show, what a mess but thankfully noticed quite easily.


I can only add my voice to those who say this bug is a deal breaker in many scenarios. Sure for most of what I do I can almost live with it. Every piece of sound and vision I work with normally is BIG, if anything gets swapped it's really going to be obvious pretty quickly. I have however worked on the audio edit / mix for a feature. I had over 30 tracks and 3,000 events. For my sanity I'd ditched over 5,000 tiny audio clips that were the foly work that someone had done. In this scenario, where a project gets down to minute detail, worked on for weeks, months or years, the impact of anything getting messed up by your software is unacceptable.

Bob.

the impact of anything getting messed up by your software is unacceptable.

Agreed.

I wish this could be pinned down.

Rob