I would be interested in knowing what things you needed to accomplish that Vegas fell short on (and what other NLEs - stand alone - would have met the challenge).

You need to be more specific about where Vegas "failed" you, as it might be in a general area that is beyond a normal NLE's capacity.

Absolutely, share your problems. I would predict we have answers for at least 80% of them? (old 80/20 rule)

Simon, I'm deeply interested in your invitation. I do take this seriously.

However, your experience: "there were certain issues that came up in the final weeks of production that we needed to resort to other software to solve" indicates to me that you appear to be "hovering" around the kernel of your experience. Why?

I have made a handful of docus for central London organisations that were originated from video captured by me over months. I ended up with masses of clips/events and many other mixed media. Apart from making my own, stupid mistakes, Vegas just flexed its muscles and punched its way through them.

Yes, please do post your "issues" so we can be more focused. Looking forward to reading your experiences Simon. Oh, I took the trouble to read your other posts hereabouts.

Best regards - g

OK Simon -

like a good showman, you have built the tension...
spill it bud - wuzzup?

v

I was going to say that a typical doco with a shooting ratio of upto 100:1 can be a serious challenge no matter what NLE is used but having watched some of the production it seems not much if anything was shot.

I didn't see anything in the first 30 minutes or so of the movie that couldn't have been done in Vegas so I'm real curious as to just what the challenges were too.

Bob.

The only thing I can really think of is wanting to hire a service to color correct a Vegas project from within their own software. Yeah you can move a Vegas project to other formats, but a lot of production companies find it easier to put down Vegas than figure out how to do this.

simon,

please bullet point a list of your problems.

as mention above, we're a generous hearted bunch around here and there's a few really, really serious individuals out there who know vegas as intimately as the back of their hand, or whatever.

i've been using since 4, cutting numerous doco's and other long form projects (along with working on fcp and avid in other studios), and all i can say is vegas hasn't ever flinched at what i've thrown at it, nor failed to deliver - though there have been many occasions when i've had to turn to this forum for help when i didn't know how to do something in vegas that i did in another nle.

i don't think it's necessary for me to waste time viewing your video without knowing what your problems were.

leslie

Thanks. I appreciate your interest.

1. The biggest problem of all was Vegas crashing out/blue screening during rendering. Timeline had around 700 events on it and the veg file was approx 1.3MB.

To try and get around this problem, we had Vegas 7 plus patches installed on 4 different machines, one of which was a brand new machine, & two of which (including the new machine), were brand new installs of WinXP with service pack 2 & all latest updates.

The only thing consistant on all of the machines is that they are all AMD rather than Intel.

I came to the conclusion that maybe there was a corruption/error actually in the veg file, but I knew of no way to check/validate such a file for consistancy (if that is the right word). Apart from maybe the issue being one related to AMD's, I just couldn't think of anythng else it could be - aparrt from some type of corruption in the main veg file. [BTW: all extraneous clips, photos removed from file - and also new veg file creation tried by copying and pasting sections from individual files.]

2. In the end we just rendered in sections - and then used 'Mpeg Video Wizard DVD'
to stich everything together.

If you havent seen or tried Mpeg Video Wizard before, it is really worth it - just to get a sense of what a solid piece of code this is - and how well it joins pieces of video together without needing to rerender (if they are of the same format).

3. We also were trying to beatmatch (beatmatching meant in a loose way) certain on screen events with sound. In general - this was quite easy - but with events such as the title sequence - we just couldnt get it any better than it is.

It seemed like some minute shifting between audio and video was happening more at the DVD architect stage - which was very frustrating. With most events a slight shift isnt really visible to the naked eye - but with an event, such as in the title sequence - where text suddenly appears, not being exactly on beat - for me at least - feels noticible.

4. Going back to the Mpeg Video W software, another one of its outstanding features is its mechanism to sync audio and video - speciically I am thinking - for audio and mouth movements.

I'm not meaning to make a comparison between the two pieces of software, as actually they seem to me for two quite separate jobs - and MPEG W - just couldn't manage a fraction of what Vegas is capable of. However, for - is it called - post production? - for jobs like splitting and splicing - syncing voice and mouth - it just seemed a life saver - and that it would be great if Vegas also had these.

These are the main things I can remember as I write you now. I hope they are useful.

Best,
Simon

So why didn't you post here when you had the problem so we could put you right?

MH: I was too busy trying to fix it... lol.

I just presumed the fault was at our end, and was so busy trying new installs, altering sizes of page files, rendering parts of files, etc... Eventually, I found a way round the problem - and so went with that.

Anyway MH your reply kind of implies that you would have been able to write me the answer - which could still be useful.

Best,
Simon

I saw something like this happen with Final Cut Pro... there was something in the timeline that would cause showstopping errors. Deleting a particular section of the project fixed things (also tried copy paste into a new timeline, but that didn't work). ver5.1.2 (not the lastest version of final cut).

Perhaps if you sent the .veg to the Vegas developers and they were able to reproduce the problem, then you might have a fix. Otherwise, workarounds are a part of many professional workflows. At the high end it's sometimes worse... a lot of the software packages have less developers behind them and aren't that stable.

1 - HOW big is that VEG file?

2 - Please supply number and approx average size of stills used? And what format of stills?

My workflow with CPU-hungry projects - many stills, FXs and so on . .- is:

i) Render to new track OR sectional rendering to AVI.

ii) Then, EITHER from within SAME project OR setup separate aggregate project render a further complete DRAFT final of project.

iii) Render MyProject VIDEO mpeg2 only for preparation to DVDA to MyFolder

iv) Render MyProject AUDIO AC3 to MyFolder

At each stage confirm and display synch with short bursts of Build RAM Previews. Look for outta synch PINK stretch marks ( "Pink Stretch Marks"!! LOL!! . . I gotta stop coming here . . ).

My approach is now SMALL and MANY, rather than BIG and FEW!

I totally agree with Grazie... cut chapters and render them - then assemble the "chapter" together in a final edit.

Many small prerenders is the way I've worked since the original AVID - a habit I got into, since the early AVID's would crash quite unexpectedly.
On most projects I make many small prerenders and then stitch those together in a final "master" file.
Vegas's ability to track the original edits > "Right click the clip> Edit Source Project" - makes this way of working totally intuitive.

That way, my final renders to MPEG are done strictly with many small prerendered AVI's and no opticals at all.
We NEVER "fix things" in the final render - we go back a generation to each chapter, fix and then rerender the section.
It sounds way harder than it actually is and I've got some really complex projects completed w/o any hardware problems, and minimal final render times.
v

These are all work arounds right? Till vegas can do it all on a single timeline.

1. Stills - there are a good few hundred - of varying resolutions & dimensions, from small to large.

2. One other really annoying problem I expereinced - again on all computers - was the fact that when trying to view the project - though it could play no problem at all even if all video track channels enabled - when it came to the sound channels - if more than 2 or 3 were enabled (even if there was nothing playing at the time on other channels) Vegas just came to a complete halt.

Somehow - I imagined I could understand if we were talking about the video channels - but not the sound.

Please remember chaps - I take my hat off to Vegas - am just reporting an expereince for developers primarily.

Best,
Simon

One thing, get all you audio into 16/48K, the overhead in resampling audio is quite high. If you're ripping audio from CD or using mp3 in a project like this convert it ALL to 16/48K first.

The other problem with the doing it in chunks approach can be the quality hit. Rendering to the Sony YUV codec is one approach that'll avoid that. Text and graphics don't fare too well rendered to NTSC DV and then mpeg-2 for DVD. PAL seems to hold up a bit better.

Bob.

It's a lot more convenient to work with chapters, but Vegas should handle as long a project as you want. You probably had a corrupted file or two in there somewhere.

Hi Laurence: Thanks. That's really what I put it down to as well... Thats why I was rasing the question, in my earlier posting, reagarding a future possibility of a file integrity checker tool. It's something that would ideally be resoved locally, as I can't imagine people wanting to send around their veg files.

Best,
Simon

Some times I've found, with a corrupt VEG file, that copying all the clips into a new VEG file fixes the problem.