“Divorcing” Vegas at NAB

[Douglas Spotted eagle]

Your letter/position would carry more substance with folks if you shared your acquisition source and export format.

There are some quirks in Vegas when working with certain file types, no doubt.
Me…I want to sue every developer of software that doesn’t support 64 bit plugins for the video and audio side of Vegas, simply because I hate using 32bit software now. 😉

Douglas Spotted Eagle
VASST

Certified Sony Vegas Trainer
Aerial Camera/Instructor

[John Rofrano]

[Douglas Spotted Eagle] “Your letter/position would carry more substance with folks if you shared your acquisition source and export format.”

Yea, I agree with Spot, what formats are you working with? We just delivered 13 episodes of a new show to PBS “Painting & Travel with Roger and Sarah Bansemer” and Roger and myself both used Vegas Pro for all of the editing and finishing. The only problems we encountered was when having to render to uncompressed QuickTime for the post house to create an HDCAM tape. Once we found a post house that accepts Sony MXF files, it’s been smooth sailing.

Sure, Vegas crashes every once in a while, but so does After Effects which I use regularly. The formats that you are using do make a difference. I mostly edit HDV which is a dream to edit with Vegas Pro.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Chuck Pullen]

Thank you both for your input I sincerely do appreciate it. Doug you have your own shelf in my office is that’s any indication of how much I value your opinion…

To answer your question, for example I am working on a project at this very moment that will give you some perspective. I have four iso’s, a line cut, and four track audio of a concert. First I tried opening the iso’s (.m2t from firestores) no matter what I open or the order I open it, it crashes. I had to open all of them in Premiere and convert them to use in Vegas. I then spent another fun filled few hours trying to get Vegas to see the line cut correctly (ProRes from a Ki Pro) I finally get the ProRes open, am trying to sync the audio, and wherever I click on the time line, the ProRes audio starts from the beginning. It crashed at least ten to twenty times just to get to that point.

Take a few moments to count the number of posts just in the last month that deal specifically with stability, or crashing issues I have mentioned with Vegas 9 or 10. I would easily say that at least 1/3 of the posts on this forum are from people frustrated that no matter what they do they are having some serious issues.

Again, both of you are having success with Vegas, but many of us are not. Could it be our processors, our memory, mother boards? I would find it extremely unlikely that there is a common hardware link between all of us.

I sincerely ask anyone who has direct access to the Vegas engineers or will be seeing them in April to let them know…there are some seriously unhappy loyal customers, and we really would appreciate any sort of response from them about what they are doing about all of these issues.

Chuck

[John Rofrano]

[Chuck Pullen] “…for example I am working on a project at this very moment …First I tried opening the iso’s (.m2t from firestores) …then spent another fun filled few hours trying to get Vegas to see the line cut correctly (ProRes from a Ki Pro)”

So… there you have it. Firestores and ProRes. You should probably buy a Mac if you want to edit with those formats. I’m serious. You either need to use the formats that edit easily in your NLE or use the NLE that edits the formats you want to use.

Here is the problem: HD is the wild, wild, west! As you said, Vegas was extremely stable in the DV world. No so much for any NLE in the HD world. HD seems to have no useful standards. Standards like MPEG4 AVC/H.264 are so broad that no software can support it all. Every camera manufacture uses different parts of the spec and so there is no commonality anymore. That’s why I stick to standards like HDV and AVCHD and I have no problems.

So if you are going to use bleeding edge formats… expect to bleed a little. Me… I stick with the standards and get productive work done with Vegas Pro.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Steve Rhoden]

As i figured Chuck, Its the file formats you are
working with and importing into Vegas.

four iso’s .m2t from firestores
line cut
ProRes from a Ki Pro

Could it be our processors, our memory, mother boards? No,
its what you are importing in Vegas…Why not try to stick to the standard formats in your editing workflow?

Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Film Maker
Filmex Creative Media.
1-876-832-4956

[Nigel O’neill]

As a relative N00b to this forum, I came to use SVP because of the superior stability it offered over other NLE’s from Pinnacle, Adobe and Avid, albeit consumer/prosumer editions. SVP simply worked for me and got the job done. No more 10 hour renders only to have it crash on 99%!

I agree with John that SVP is a stalwart with HDV and DV, and I have to admit that when I first starting importing NXCAM, MXF and some AVCHD into my workflow, I initially had problems, but in time, Sony added support for them.

I have had a few unusual quirks, but I suspect they are more operator error-related in nature than genuine software faults.

Like John, I work in the software development world and understand what it takes to develop, test and maintain software for such a diverse platform of users, operating systems, hardware, software and video/audio formats. It ain’t easy to get it right the first time, especially when other vendors do not follow defined standards fully or choose to deviate, but at least Sony listens unlike some other companies and attempts to address the issues as best they can.

Unfortunately if that means not being able to support Mac formats, perhaps the answer for you is an NLE designed for them, as John suggests… .

Intel i7 920, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 10 (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Stephen Mann]

I would easily say that at least 1/3 of the posts on this forum are from people frustrated that no matter what they do they are having some serious issues.

Since this is a user support forum, it’s no surprise that most posts are an issue of some sort. Not many users post that their system is rock-solid and working great.

Speaking from my experience as a former tech support manager for a Silicon Valley embedded PC manufacturer, if we couldn’t duplicate a customer’s problem, then we couldn’t fix it. Reinstall the O/S or programs was all we could offer.

To extrapolate that experience to SCS, If you can’t provide the steps to replicate the problem on their PC’s, then – all they can do is offer suggestions.

Also, there’s really only a few people – a dozen at the most – always complaining about “serious problems”. I suspect that the majority of users on these forums are generally quite happy with their installations of Vegas.

Steve Mann

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Al Bergstein]

Steve, my system is rock solid and working fine! Just joking.no problems here working with canon 7d x.264, Avchd, and avi. All is well.

Alf

[Dave Haynie]

Same here… I’m using AVCHD/MTS from Panasonic camcorders, HDV/MTS from Sony, and AVC/Quicktime from Canon HDSLR (60D) with very reliable results (other than Cineform output still being broken in Vegas 10). Even that Canon worried me a bit, because in native format, I’m potentially at the mercy of Apple’s Quicktime subsystem for Windows. But I could always re-mux that to MP4 if necessary.

And Vegas has come some distance in handling AVC. This is a fairly complex format, and pretty much every camcorder manufacturer had their own set of quirks with it (a Sanyo Xacti FH1 I was playing with a year ago very regularly crashed Vegas, by including negative timecodes in its particular flavor of AVC + MP4 wrapper). This hasn’t been a Vegas thing, it’s an industry thing. And HD itself has been an evolving thing… for about decade, the right answer was always “DV”.. your worst conflict might be DV/AVI Type 1, DV/AVI Type 2, or DV/Quicktime. These days, there are dozens of HD format permutations, and the count seems to increase regularly.

ProRes is very much, and very intentionally, an Apple proprietary format. Yeah, you can read in under Windows and, thus, in theory, edit in any NLE that supports Quicktime under Windows. But only do far as Apple’s willing to make that stable… and they have largely indicted, as John says, that you should have a Mac for any serious ProRes work.

-Dave

[Jay Allen]

I share your pain. with each new release there is a one step forward and two steps back result. the bugs are getting far worse, but at the same time we are getting a ton of new features. I would like to see Sony fix what we have been asking for for YEARS and not add features that “everyone is adding” like 3d. I for one would still like to see faster building peaks, and a preview that always works full frame rate with full res.(use the multicore processor for preview).I have a i7 980 extreme w/24 gigs of ram and the building peaks is as slow as it ever was. The problem is that all the nles out there are also buggy and have problems. at least with Vegas I can keep the ver 8,9,and 10 on the same computer and can complete a project with a combination of builds.