Sebaz: "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."

Well, it is for me.... I'm quite happy..... and that's the problem. Try tracing down a bug that only shows its head with certain people, under certain circumstances..... One of the most difficult bugs sets to correct.

What I find laughable is with AVID and the Liquid program..... waiting an entire year for a bug patch on some large show-stopper bugs that affects EVERYONE on ALL machines. It's BEYOND laughable... it's just plain unforgivable. If it's happening on ALL machines, then it must of happened with their Beta testers and they must have known about it.

People seem to think the grass is greener on the other side of the fence....however they never stop to consider the distinct possibility.... that it's not.

And what did Avid do with Liquid?

Didn't you say they did the humane thing and took it off life support?

You keep saying things are no better elsewhere, I find that assumption staggering. Exactly which "elsewhere" do you have any knowledge of. If things are equally bad elsewhere I wonder how broadcasters get their programs to air.

Bob.

Sebaz says:
"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.
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I tested these:

1) does seem to be a bit flaky I used the standard Blu ray (1920x1080) template for pre render.... and I got no blue bar. In fact there was NOTHING in my prerender folder at all! But then I made a few minor adjustments to the template to better reflect my T/L and everything worked.

2)I had no issues here (not calling you a liar... but it just shows you that each machine is different which is why these bugs are so hard to kill)

3)You're right.... it didn't work for me either. But then I simply stretched the keyframe window to the size of the screen which gave me the sensitivity I needed to set a fey frame pretty accurately.

4) I've never had this problem. again......not calling you a liar... but it just shows you that each machine is different which is why these bugs are so hard to kill

Bottom line.... none of these issues are showstoppers. They're pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. Sure... they may be a bit irritating when you're on a deadline, but I PROMISE you the same kind of irritating bugs live and thrive in EVERY nle out there and Vegas is no different. At some point you just have to admit that the machine types and variables here are so big here that there is simply no way for ANY company to avoid these little irritants.

Yesterday I spent the ENTIRE day trying to burn a Blu Ray disk. The burner program I use which is normally very dependable.... did NOTHING but crash, crash, CRASH.... quite the piss off! Finally I ghosted back to a previous disk image, and everything worked. I have NOOOO idea what the problem was, and I don't remember changing ANYTHING with that program but none the less... crap happened. It shows you sensitive these machines/programs can be.

So, we're all working under Windows, but are we following safe Windows practices? I have no general problems with Vegas, or other Windows apps unless I let a lot of time go by with Windows open. Due to my inherent laziness, I used to use the Standby function of Windows. After 2 or 3 days of this, I would get erratic and bizarre behavior in most apps. Rebooting would fix things. Today, I use CTL-S regularly, and when I take a break, I reboot the system. With today's processors it seldom takes as much as a minute. When I return from my break it takes seconds to relaunch Vegas and continue. And guess what? It functions as expected, and nary a problem to be seen. I don't understand the logic behind plodding along and beating one's head on the wall when a couple of minutes worth of prophylactic restarts can eliminate most of the problems. For sure there are bugs and problems that this will not address, but with the near infinite number of configurations of hardware and software combinations I don't expect 100% troublefree performance, and I proceed accordingly.

@ Sebaz,

so the major difference in the specs could be that you use Vista, while I have tested with XP. Given some experience in beta testing, I know quite well that sometimes bugs take place in Vista only, but not in XP.

So maybe it would be worthwile to give that bugs another try in a Vista SP1 environent. Generally, without a repro, nobody will be able to kill such a bug.


@ blink3times,

I have not tried, but I think the blu ray templates are not the best choice for prerender, since footage generated by those templates cannot be re-imported in Vegas again.

@ baysidebas

yes, it is always a good idea to maintain a stable production environment - and a great way to do so is to use products like True Image, generating Images from time to time, and to be able to recreate a stable system within some minutes, is a good way to ensure that.

Due to my inherent laziness, I used to use the Standby function of Windows. After 2 or 3 days of this, I would get erratic and bizarre behavior in most apps. Rebooting would fix things.

I'm a frequent rebooter, in fact I recommend that to any friend or co-worker that is having computer problems. But the problems I described here kept happening after rebooting, not one, but several times. Even turning off the machine and leaving it off for a minute didn't help. These are huge bugs because they make the editor waste time, simple as that. And I have never seen them in any other NLE, at least not in FCP and Premiere. And I prefer Vegas' interface to any other NLE, but SCS has to fix bugs that make editors waste valuable time, simple as that.

So maybe it would be worthwile to give that bugs another try in a Vista SP1 environent. Generally, without a repro, nobody will be able to kill such a bug.

I think you should also try to use the Blur Cross Effect at either the beginning or end of a title that you have adjusted to fade in and fade out with the envelope handles. This is not a title with the Protitler, but just the plain title generator.

The problem with reproducing these bugs is that maybe the ones here trying are not trying long enough. Maybe the project needs to have a certain amount of events in it with a certain amount of titles. If it wasn't several GBs of data I would upload it so somebody else can try them.

If it is a matter of XP vs. Vista, well, Vista has been out for over a year and a half, and although it was a total piece of crap at the beginning, by now it's pretty decent, of course not to the point of reliability of Mac OS X, but as far as Windows goes, it's pretty good. Sony had plenty of time to test Vegas on Vista and make it work as it should.

I have not tried, but I think the blu ray templates are not the best choice for prerender, since footage generated by those templates cannot be re-imported in Vegas again.

I don't understand, why would you want to import prerendered files into the project? Prerenders are temporary files just to test an effect or how a title looks over the main track.
I do agree in that Bluray templates, as they come, don't play well with Vegas. I modified the 25 Mbps 1080 60i one by unchecking "Save as separate streams" and I made it CBR instead of VBR for obvious reasons. After that change, the bug takes longer to appear, but it does appear eventually.

You're making MPEG prerenders?

Rob

"The problem with reproducing these bugs is that maybe the ones here trying are not trying long enough. Maybe the project needs to have a certain amount of events in it with a certain amount of titles."

There you go... you just said it. "Maybe we can repro this if we do it like this....". Now put yourself in Sony's shoes and think about the HUNDREDS of "bug" calls a day they get. Is it operator error? Is it hardware error? Is it software error? Is it some one's imagination? Is it all of the above? What about the bugs that are happening to some and not others.... how do you begin to handle that!??!

It's real easy ti bitch at Sony..... but that's the ONLY easy part about all of this.

You're making MPEG prerenders?

Yes, they show this bug less than with the m2v ones. The m2v prerenders sometimes don't work at all, sometimes they work for like two prerenders and then the bug shows up. By making it a .mpg it takes longer. But mostly I use AVI Huffyuv, because that tends to take much longer to show the prerender bug.

But mostly I use AVI Huffyuv, because that tends to take much longer to show the prerender bug.

That makes some sense since HuffyUV is much more workable as an editing format. This gets into the topic of what's good for acquisition, what's good for editing, and what's good for final delivery. Some workflows would have you acquiring everything by SDI and digitizing into whatever the "house codec" happens to be then exporting in whatever format you need to deliver in. It's not a very modern workflow but it does have the advantage of being a very controlled process. The NLE only has to deal with one codec, ever.

Media100 worked that way, and maybe still does. FCP approaches that by allowing you to do everything in ProRes, I suppose.

Rob Mack

Sometimes you need a design solution rather than a code solution. If the design can be changed to lead people away from bad decisions that can help a lot.

Vegas, unfortunately, often gives you more than enough rope to hang yourself with.

Rob

" have not tried, but I think the blu ray templates are not the best choice for prerender, since footage generated by those templates cannot be re-imported in Vegas again.

I don't understand, why would you want to import prerendered files into the project? Prerenders are temporary files just to test an effect or how a title looks over the main track."

I do not wish to import prerendered files - but the point is, that this footage cannot be imported in the timeline. But if they cannot be imported, playback will not work too very likely. But as said, I have not tried to use the Blu Ray templates for that purpose.

So the point is that if footage of that type can't be imported or doesn't play very well on the timeline then it wouldn't play well as a prerender format either. Although Vegas doesn't quite present it this way, prerenders are essentially on the timeline.

I think that probably the rationale of prerendering to these formats might be that it smart renders fast on final output. I don't really buy that, though. I think it'd be better to prerender to an efficient format rather than making yet more problematic media.

Rob Mack

I think that probably the rationale of prerendering to these formats might be that it smart renders fast on final output. I don't really buy that, though. I think it'd be better to prerender to an efficient format rather than making yet more problematic media.

Well, in my case, I would like to be able to render to 1920x1080i Mpeg 2 because at 25 Mbps it provides a full size decent quality preview of things like titling or special effects, without taking up a lot of drive space. Also, it renders fast. Huffyuv is a good codec, it also renders fast, but it can't be used for previews at 1080i because the data rate makes a normal SATA-2 drive choke, so I have to setup a prerender template at 800x450 in Huffyuv, which then my drive can playback without problem, and also it's the size of the monitor window as I have it in my layout. This works fine mostly, but it has the disadvantage that when played back on an external HDTV the resolution it's downscaled, and also that the prerender folder escalates in size pretty soon, and I have to clean up the files more often than if I do 1080i MPEG-2 prerenders.

I never care to use smart-renders from the prerendered files, since when I output to HD it is in AVC and since Vegas for now is handicapped in its AVC output, I output to Huffyuv AVI and I let DVDA 5 do the proper encoding to 1920x1080 AVC, even though it takes much longer because unlike Vegas, it uses less than half of the full processor power. Vegas uses almost all the processor power when encoding to 1440x1080 AVC.