Comments

farss wrote on 7/11/2012, 5:08 PM
Rather alarming that 66% of respondants rated it less than excellent!

I see issues with the survery itself:

1) Excellent and poor will mean different things to different people.
2) The sample size is small
3) How the sample was selected can dramatically skew the results and we have no info on that.

All that said getting a result of less than 90% for excellent is not good.

Bob.
Grazie wrote on 7/11/2012, 5:10 PM
Where did all that come from?

G

Leee wrote on 7/11/2012, 5:24 PM
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro/reviews

It was also interesting to see that many of the people who gave Stability a 1 star rating, also "recommended" the product. Which is why SCS can claim that the results show 90% of the polled users recommend Vegas 11 Pro.

And I agree it's very hard to extract any hard conclusions from this data, except for the fact that only one third of the users gave Stability a perfect score.
Leee wrote on 7/11/2012, 5:29 PM
3) How the sample was selected can dramatically skew the results and we have no info on that.

I'm not sure what you mean by how the sample was selected. Although it seems that SCS has posted every review, whether they were positive or negative, with the latest reviews all leaning toward the negative. So I don't think there was any selective sampling going on. The results are simply based on everyone that chose to participate in reviewing Vegas 11.

Agreed if more people participated in the review process, and assuming their answers were all honest, we would have a more accurate result. But 236 users, I believe, is a fair amount to base a fairly accurate representation of the overall user experience.
paul_w wrote on 7/11/2012, 5:34 PM
Not wanting to sounds like a vegas basher, but, the first page titles read as:

Version 11 is unreliable
skip this version if you use any plug-ins
You should improve Vegas Design, it should be look like Pro
Vegas Pro 11 - Unbelievably unstable
Disappointing
Long time Vegas Pro user - And dissapointed with the continuing stability issues in V11
.MXF problem
Version 11 is full of bugs

sorry, but this aint good - no matter what the stats say. Not one single positive title on the first page.

Paul.
Leee wrote on 7/11/2012, 5:39 PM
Paul, to be fair, the ratings are defaulted to be listed in date order (newest to oldest) and I think the latest reviews represent a frustration that after so many updates, Vegas is still unstable.

I used Excel to create the pie chart, and I think it would also be interesting to plot a graph showing the stability ratings through time. But as was already mentioned, the larger the sampling, the clearer the picture. Even though the first page is "bottom heavy", it is still only 1/10th of the overall results.

In fact when I started tallying up the ratings, while still on the first page, I assumed that (based on that first page) the ratings would be much lower than they actually were. But yes, I also agree, there IS a message there, and it does indicate a definite level of extreme dissatisfaction.
paul_w wrote on 7/11/2012, 5:48 PM
I take your point Leee, but in my mind, that makes the results even more worrying. After all this time and updates, Vegas users should be getting less angry, not more.

Anyway, its a super pie chart and must have taken you quite some time to tabulate. nice job.

Paul.
Leee wrote on 7/11/2012, 6:03 PM
That's true Paul, we should be seeing less complaints and more fixes over this much amount of time. And even more disturbing is that many of the fixes or workarounds for serious crashes seems to have come from the end users and not Sony.

And thanks for the compliment. I know someone is bound to say I have too much time on my hands, so for the record the entire process from tallying to creating the pie chart only took me about a half hour. What can I say, it keeps me off the streets! ;-)
Laurence wrote on 7/11/2012, 6:21 PM
At this point, V11 is relatively stable on my PC right up until I try to render. I tried rendering a project the other day and after three unsuccessful attempts, I just cut and pasted it into a V10 timeline.
cybercom wrote on 7/11/2012, 9:06 PM
FWIW, I downloaded the Edius 6.5 trial, installed it, created a project, imported a mess of dual-stream 3D avi files, dragged them to the timeline, modified them, changed the view to various 3D formats, created a new sequence, dragged files onto that timeline, modified them, added effects, made multiple adjustments to the 3D pairs, returned to the original sequence, added a title, dragged the 2nd sequence onto the timeline, cut it down, added a third sequence and brought it into the original sequence, added black, made dissolves, imported a wav file and laid it in as a bed then exported the entire timeline as an HD anaglyph, stereoscopic mp4 file with no black frames.

Opened and closed the project numerous times over two days. Saved different versions, etc. Latest one always opened flawlessly.

It never crashed, flashed mashed or bashed. There was not even a stutter in playback or a loss of sync. It simply worked and I spent my time editing instead of worrying or fighting the program. I give it a 10!

< ")%%%><(
farss wrote on 7/11/2012, 10:26 PM
Thank you for clarifying the source of the data
As others have said serious kudos to you for the work that you've put into compliling the data.

Bob.
Grazie wrote on 7/11/2012, 10:53 PM
Thanks for showing source on this SCS site. I'm really impressed with SCS to openly, publicly share this level of feedback.

Grazie

Leee wrote on 7/11/2012, 11:10 PM
Your welcome. I did it so we could have a better idea of how many people (percentage-wise) are having stability issues. From claims posted here, everything ranging from "a handful of people" to "almost everyone", I wanted to have a clearer picture so when people make statements like these, now we can back them up with cold, hard statistics.

As I said, many people will look at the same pie chart and come to different conclusions. It all depends on how honest the ratings were (I believe most to be accurate) and how to interpret the 1 - 5 scale. It might have been easier to have just TWO possible answers: Yes, I am having stability issues, or No, I am not.

Because it can be construed that only the 33% of the users that responded are NOT having any stability issues, while the other 66% are having stability issues ranging from once in a while to constantly. And I think that might be partially reflected in the ratings (1 - 4), with 1 being having a lot of stability issues, going down the line to 4, having SOME issues. But then again, it might only reflect how angry the person was when filling out the survey.
Grazie wrote on 7/11/2012, 11:26 PM
Again, thanks for the hard work. Jolly worthwhile indeed.

That'll be "you're welcome", not "your welcome".

Grazie

Leee wrote on 7/12/2012, 12:46 AM
"You're Welcome"

YIKES! How embarrassing, especially since I consider myself an honorary member of the Grammar and Spelling Police, I'm ashamed to have made such a common error. But thanks for pointing that out. You're help is appreciated!!!

(yes I know, I did that on porpoise) ;-)
ushere wrote on 7/12/2012, 12:47 AM
another vote of thanks too ;-)

interestingly enough, or not, i bought cs6 a few months back (edu discount of course!) when i was having serious wobblies with 11. however, i was also lurking over on the adobe board and having my own foibles about learning / starting a project in ppro when there seemed to be so much 'noise' about problems with the new ppro.

so, i'm half way into a major project in vegas and all seems ok so far, but i'm not really pushing vegas - hdv, jpg, png, wav, 3 camera multicam, etc., HOWEVER, i have experienced some 'problems' with 11 in the past, so i'd opt for the 'instability' box.

it looks (with perhaps the exception of edius) like all the latest versions of nle's seem have been release 'half-baked' and the end-users are the beta testers.

if that is the case, then it's probably better the devil you know.....
Leee wrote on 7/12/2012, 1:07 AM
I know it's kind of rude of me to mention this but certain online retail stores are having a special cross-grade special for Edius for any owner of the more popular NLE's It's something like half off the regular price.

I might consider getting it, but I have too much money invested with all the plugins I have specifically designed for Vegas. No way am I giving up my BCC7.
Grazie wrote on 7/12/2012, 2:05 AM
I'm guessing SCS has pointed their engineers at that page.

Grazie

fausseplanete wrote on 7/12/2012, 4:00 AM
er...

"You should improve Vegas Design, it should be look like Pro"...

What's "Vegas Design" ? is that a new product or just broken english ? If its the latter then it implies an equivalent potential for broken software (bad image).
Leee wrote on 7/12/2012, 5:16 AM
I think this non-English speaking person was probably referring to the user interface.

Many people have no patience for someone trying to post in English when it is not their native language. But I have to hand it to most of them because I can't even imagine trying to post a message in Spanish, French, Chinese or any other language.

I save my impatience for people whose first language IS English but write worse than our foreign friends.
Grazie wrote on 7/12/2012, 5:33 AM
And that's you're opinion?

G
deusx wrote on 7/12/2012, 6:01 AM
>>>Rather alarming that 66% of respondants rated it less than excellent!<<<

60% are rating it 5 or 4, that doesn't sound bad at all. I doubt photoshop would get more than 50% of 4 and 5 votes.

JJKizak wrote on 7/12/2012, 6:30 AM
Is that the 32 bit or 64 bit Vegas Pro 11?
JJK
DonLandis wrote on 7/13/2012, 1:59 AM
It's an interesting study but I also question the details of who the respondents are. That is, what kind of Vegas user are they?

If I took the survey after editing some very basic projects in 2D SD video, I might be in that 33% category 5 too. But, for the past year I've been editing exclusively 3D video, from several sources both paired and MVC Sony Camcorder sources. I have followed the guidelines for hardware from Sony SCS engineers, even using the Video card they recommended. When I spend a day editing and get the dreaded crash popup more than 20 times an hour and feel the need to manually save the veg file after every edit move, that is what I call an extremely unstable product. I would be in the category 1 of your pie chart.

It would be nice if Vegas gave us a clue as to what was causing these crashes so we could fix it. For example, I know that when I render a timeline to the BD iso I need lots of drive space on my C drive for the application temp files. When I get a failure during the render it seems to be my warning to free up more C drive space. I never did get that before switching to low capacity SSD C drive but now I do as the space can often get too low. That is not the kind of instability I am annoyed with and soon will be fixing the render crash. with a bigger SSD for the C drive. I'm much more annoyed when Vegas just stops after moving a clip on the timeline, trimming a clip, adding a key frame, or selecting a clip. These are really basic operations that result in the crashes I get. There seems to be no one thing that causes it..

My- current hardware:
i7-950 with 12 gb ram; FirePro V8800, SSD C drive and SSD media drive

Note I tried b683 but it would crash even more frequently even just loading my veg files so I have reverted back to b595. At least with 595 I can get some editing done between crashes.