Okay, How many people here are receiving this survey? Surveys of a very limited count of users and potential continuing customers does not serve much of a purpose.

Seems like I filled out the survey a couple of months ago.

Rob

I received the survey and have not updated since V9. As in the prior survey my primary reason for not upgrading to V11 is stability - based on comments on this forum and others.

I can forgo the feature improvements made as I have no patience for unstable software. If Sony have not received this message loud and clear from their user base by now then they have cloth ears. With the announcement of Pixelcast today I have to question the priorities they are allocating to their products.

Tim

I received the email today, and tried filling it out, but there's a bug with the "reasons for not upgrading" selections. If I select X for any item, then try to select X for the subsequent one it removes my previous selection. If I select X+1 or X-1 then it keeps both selections.

(Not a bug; see Chienworks post below.)

But, I didn't upgrade to 10 because I didn't see anything new that was relevant to me. I think the email said it had 3D support, which I didn't care about, and GPU-accelerated rendering if you had a NVIDIA card, which I didn't.

I didn't upgrade to 11 because again it didn't seem to have anything new for me. The GPU acceleration was expanded to work in preview, but doesn't seem to work with my integrated Xeon E3 P3000 graphics.

But then I wanted to use AVC, and 9 doesn't really work for that. The AVC support was updated in 10, but you can't buy that anymore, so I tried 11 and it was very unstable.

I gave it time, and it wasn't just not fixed, but there's no simple indication here of anyone listening or planning to solve it in an open manner.

I'm going to do something hacky for a few months, like keep reinstalling the 10 trial. Then when 12 is out, if it's stable I'll buy the upgrade.

Vegas Pro feels like a small niche, so it seems like it should have more transparency of development. I just want to see some developers participating a little and reminding us that it's still being worked on. Otherwise how do I know it's not abandoned? Maybe bugs never will be fixed, and they're just busy slapping more features on to capture sales in the annual cycle. That strategy works when the core software is stable, but not when the foundation itself is cracked.

If a ship is leaky, and you're busy expanding the selection of cuisine, don't be surprised when people start abandoning ship. Just fix the core stability issues quickly, or work in an open manner to show it's in progress and is likely to happen, and I'll be more likely to support development by paying for updates.

Maybe a sign of goodwill would be a public bug tracker, so we can better organize the issues, and have opportunity to share and browse feature requests.

...a sign of goodwill would be a public bug tracker... -Jamon

+1 good idea.

It's not a bug with the form. You're requested to rank them in order, so you can only have one choice for each position. Took me a while to realize that. However, i found it rather unfortunate as i would have answered 10 to one of them and 1 to the other nine.

Really my only reason concrete reason for not upgrading is the OS requirement. I'm not going to be moving my editing rigs past XP Pro until they die, which could easily be another 5 years. Currently Vegas is THE ONLY piece of software i'd use or consider using that requires Vista/7. I can run it on my laptop, but i don't know why i'd bother running a version on my laptop that produces project files that i can't use on my big rigs. So for now i'm running Vegas 9 for the foreseeable future.

I received the survey but couldn't complete it. There seems to have been some kind of loop in the software that kept taking me back to the same question.

Jack

By the sounds of it it's going out to those that have not upgraded to V11 yet. I stopped at 9 when version 10 was buggy at first, 11 was not even a factor since all reports from many forums brought up its instability woes and I just cant take a chance on buggy software. I keep coming back to this forum hoping for a ray of light because I really do like Vegas but have yet to read that SCS have gotten the kinks worked out. Here is one of the differences. I had small question about interlaced footage I tweeted it to @AdobePremiere and they gave me an answer in less then an hour.

Since SCS has set the initial upgrade price per license to just $140 I always buy the upgrade when it is first released. However I then wait about 4 months to actually install it. Because I do this with every release, I still get about 12-14 months out of each release before actually upgrading and then I still keep older versions handy for certain projects.

That's a cost of only $10 per month per license and I have access to V8-V11 on the same machine. It costs me more than that for electricity every day & double in the hot summer months... In fact, I spend less per year on Vegas upgrades than I do on 3rd party FX - some of which I only need for a single FX...

IMO it is unrealistic to expect new software to maintain compatibility with an obsolete OS like XP. In July 2008 MS announced that they would no longer support XP one year later. It is now 4 years later!

I also cannot imagine editing HD video 5 years from now on a PC that is already 5 years old. Even our 2 year-old workstation runs circles around our 5 year-old XP workstation (which we still keep for importing video from tape...) This XP machine has V8-V10 but it is simply too slow for serious HD video editing. Even my $500 2600K Sandy Bridge Media Center runs circles around that machine....

Thanks, it's not a bug, I edited my previous post to say that.

But, the items aren't rankable like that for me. Many are basically the same reason, and some aren't applicable, so how can 2 equally inapplicable reasons have different weight? It'd work better if you could weigh the importance of each reason independent from the other.

Plus it's difficult to rank them using that interface, because you have to keep track of previous numbers, and shifting them around is tricky, and if there's a duplicate it erases the other. It'd be much easier with a drag and drop sortable list, or to just rate each separate.

But I did what I could with it; hope that helps.

I ask the question once again as I did many posts back, who gets to respond to this heavy-handed survey???

I haven't seen it and I am an ardent registered user since Vegas 7.

Some postulate it is for users who haven't made the choice to bite V11 - but that is simply not true.

A small diletant sampling of potential customers is pretty pathetic.

Maybe it's random? I didn't upgrade to 10 or 11 and received the invitation.

I received the survey and it asked what was your first version of Vegas I clicked V8 Pro in my case and then a thank you message. Weird survey I haven't upgraded to V11.

I clicked the first version of Vegas Pro, and it took me to further pages, like the reasons for not upgrading, and what I use it for.

Which was the first version I bought? 4
Have I skipped any updates since? No.


Thank you and goodbye
Just like V11 without the "thank you" :(

Nice to see my money and time spent on such a profound and meaningful survey of users. I'm certain my input will go a long way to improving the product.

Bob.

TheRhino, i never said i expected Vegas to maintain backwards OS compatibility. I'm just saying that's my primary, and pretty much only, reason for not upgrading. If Vegas 11 did run under XP then i would have had no reason *not* to get it.

I think it's unrealistic for a software company, or an OS company, to expect me to junk perfectly good and functional systems just because *they* have moved on. Video isn't my money-maker and my old clunker PCs are way more than adequate for everything i need to accomplish with them. AVCHD will still edit just as well on them 5 years from now as it does today, and it works just fine today.

Will some new heavier format thrust itself upon me and require me to use it tomorrow that can't be adequately handled by my current systems? Maybe. Doubtful, very very doubtful. But should that day come i'll consider my options at that time. I'd say it's a very safe bet that i'm set for quite a long while.

The disparity in pricing models from SCS and Adobe have been perennial topics of discussion about how much VegasPro is worth.

Below: I have copied two responses that I thought should see the light of day within a single glance-- make your own determination of what pricing model you would prefer and support SCS:

1)Subject: RE: Vegas to Premiere to Vegas... back to Premiere?
Reply by: rdolishny
Date: 7/2/2012 8:12:38 PM
There were cross-grades around $600 for the CS suite. I think full retail is about $1900.

However: the subscription model is amazing and I've switched one of my clients to that. It's $39-$49/m for EVERYTHING Adobe makes.

Message last edited on 7/2/2012 8:18:52 PM, by rdolishny.

and from the other camp.......

2)Subject: RE: Vegas Pro User Survey, July 2012 - feedback
Reply by: TheRhino
Date: 7/3/2012 5:05:49 PM
Since SCS has set the initial upgrade price per license to just $140 I always buy the upgrade when it is first released. However I then wait about 4 months to actually install it. Because I do this with every release, I still get about 12-14 months out of each release before actually upgrading and then I still keep older versions handy for certain projects.

That's a cost of only $10 per month per license and I have access to V8-V11 on the same machine. It costs me more than that for electricity every day & double in the hot summer months... In fact, I spend less per year on Vegas upgrades than I do on 3rd party FX - some of which I only need for a single FX...


?

"The following brief set of questions will help us tailor products, features and offers that better match your needs for video and audio production."

Totally agree Bob - my first Version was 3, which wasn't shown, so I clicked the blank one above V4, then "No" to having skipped updates, and felt let down that being a faithful user for 10 years meant that they didn't want to hear anything else from me.

Unless of course they have some brilliant minds that are somehow are able to tailor products and features to match my needs based on the way I clicked those two boxes!

Same thing happened here, but it's obvious that they are looking for responses from those who do not upgrade with every new version.

But, a general comments section would have been nice.

I got the survey but bailed on it during that one section which made you rank the reasons you skipped certain upgrades. I never had a machine that couldn't take an upgrade so I wanted to rank that zero. But I also never skipped an upgrade because of other reasons so I wanted to rank them zero as well but the survey wouldn't allow that. I won't be pushed into answers I don't believe in so I quit. If Sony really wants my opinion give me the opportunity to provide text answers and try to understand the real issues. The whole thing stank of some poor slob being forced to put out customer surveys because some consultant told his boss that's what they should do.

To those who were dumped out near the beginning, because Sony gets your money with every new version and doesn't need to hear from you, you were spared the really badly designed question 4. Apart from duplicate/overlapping options, and being required to somehow rank irrelevant options, it glaringly omits the option "I believe that the new version is less stable than my current version".



Re. lack of XP support in V11... After XP, colour management in Windows was greatly improved. Loading of colour profiles is very hit or miss in Windows XP. In fact, it just doesn't really work properly or reliably, to such an extent that I basically gave up on having Windows load colour profiles for my monitors.

In Vegas Pro 11, my understanding (I don't have 11) is that the choice of monitor colour profiles in the preview device preferences has been dropped. I guess the programmers' thinking is that this loading of colour profiles is now better done in the O/S. That might be the key reason why they dropped XP support in 11. Because XP just doesn't do that properly and reliably.

Having said that, I still wish they'd retained support for XP in VP11, even if colour management was crippled. Either that or tell us the reason they dropped it, even if the reason is unpopular.