Has Sony lost the plot

[John Rofrano]

What do other people think?

I think you are not taking the different target markets that Sony serves into account but let me comment on your statements and then I’ll offer my own:

Has Sony lost the plot, I refer to my recent post regarding Sony Vegas 9e and other problems with versions of Vegas9.

Vegas 9.0e was very uncharacteristic for Sony. They have never released a fix right on the heals of a previous fix (9.0d) but because 9.0d introduced new functionality which broke some old functionality, an immediate fix was required and I applaud Sony for being so responsive. The problem is that this is not Vegas Pro 1.0 and when you get to version 9.0 in a product’s lifecycle, it becomes increasingly difficult to regression test all the existing functionality with each new change. It’s a balance between how much testing you do and how quickly you need to get it into the fields. It’s unfortunate that they fix for the fix needs another fix but, welcome to the world of software development where every day is “anything can happen day”. (for those of us old enough to remember the Mickey Mouse Club) 😉

If we look at the problem overall Sony is not the company it used to be, Sony Vegas is quickly becoming “out of date” many other much cheaper programs for video editing are available with quite good facillities including much easier and better titling than Vegas Pro titler,(which is just crap) just take a look at the latest versions of Pinnacle Studio and Corel Sudio which also include Blu-ray HD burning and Authoring,not to mention lots of others out there I have not tried !.And these programs retail for half or less than Vegas…perhaps not as good yet but look out Sony !.

No company is the company it use to be. Every company is cutting back. But let’s make sure we car comparing apples to apples here. Vegas Pro is not aimed at the Pinnacle Studio / Corel Studio market at all. Vegas has Movie Studio which is very price competitive in that market so Vegas Movie Studio is not more expensive than those other applications at all. I use to use Pinnacle Studio 1.5, 7.0, & 8.0 and it is an example of the worst quality control in computer programming history. You couldn’t pay me enough money to use that software. It is extremely unreliable and the primary reason that I moved to Vegas! So I don’t care what functionality Pinnacle claims it has if it doesn’t work. I have never used Corel so I can’t say anything about them.

I always regarded Sony as the “leader” ever since they invented the first Walkman….Well whats happed Sony ?

Sony is a BIG company. Don’t get Sony Broadcast confused with Sony Consumer divisions. Those are two different target markets. Sony Broadcast is extremely innovative and producing leading edge cameras. If you don’t think so, just attend NAB and visit the Sony Broadcast section. It’s pretty darn impressive.

In my opinion Panasonic and canon Camcorders are far better now than Sony, Sony has not yet released a Blu-ray recorder which Panasonic have had for sale for almost 2 years.

Who in their right mind would buy a Blu-ray camcorder??? That’s a “soccer mom” camera!!! (ok, so soccer mom’s would buy it but you should not) Some of the saddest posts on forums is when someone who bought a DVD camcorder thinking they could edit the footage, complaining about how poor the quality is when it’s re-rendered and realizing that they bought the wrong camera for video editing. I could care less if Sony ever made a Blu-ray camera but that’s a consumer thing anyway. Again, if you are focusing on the consumer market that’s a different story. But as long as you’re talking consumer… I feel Sony consumer cameras are better because they shoot industry standard AVCHD while Cannon and Panasonic are busy creating proprietary formats of AVC that no one can edit.

What do other people think? (reprise)

I think what has happened to Sony with regard to Vegas is the same thing that is happening to all companies in this poor economic climate. Companies are cutting back, development teams are being ask to do more with less, and the result is usually a hit on quality because it still takes the same amount of resource to develop the functionality so the only place to cut is the testing. Now I don’t know if 9.0e was tested any less than 9.0d but given the short development cycle, I would guess that it was tested less and luck wasn’t on their side. You can always test more… but at some point you have to ship it to the customer to fix the known problems.

~jr

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

[Danny Hays]

Maybe Sony was too quick in releasing the new 9e but it’s still the best in my opinion. I have tried most others, Media composer, Final Cut and I can work circles around those with Vegas. And you don’t need external hardware to get full functionality from the software like some others. I also have a Sony HDV camera and for the price, it’s a fantastic camera. It smokes my Canon GL1, which I don’t even turn on anymore. Step back to 9c until these issues are fixed. If there some other specific issues your having with Vegas, post them here and maybe we can help you through them.
If there was one thing I wish Vegas Pro had that it doesn’t, it would be a decent keyer. If it had that, I would almost never have to leave the app, even for audio. Vegas was audio only at first and is a great multi track audio editor, which supports direct-x and vst pluggins. With FCP and Avid, It’s pretty much expected to use a different app for your audio.

[Lance Bachelder]

I’ve been working with Vegas since 2000 and been a beta tester from version 3 through 8. I’ve probably released a wider variety of pro projects using Vegas than ANY other user on the planet – from Emmy winning TV series to a $60 million studio feature – Defend Sony and Vegas all you want but why? If they’ve broken something, and they have, they need to listen and fix it!

Vegas 9e is currently unusable for any of the work I am currently doing (feature film). Now if you’re shooting HDV or XDCAM it may be working fine. Then Sony needs to come out with a disclaimer stating that Vegas should only be used with media created using a Sony product.

I hope someone at Sony is listening and I hope they can get a handle on this quickly and fix ALL the mess – I’ll be waiting patiently but will have to get my current project out with Final Cut Pro which works like a dream…

Here’s hoping…

Lance Bachelder
Southern California

[James Wilhelmi]

I really like Vegas too, but I am really disappointed that it doesn’t have sequences. Every pro NLE that I know has sequences! There are a few other little things Vegas could stand to adapt from the competition, but the lack of sequences is my biggest complaint.

James

[Jerry Norman]

James, what do you mean by sequences? If you mean importing and exporting image sequences then Vegas does support that.

Regarding the original question – I originally came to Vegas from Media Studio Pro because MSP was very unstable and Vegas was rock solid.

I have seen Vegas become less stable with versions 8 and 9. And although I applaud SCS’s quick response on the slow project loading problem in 9d, and earlier the quick response on the problem of losing text in titles, in general I think SCS has become much less responsive than Sonic Foundry was to less critical bugs that get frequent mention in the forums. In fairness to SCS, video formats have become much more complex in the last few years with introduction of HDV and AVCHD. Nearly every NLE vendor is struggling with AVCHD, and I’m pretty sure that takes resouces away from other things we would like to see SCS address.

My recommendations to SCS? More than anything else I feel SCS needs to implement a public beta to get wider exposure before releasing a new version to production. Both the text problem and slow load problems mentioned before were caught within days of release but were not caught within (presumably) weeks or months of beta testing. Even public beta testing won’t catch all problems, but I think it would significantly reduce the embarrasing flaws we’ve seen in Vegas 9.

Jerry

[Carlton Rahmani]

So you’ve actually produced FEATURES (movies) using Sony Vegas? If so, what were they? I, along with a lot of other people, want to know.

[Jerry Norman]

Carlton, Google is your friend: //www.imdb.com/name/nm1680680/

Jerry

[James Wilhelmi]

Jerry

A sequence is a basically a timeline. Vegas only has the one timeline where FCP, Avid & Premier Pro you can have multiple timelines(sequences). Let’s say you have a wedding you’re editing. And you want render several different aspects of the wedding for a menu based dvd. You could have one sequence for the ceremony, one for the reception, ect. With Vegas you have to either create a new project or dedicate space on the timeline for seperate renders.

James

[John Rofrano]

A sequence is a basically a timeline. Vegas only has the one timeline where FCP, Avid & Premier Pro you can have multiple timelines(sequences).

Yea, but with Vegas you can have multiple instances open at once. So I can be rendering in one instance, editing in another, and doing special fx sequences in a third. You can’t do that with FCP, Avid, or Premier Pro. That’s probably why they chose to implement mutliple timelines. For me, Vegas has a more productive workflow by allowing multiple projects to be worked on at once. The whole interface is dedicated to that one task which could even be another unrelated project that you need to copy and paste sections from.

You could have one sequence for the ceremony, one for the reception, ect. With Vegas you have to either create a new project or dedicate space on the timeline for seperate renders.

This is not true. Vegas allows nested projects that work the same way as After Effects does with nest comps. When I create my VASST training DVD’s each chapter is a separate Vegas project and then I drop them all into a master project and I can still trim and manipulate them like regular media just like you would for your parts of a wedding. When I create complex multi-track opening sequences, I do this as a separate project and just drop it into my current project. It works the same as sequences do in other NLE’s.

So the real difference here is whether the sequence is a tab on the tiemline or if you open a new project to work on it and drop it into your existing project. It’s six of one and half-dozen of the other. It all boils down to how you like to work. I like working with multiple instances because I can even work on multiple unrelated projects at the same time with Vegas which you can do with the others.

~jr

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

[James Wilhelmi]

As always, good points John. I started with Avid so I’m use to the sequence workflow which I like better. But you’ve given a good example of how to make the Vegas workflow better in these situations. Thanks.

James