I have not tried 32bit yet in 8.0b but in all previous versions it's been hopeless. Real shame, hope they eventually fix this.

Marc

Still hopeless.

I love Vegas, but I am starting to get a little worried that all is not well in Madison these days. Vegas is being released with far more problems than we are used to, currently with many serious problems (editing long GOP video for example - black frames anyone). Other products appear to be receiving very little attention, DVDA and Cincescore come to mind etc.

My background is from software development. In my experience these types of problem seem to appear when there are problems with management in a software organization.

I hope things will turn around soon. I am not really liking it.

I don't know what the problems are,, but this "pro" upgrade certainly was no where near ready for release,, kind of embarrassing i would think .
( and i still dont have a clue what the 32 bit feature is for, other than causing grief and confusion, and the new titler... a #$%^ manual sure would be nice)

I rarely file a request for Tech support, however, since this release I've filed two requests. Since version 3, I've only filed one other request, which was dealt with the same day and resolved. The last two requests have taken two weeks for a support person to answer me. The answer was very closed ended, basically denying SMS's desire to offer any constructive help. Of course it's my camera, I'm not using a Sony.

I concur with your impressions of trouble in paradise. My own experiences would lead me to infer that the hand of corporate bureacracy within Sony Corp. has increased the workload of the staff, reduced the number of savvy tech support people, and shifted priorities from product reliability and customer satisfaction to product production schedule.

To make matters worse, it would appear that Vegas is becoming more and more of a dedicated NLE for Sony camera products and less and less of a camera agnostic NLE. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone; and, it doesn't really bother me, except to say that they should own their brand loyalty rather than blame "off brands". If others can get it right, a giant like Sony sure oughta, as well.

Back in the days of Sonic Foundry, there was a small cadre of dedicated vegas users, that comprised, primarily, small business owners interested in quality and reliability of their NLE. These days, Sony has a greatly increased market share, which was something we all hoped for in the days of SF. Unfortunately, along with increased market share comes some unpleasant side effects. For example, there is a glut of armchair swashbucklers (some don't even own cameras and work for someone else) on this site alone, not to mention what I imagine is a huge jump in the numbers of users asking for tech support. The longwinded and pointless discussions on this site, alone, are enough to dissuade even the most hardened of ex-avid, ex-premiere users.

Oh well, it is what it is.

Such is the fate of many small companies absorbed by the monster.

To make matters worse, it would appear that Vegas is becoming more and more of a dedicated NLE for Sony camera products and less and less of a camera agnostic NLE. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

Definitely not a surprise. The alternatives are even stranger.

What would you think if you bought yourself a Sony XDCAM and the dealer told you, "buy Adobe Premiere. Sony Vegas doesn't support this camera." (Never mind the question of how much support Premiere has for XDCAM, the issue is the same.)

Or what if you were the Program Manager for Sony Vegas, trying to penetrate the HD market, and you learned that one of your parent company's divisions is going to start bundling Premiere with their new XDCAM. Now your company is subsidizing one of your competitors. The alternative is to collaborate, getting more budget to build your staff, and getting a bit more sales to increase revenue, and an opportunity to position your product as the first to market supporting a new HD format.

And, as far as being camera agnostic, how many new cameras are on the market that aren't compatible with Vegas? Probably not many...

I made similar comments in regards to poor release quality and apparent lack of alpha and beta testing on another forum, and found myself banned for my troubles. I am quite suprised to find it is freely spoken of here. I was expecting this would be much more the lickspittle's domain, but I am impressed!

My opinion is that the software is clearly under developed. I've been awaiting the b release since moving up from 6.0a to 8.0a. We had a myriad of GUI crashes and occasional render issues with 8.0a . But now I have persevered enough it to hold off on 8.0b, as we are at the final render stage and I fear we are just going to introduce a whole new set of unknown issues if we switch at the last minute.

In regards to the software becoming Sony centric, for purely selfish reasons, I am none to fussed with that happening as our workflow is based around the Z1 series. I would rather they got that perfect than be a jack of all trades. But as it stands, it doesn't appear they have got that even perfect either, even though the splash screen stares straight down the barrel of one!

Curiously enough, my complaint about non-Sony camera support, is really a problem for some Sony cameras, as well. I'm not the only one who has complained about red frames on the timeline. It's clear to me that it's a timecode or clip EOF marker issue that Sony refuses to fix. Other clip readers know how to spot a scene change correctly. Seems like Sony should also know. But, alas, SMS is probably too busy attending team leader meetings or satisfying some occupational health and safety training requirement of the US governmint to address tech issues.

In all fairness to SMS, as they're probably learning, the bureaucratic wickets a company's employees have to satisfy increase exponentially when the number of employess goes over a magic number, I think it's 50 employees. No longer officially classified as a "small company", the overhead required by the US labor department is staggering. I'll bet you a dollar to a box of donuts there's more people in the HR department than there are in tech support.

"To make matters worse, it would appear that Vegas is becoming more and more of a dedicated NLE for Sony camera products and less and less of a camera agnostic NLE. This shouldn't be a
surprise to anyone."

To be honest, and trying not to sound too cynical here, there is a seemingly growing trend here..

In the end however, the fact remains that Vegas doesnt use its own MPG encoder. It does however use the way the encoder is operated within a decide of a given a stream.. this in itself could be a conspiracy but i really doubt that.
They wont sell Sony cameras by restricting the compatibility of others.. it doesnt work that way.

But i feel that the statement above seems to contiue to ring true, however i believe, more than anything, its due to teh fact that the very "select" few Beta testers probably do not have access to the hardware (ie cameras) to test thoroughly.

Then there is the additional issue of who in fact is doing the Beta testing. It could be anyone with their own agenda...
Unlike Pinnacle Liquid Beta testing which i used to do before Avid bought them out, Pinnacle used to listen VERY closely to their users, however despite their efforts, the SW itself was weak when it came to diagnosing and amending known issues.
Vegas, and the way it is managed, seems to be an application built on loyal users.
These users are then used as guinea pigs on the Alpha test stage.
One thing to note howwever, s that despite the issues we read abotu here, there are issues we do not read about.
Move along and consider how many users have a problem, then consider how many users DO NOT have a problem.
It with these odds that SCS must consider whether or not an issue is large enough to consider and repair.

Much like recalling a vehicle... a comapny will determine its losses based on a non recall.
Then according to the odds and statistics, they will calculate whether its cheaper to leave 1 in every 10 defective vehicles on the road, or whther it woudl cost MORE to recall ALL vehicles.
The loss of life (in this case the loss of a user) is not an issue unless in teh longrun, it is cheaper for said comapny to recall the product and repair the defect (in Vegas case, offer a fix within an update)

Aside from that, I have always thought that Vegas was a good no nonsense tol which used to be one ot those apps that you would sell by saying " it doesnt matter waht you use, it just works"

I can no longer say this to potential buyers...

'"And, as far as being camera agnostic, how many new cameras are on the market that aren't compatible with Vegas? Probably not many..."

hmm.. lets see... it just so happens that the Panasonic HVX and Canon A1/H1 do not work natively with Vegas.

Hmm.. strange that these are the 2 major camera competitors of this particular prosumer NLE and Camera market.
Those using ENG type cameras arent using Vegas for the most part, and those using smaller consumer camcorders are using "studio' based consumer NLE's

Buit this inbetween market... hmmm.... interesting dont you think... ??

Consideirng CS3, Liquid, Edius, Avid, and FCP support HVX/SDX mxf formats, i dont beleive its a format issue on Panas behalf.
Why would they shoot themselves in teh foot yby restricting their camera/format to any one gien NLE?

And as mentioned many moons ago, i am sure that like Edius, Sony could offer a "pro" pack which opens a variety of codec options for this particular reason and or user.

Oh and then we have the Canon XH series which Vegas jsut loves to hate..
Funny this, considering that interlace modes work.. and it jstu so happens that this same interlaced mode is also accidently compatible with Sonys own playback decks..
Hmm... throw on some footage filmed in frame mode though and watch the sparks fly...
Is it a Canon issue? i dont think so Tim... considering the stream itself is running a standard 2:3 or 2:2 (for pal) pulldown service..
These pulldowns work fine wth DV.
Is it Vegas having issues with long gop and pulldown combination? hmm.. explain then why long gop XDCam using 24p with pulldown works then?

Conspiracy? LOL No.. i dont think so..

Persoanlly, I just think they havent bothered to contact or headhunt Beta testers who can actually help with the development of the application. Instead, they opt to find beta testers who are stuck within their own circle of produciton valus and equipment.
The best BEta testers MO are the people who sell teh stuff. They KNOW what people are looking for, they KNOW the consumer, and learn abotu the consumber needs.
They also have access to oodles of equipment and tesing wiht said equipment should be a no brainer is SCS decide to offer an extensive discount to those particular testing stores.

Beta testing IMO is a huge responsibility. To be honest, with the ongoing lucklustre performance and compatibility issues surrounding Vegas releases since V6, it seems Beta testing has taken a backseat.

Actually i feel its in the trunk of the car under the mat laying right beside the spare tyre... Its there if u need it, but most of the time you dont bother with it, especially nowadays with those tyreweld foam in a can which fix your flat without needing to remove the tyre.... easy fix, get you to where u need to go safely, but the hole is still there...

The job is a thankless one but when you find a problem, and you know what you can do to fix it alongside the engineer who wrote it, you then know that the thanks you get is not from other users, but your clients who are happy with the work you have produced using said NLE which you took part in putting and keeping together.

If SCS want to be serious about Vegas, they would attempt to find users who not only know their equipment, but know thier limitations, know their possibilites and mroeso than this, testers who would freely give up their time to enhance what was once a very stong and powerful contender for being teh best NLE to hit the market.

Sadly this wont happen if they keep going the way theyre going.
Honestly i dont see Vegas living past V10.
Aside from hte potential advent of 64bit, they havent offered anything significantly new for over 4 years.
I note that the applicaion has evolved with time and technology, but thats a given and is to be expected by this and every other program.. Be it NLE, DAW, or even a computer game sequel.

In the end, vegas works and offers what it has always offered, two of those offerings was stability and compatibility.
These are now questionable elements.

DJ...

you can add JVC Pro cams to your list.

Well now THERE YOU GO....

I would really REALLY like to see a list of all the cameras which have been tested with this app...

I would bet my 3 little chinese cats which bring me luck that the testers in question DONT BOTHER testing Vegas with these cameras.. if they do Id like to know their setup...

Now i work contracting training sessions and seminars etc
I have 2 clients, the company i contract to built 2 identical systems.

We connected one camera (my A1) , in fact we did this on Thursday.

Vegas 8 puked
Lucky i had my laptop. I downloaded HDVsplit and installed it on one of the machines as i knew the buyer also had an A1.
In any case, ti didnt bode well when i had to tell him that to cpature HDV with V8 with THIS camera he had to use a tool he had no clue about.

The other guy uses an FX1. No problem there..

But like i said, we can no longer sell Vegas as the "does everything works on aything" tool..

As it stands i use V7 and wil continue using it until a stable v8 is released.
Ive bought and registered V8, but im glad i kept my installs. i cannot count how many times its saved my butt jsut to keep working with the 'old" program

At least the bugger works..

Actually, i was overjoyed to find that i can now use 3D Track Motion in 32bit mode with 8b, only to be crushed by it crashing every time it came to rendering a simple Jpeg with a Secondary Colour Corrector colour pass effect on it. 8 bit rendered without a problem............

Well, I have no clue wehat the hell everybody is whining about.

I've used Sony, panasonic and Canon footage without a single crash with v.8 and 8a..

Canon 24pf also captures fine ( vegas capture utility ) without any problems reported here ( one file per frame stuff ).

Renders fine to avi or mp4 in various formats ( HD, SD ), 8 bit or 32 bit ( which I don't use, but just for the hell of it tried.

If I had felt I had a direct line to the engineers, I reckon I could have resolved 100 blatant GUI issues in the last month alone. The Sony support team are very polite and helpful, but they have not actually offered me any solutions, and they do not seem to be able to recreate any of my problems. They just do not seem to have the variety of platforms you need to properly test a piece of software.

I concur with a lot of what was written above. On the post that banned me from the other board, I made the point that users should not put up with rubbish like this. I made the comparison to the Amiga, which was an amazing ground breaking computer platform for video work, (notably at the heart of Pixar's earliest work), with a small band of incredibly loyal users which the company abused and eventually alienated. It was a coincidence that one of the key designers of the Amiga actually frequented that board and he concurred with me in an email on the comparative intuitiveness and ease of use of Vegas to Amiga based systems.

Three things I was going to call in at 8.0a, but neglected in the end (mainly as my login only works sporadically):

1) The tiny editing window in the normal text generator box, that doesn't even have a resize gadget, not to mention a zoom tool.

2) The tiny unresizable window used for the effect automation timeline. This window is magical, because when you have enough effects on a track or event to necessitate a scroll bar, the first time you scroll down to the track you want, it magically bounces you back up to the first track again. Very, very annoying.

3) The legendary "double dongler* effect. Not sure if this is an intended quirk of the program's intuition, but in practical use it acts like a bug. When setting points on an event crop/pan timeline, after you close the window a mysterious new point appears on the last frame of the cut which is usually set to the default settings. Then when you review your current render, you discover all these odd shots where the last frame of a shot pings up from cropped to uncropped. That drives us mad.

I did have another one I was going to write about, but it escapes me at this minute. But I'm about to do some work with Vegas, so no doubt it will pop up soon to remind me....

"Well, I have no clue wehat the hell everybody is whining about."

Like i said, of the ones we hear about there are oodles of other people out there without issues.
Your one of the lucky ones ;)

Yes, it is very easy to think everyone is whining when it is not happening to them. Of course he doesn't know what everyone is whining about if it hasn't happened to him. Are the other guys supposed to be lying or something? :)

I wish my crashes were psychosomatic! :)

"2) The tiny unresizable window used for the effect automation timeline. This window is magical, because when you have enough effects on a track or event to necessitate a scroll bar, the first time you scroll down to the track you want, it magically bounces you back up to the first track again. Very, very annoying."

This was an issue we initially saw on Vegas 6 i believe (might be V5... ).
There was an actual note of it in one of the fixes. Fixed issue with filter chain keyframe moving to the top filter or some such thing.. ... It was eventually rectified, but it now happens with V7 and V8

I wasn't implying anybody was lying. Just saying that I had no clue about any of this because I have never personally experienced any problems, and I mean, literally zero problems.

All this would indicate it's hardware related.

So it's not really Vegas' fault. Maybe they could have tested wth more different configurations, but maybe it's just bad hardware.

Think about Avid or FCP. FCP will run only on macs, even there it's crap a lot of times, AVID will run on about 2% of machines out there. And I don't mean that you'll get crashes. The piece os $hit won't run at all. So maybe Vegas now needs more specific hardware, I don't know.

How come I can plug in HV20 into both desktop and laptop, leave scene detection on, and capture 60i or 24pf without any problems ( properly recognizes scenes ). cut here, cut there, color correct, add some effects, and rended to usually uncompressed .avi, or .mp4.
And that camera footage is supposedly a nightmare to work with in Vegas.

So obviously with my hardware it works the way it's supposed to.

Once upon a time I owned a Triumph Bonneville. One hell of a motorcycle. Funny thing about that vintage of british mechanicals.....you could only work on them with Whitworth wrenches. They weren't even metric, but, the british have their own way of doing things.So, one had to invest in a set of whitworth wrenches. (My apologies, in advance, to my British friends)

I still have a few whitworth wrenches in my toolbox. They're in the same drawer that I keep my SU Carb air balancing tool and the special little funnel I used to add oil to the carb dampers..

Anyone ever wonder what happened to whitworth?
And speaking of extinct species, whatever happened to Dr. Lumen?

I think this hardware thing is a rather spurious argument. Most of my issues are GUI based. In the whole time i used Vegas 6.0a, we had maybe two crashes. Otherwise it was completely stable and we certainly had no GUI issues. The hardware platform was fine. All my other applications run fine.

Since we went to Vegas 8.0a, GUI crashes, particularly ones that involve the title bar blanking out as white, have abounded. Hardware does not make that happen, poorly written software, with memory leaks and glitches causing buffer underruns etc. make that happen. Beta testing should remove the bulk of these issues.

Vegas 8.0a is an unstable piece of software, and it sounds like 8.0b is too.

I hear you mate, and this was the point of noting that not everyone is having issues.. .

"So it's not really Vegas' fault. Maybe they could have tested wth more different configurations, but maybe it's just bad hardware."

Bad hardware in what regard? Im just curious as to your thoughts and im not picking a fight or anything. Im trying to get to the crux of the matter...
Considering their all OHCI compliant, it shoudlnt make an iota of a difference what hardware is used.
I do agree that it could well be a driver issue, maybe someons runnign a Via chipset vs an Intel chipset. maybe someones running a PCI 1394 card while the next guy is using their Mobo input.. maybe theyre even crazy enough to use their Soundblaster in built firewire port... COuld be ANYTHING...
And this is where testing is king...

Fact remains, if i can capture HDV with Premiere and use Mainconcept HDV codecs identically as i do with Vegas (during capture), there is no reason why Vegas shouldnt capture the same footage, from the same camera, from the same deck into the same same PC running the same codec for the same capture in question.

"Think about Avid or FCP. FCP will run only on macs, even there it's crap a lot of times, "

I have to disagree.. i know MANY MANY users pushing mulitple DVCproHD streams ( 6 streams @ 100mbps each without skipping a beat) on a lowly G5 dual core with 4gb ram)
Mind u i dont like the NLE on the outset, but the performance was there.. and it was consistant

"AVID will run on about 2% of machines out there. "
This is why many machines need to be certified by Avid before any turnkey is put together. You can always check the Avid website for verification of this. Sure ti will work on most builds, but there are certain configs which will work better. When running a Mojo BoB its even more imperitive to get it right the first time..
Lke i said, Avid have a range of builds, much like Matrox and Canopus, as to which builds or configs work best for their softwre.
These companies however do not make a secret of it, in regard to what works and what doesnt.. With tis in mind, these comapnies carry alot more credibility and sales power when someone calls p and asks about what kinda system they might need to use this particular NLE..
At least the salesguy can give them an answer as opposed to praying for Vegas to work..

"And I don't mean that you'll get crashes. The piece os $hit won't run at all. "
LOL
I hear you. but i also know one guy who edits a high profile talk show for the ABC down here who uses 3 avid systems which he put together himself. Saved thousand, and the systems work for him. His making a tidy sum regardless..

"So maybe Vegas now needs more specific hardware, I don't know."
Maybe so, but noone will know this until Vegas is tramped around town hitting any and every config conceivable.. The only way to do that is to find beta testers capabe and willing to take Vegas out to town... and check out which bars she prefers..

"How come I can plug in HV20 into both desktop and laptop, leave scene detection on, and capture 60i or 24pf without any problems ( properly recognizes scenes ). "

I cant answer that.. maybe the HV20 has a newer updated ohci interface than what the XH series do?
WHo knows..
i know that even with scene detection off, V7 randomly creates clips as opposed to retaining the one long tape capture. These clips are usually cut at broken gop segments, and when trimmed at the actual scene, theyre several frames off.
I havent used frame mode in cam coz i havent needed to shoot in frame mode yet for HD, For now im deinterlacing for SD so this works ok.. but when i start delivering 1080p to my clients it will def be something to look into..

In any case, unitl i can read an update that says "fixed issue with Frame capture modes from Canon A1" only then will i shoot in frame mode and work with Vegas...

As it stands, i wont risk my clients investments on an unstable tool. Its that simple..

I mean seriously would you risk your life in a vehicle which you knew MIGHT have braking issues? And would you ride in that car knowing that the Brakes may or may not fail at any given time, be it in full peak hour traffic, or just cruising on a highway?
I think of my clients investments in much the same way.

WHAT exactly is broken? I don't see any problem.

WHAT exactly is broken? I don't see any problem.