"Apparently you haven't spent a lot of time in FCP or Premiere... "

From my limited experience with the CS3 that's probably not a pissing contest you'd want to get into. Suffice to say that unlike V8.0, out of the box I wasn't able to crash Ppro in 5 minutes and it works with my hardware and camera.

Bob.

vegas has more issues right now than the other apps i use,, only problem i see in the others is my graphic card reloads now and then which is probably cause i got a cheap card , Vegas 8 , which i am hanging on to like an old girlfiend , is buggy , least for me.The project load up time is nuts.

Ive been using Vegas since 4 ,this is the most buggy version I have used and it crashes at the worst times. The reason I left premier for 4 was because it crashed. Sony better get their act together.

While I fully admit to a bunch of avchd bugs and USED to complain of frequent HDV crashes.... I have not had one crash in months.... and I'm rendering time lines of 400 plus scenes and 2 hours long (for blu ray disk)

I used to have horrendous crashing problems but it all stopped when I started capturing with HDVsplit and doing the scene detection AFTER the complete capture.

I just rendered a 2 hour HDV T/L this morning.... no crash. Had to do it again at a lower bitrate (my first render was a bit too big for the disk).... again.... no crash.

Version 8b has become (for me anyway) about as reliable as 7d was (which was the most reliable version I have worked with).

I have NO complaints at all!

Apparently you haven't spent a lot of time in FCP or Premiere...

I'm not saying those two don't have bugs, but these kinds of bugs, I've never seen them.

For a prerender feature to work until x number of times and then not work again until you restart the application, or for audio peaks suddenly rebuilding themselves without me telling the program to, it's just outrageous.

Then, today I was editing this kart race that me and some co-workers went to, and on some transtions I applied the Blur Dissolve. When I finished editing I wanted to test it to take notes, so knowing that encoding to AVC for 30 minutes of footage was going to take like four hours or more, I encoded to 20 Mbps 1080i MPEG-2, because 20 Mbps is about the highest bitrate you can play HD content on DVD media, at least in my Bluray player. So I do the encoding, launch DVDA 5, burn to BD5 format, and when I play it my BD player lots of transitions are completely screwed up, like for the duration of the transition it interlaces one frame of the A clip with one frame of the B clip. Also, in many places the audio goes mute for a second or two.

So I'm asking myself, how did my timeline get so screwed up? So I load the project again, and there was nothing wrong with it. It's simply that Vegas had sent a lot of garbage to the MPEG2 encoder, especially in the transitions using Blur Cross Dissolve. And the audio, beats me, I'll try rebuilding all the peaks, and hope this time it works. Because if it doesn't then probably that will be final frustration that will make me switch to another NLE. I like Vegas' interface very much, but if it's going to screw my timeline, and make me waste time, then it's not for me.

with b3t here.

no major problems that weren't solved with the new mpg.dll. there are some niggling bugs still left, and pro titler is still a bit of a joke (even though it's got great potential), but hey, as someone once said, you want perfection or something?

leslie

So....how much AVCHD editing have you done in *either* FCS or Premiere?

no major problems that weren't solved with the new mpg.dll

What are you referring to exactly?

So....how much AVCHD editing have you done in *either* FCS or Premiere?

None. But given my experience with those two NLEs, I know they don't have bugs that are so absurd, such as prerendering working for a while and then not working again until you restart the software, or the audio peaks bug I mentioned. This kinds of bugs show me that Sony Creative really didn't test Vegas long enough before releasing it, and given that it's currently under the second update of version Pro 8, it's unacceptable to have these types of bugs still in their software.

Neither FCS nor Premiere offer full AVCHD support at this time, because it's an easy thing to screw up.
Regarding releases...it's a little ignorant to point to Sony being on the second rev of 8 so long after its launch. If you use FCS, there is a component update every week, sometimes more often. Premiere isn't much better. In other words, Sony tends to release patches less often than their competitors.
We could always find ourselves needing twice the disc space for every project so the masters are always pulled to the back vs scratch works doubled up elswhere.
Vegas has bugs, but you're making mountains out of molehills here. New version coming...why bitch until you've got the latest?

Neither FCS nor Premiere offer full AVCHD support at this time, because it's an easy thing to screw up.

Neither does Vegas. The only advantage is that it loads AVCHD files without any pre-conversion or an expensive plugin, but it doesn't smartrender, one thing that the software bundled with Canon camera does perfectly (even though it's the only good thing about that software). Also, playback from the timeline is choppy even with a decent machine.

Regarding releases...it's a little ignorant to point to Sony being on the second rev of 8 so long after its launch. If you use FCS, there is a component update every week, sometimes more often. Premiere isn't much better. In other words, Sony tends to release patches less often than their competitors.

Here's my problem. We're talking about Sony. We're not talking about a small software company, but Sony, a multi-billion, multi-national corporation. I know that SCS used to be Sonic Foundry, but Sony bought it a few years ago, so by now it should've put there enough man power to release decent software instead of software that's rushed out the door and with significant bugs.

Vegas has bugs, but you're making mountains out of molehills here.

I don't think so. To me, the prerender bug is far from being a molehill. It's a freaking mountain.

New version coming...why bitch until you've got the latest?

We'll see. I really hope they fixed at least the most important bugs and included better AVCHD support.

"We're not talking about a small software company,"

But we are. Sony buys companies and pretty much keeps them at arms length from the rest of the business. I doubt since Sony bought SoFo if much if anything has changed in Maddison.

Some of the annoyances you talk about though are pretty daft and should have been fixed years ago, well before HDV and AVCHD came along. Building the waveform and thumbnails seems to be a big resource hog, rebuilding them for reasons unknown a big waste of our time. A simple dialog box to ask the user if he'd like them rebuilt would seem more user friendly and a doodle to implement.

Bob.

Just from my own personal experience, I'm kinda with Sebaz on this one. I switched to Vegas (back in version 4) mainly because of it's stability, then I found out how great it was afterwards. Since version 8 that has been turned on it's head. I used to be a religious supporter of Vegas and would evangelize everyone I talked to about Vegas...however, I've had so much instability with version 8 that I rarely attempt to make converts anymore. In fact, if I have a project that is drop-dead important I've had to use FC simply because I know it will render without crashing. I hate to do it, but it's in Sony's hands, not mine. If it becomes stable again I'll switch back in a heartbeat.

Sony buys companies and pretty much keeps them at arms length from the rest of the business. I doubt since Sony bought SoFo if much if anything has changed in Maddison.

It may be so, but in the end to me Sony, the huge multinational, is responsible for its products, whether it's televisions, video cameras, car stereos or software. It's their brand and their logo on all these products, so they should put whatever resources are necessary to make sure the product is almost bug-free, at least from bugs that cause the editor a lot of wasted time.

It seems like there was always one thing I needed to do that crashed Vegas... before it was undo-ing a marker operation when the marker had a long name. Crashed every time... that went on for a couple of Vegas versions. Before that it was GIF files on the timeline, if you ALT-TAB while the thumbnails were drawing it would crash. Now it's SWF files on the timeline. If I ALT+TAB with SWF files on the time line it frequently crashes Vegas 8. So I don't know if it crashes more than other versions... it depends on what you are doing.

Ben

Quite frankly, I'm amazed it does what it does. The program is as large as the OS which by the way cost 9 billion and still had problems. What's Sony's software budget for 200 programmers? 10 million? 1 million? 100 million? 100K? The programmers are most likely bald and freaking out on Pepsi and Pizza.Their efficiency rating is about a billion times better than Microsoft. I only use very small portions of V8b and it works just fine, even in Vista 64 which it is not supported.
JJK

there's a fully functional demo of the program to try EVERYTHING before you buy. I don't see any reason anything that's an issue should be found out after you bought the program. I've tried every version to see if it works with what I need before I buy.

it's only crashed for me a handful of times since I got 8. Most of those times were when I was working with HDV over a 30 minute period. After 30 minutes I figured out how to solve my problem & 100% avoided it. The bug still exists but it doesn't effect me any more.

That's part of our JOB. To handle issues that come up and DEAL with them. If we don't do that then there's NO reason to hire anyone on this board vs some student in high school/college that warezed the software because the experience is the same. If we can't deal with some stupid prerender issue, we have no business editing. If we can't deal with some stupid stuttering playback we have no business editing. 99.9% of everything out there has been edited on film with NO prerenders, NO real time/immediate playback. THOSE editors delt with it and didn't use it as an excuse to NOT do their JOB. If something is not working you you so much it stops your work, then YOU need to figure out what will WORK. Complaining to a bunch of people who don't care & you don't want help from does nothing.

man I hope one day I can create a buggy product ,have people buy it and then be apologists for it.

If we can't deal with some stupid prerender issue, we have no business editing.

I hardly consider this HUGE bug a "stupid prerender issue". Any bug that will force the editor to restart the program, losing valuable time is not stupid at all. Especially when it's so clear that SCS didn't test this out, because this is not a random bug, this is reproducible. If SCS would've spent some hours testing their software, this would've been eliminated, even at version 8.0. We'll have to see what happens when 8.0c comes out.

As for your other statements, about bugs being an excuse for editors not to do their job, I find them laughable. Software companies are supposed to give editors NLEs that while may not be perfect, at least have a minimum stability and reliability, and Vegas Pro 8.0b is not that.

So far in the last two days, while editing a simple video with some transitions and overlay titles, I found three really annoying bugs, which I already described, but to summarize:

1) Prerendering to 1920x1080i MPEG2 at 25 Mbps works for a few prerenders. At one point, you do a prerender but the blue bars on top of the loop area don't show, and playing back that area shows that it hasn't been prerendered, or that the prerendered file hasn't been associated with the loop area. The only thing you can do is restart Vegas.

2) Prerendering or rendering of certain transitions doesn't work right until you restart the application. Example: The Cross Effect Blur transition. It shows garbage, one frame of the source, one frame of the destination, and so on for the length you had set the transition to. Again, the only way to make it work is to restart the application.

3) When trying to adjust a keyframe on an envelope, both audio and video, holding CTRL while moving the keyframe up or down is supposed to slow down the pointer so you can set it to the exact percentage you want it to, such as 100%, 50%, etc. Half the times this doesn't work. As soon as you hold CTRL and start moving the keyframe, it starts having a seizure, jumping all over the place.

4) For no apparent reason, Vegas wants to rebuild the peak files at random, sometimes during the project, sometimes as soon as you open it.

Now, tell me if these things are so stupid.

Well, I try to repro that, using a HF100 1920 1080 50i project. Without repro, Sony would not be able to identify the issue.

Ad 1: have done now seven prerenderd areas - and had not the issue that a prerendered area has not been associated with the HD 25 mbps file. Any additional information, for example after how many prerendered areas that happens for you?

Ad 2: Have prerendered a cross effect blur transition (cross blur a/b) with HF 100 footage - again with the HD 25 mpbs template. Cannot repro that up to now, on my test-prerendering it worked fine. Any additional information availabe here, that could help to repro that?

Ad 3: I did not even know that this exists - and have tested that now for the first time, with a velofcity envelope and a Canon HF100 project. Works great here - I have not seen any jumping or anything else.

Ad 4: well, I have edited now some Canon HF100 projects in Vegas 8b. I never have seen that the peak files must be rebuild at random, or at least up to now I have not seen that. Hmm, no idea how I could try to repro that.

Generally spoken, up to now I only can state that the repro did not work out. What are the specification of your PC you use - processor, do you use overclocking, how many GB rams do you use, what is your OS?

Here I work with a 3.3 Ghz overclocked Q6600, XP SP2, 2 GB. I have not tested that on my Vista 64 bit System yet.

Perhaps all these problems occur after working with Vegas for a while. I know I've been editing this thing since yesterday and the prerender bug came up several times, and although I haven't counted how many good prerenders before failure, I think it might be around 10 or 12, and I think it shows up more if you're working consistently on an event or loop area of a few events. For example, I was adjusting keyframing for a tille in the event pan & crop window, for which I was prerendering often after a few changes. After several prerenders, the bug showed up. Of course that is only one instance, the bug showed up doing prerenders of separate areas as well. And it seems to show up less if I use AVI prerenders (I set up a preset for 800x450 Huffyuv) but still i had instances of the bug showing using that as well.

And I think the same goes for the other problems. Maybe if you're just testing for a few minutes you'll be fine, but after working for hours all these start to show up. I may have something to do with having several events, although it's just a half hour project, with only a video track and another for overlays, so it's nothing really complicated.

My system specs are:

Intel Desktop Board D975XBX2
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 2.66 Ghz
4 GB of OCZ Platinum 800 Mhz RAM
eVGA Nvidia 9500GT graphics card
3 Western Digital SATA 2 drives, 250, 320 and 640 GB
OS Vista Home Premium SP1 (bought with SP1 included) and all the updates.

Hello everyone,
quite the learning day today ...
Item 1 - I used to complain frequently about not getting my certification for paying my money, attending, and passing the certified Vegas editor training about two years ago ... until I found it under the certificates link on my account page today . . . dhoh!
- - -
Item 2 - We've used 22 messages from a dozen or more contributors to finally get to Wolfgang's attempting to reproduce the bugs Sebaz experiences ... wouldn't it have been nice to skip all the aggravation, aggressiveness, and defensiveness to get to the "help working on a solution" phase expressed in the last couple of messages? I think so.
- - -
So, with those two comments above, I think I can summarize that: 1 - oftentimes there are problems that we encounter that might be specific only to our situation/hardware/software configuration that might be carried by our emotions to the entire user community, when that situation might not be entirely true. I accused Sony of taking my money and not honoring its end of the bargain for the training I paid for and attended when all along it was my fault for not looking at the options in my own Sony account... and 2 - perhaps we could all benefit from a sense of community to help each other get better at understanding and using the software we have rather than voice our frustrations at the software maker, especially if the troubles encountered might very well be user or computer specific and not at all experienced by the rest of the user community.
I think we could all work better on problems we encounter if we take the time to collect all the pertinent data before drawing any conclusions as well as focusing on solving the problem instead of placing the blame. ..

I might be a slow learner - but I can do it from time to time . . . (grin)

Perhaps we all could . . . perhaps not. . . it's entirely a personal choice (wink).

Until that time. . . Earl J.