I give up… heading to Mac

[Joe Mantaratz]

Wow….feels like we just got a divorce.

Seriously I understand the frustration as most of us have been through it at one time or another. When I think back when it was a DOS world and you had to know those codes I don’t recall ever having the system crash. Enter windows and voila…!!! Some people never have a problem (not me) and others like yourself are plagued with them. I think the community has come to accept that there will always be issues. bugs, updates and work arounds.

The promise of the latest and greatest and being the first kid on the block is our fault. There’s no secret that the consumers are the beta testers and we have allowed it. I always dread doing any updates, whether it is for windows or any other software. I’m waiting before I upgrade to Vegas 9 and windows 7 for the bugs to have been dealt with. The marketing people just want to sell the product so I never believe the hype. Here we have 64 bit Windows 7 and Vegas 9 fresh out of the box so to speak and they have well known issues already. No surprise.

Can’t say I blame you for the move however.

[John Rofrano]

> I have both a MacBook Pro, a Dell Studio Laptop and an HP Pavilion quad core w/6 GBs RAM, 500 GB hard disk, … BUT, I’ve struggled over the last month to cope with blue screens of death on video drivers, and other blue screen issues.

And what does HP and Dell have to say about this? I assume you overpaid for these name brands so that you could get support. BSOD’s are clearly system problems that the manufacturer should address. It’s the sign of a poorly configured system. I’m running Windows 7 64-bit since it came out with not one BSOD. I build my own PC’s and the specs are on the PC Equipment page of my web site so you can build one too. It’s the most stable computer I have ever owned.

I would suggest that you tell HP and Dell to get their PC’s working or take their junk back. BTW, HP builds some really fine WORKSTATION computers for video editing. Your mistake was buy the home “Pavilion” line. It’s just made for surfing the web and doing homework. There is no magic in Mac. Buy an HP workstation and you’ll see a world of difference in the quality of the components and the build. I’ve seen the insides of the HP Workstations when I was out at NAB 2009 last year and they are impressive.

Buying a Mac will not fix this. You are just trading one set of problems for another. Mac’s will force you to transcode your files into their proprietary format because apps like FCP can’t edit native camera files. We have people at work that use Mac’s and whenever they have to make presentation, you can bet that the first 15 minutes of the meeting will be wasted with them trying to get their precious Mac to work with the overhead projector. It’s a joke but you have a MacBook pro so I guess you know what you’re in for.

Macs are more stable because they support less hardware. Buy a well built PC (or build your own from quality parts) and it will be just as stable.

~jr

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

[Enrique Orozco]

…I have also a custom PC workstation running Win 64bits with Vegas 9pro (32 and 64 bits) and I’m very happy with this machine… the problem with most commercial PC brands at least for intensive video or 3D applications is the lack of power and stability that you only get with a really professional workstation (custom made as John said or certified like some HPs, Boxx machines, etc.)… I once try FCP (on a Mac)…. and I stay with Vegas…. sorry for your Win experience…

Good luck

Enrique Orozco R.
iDEA DigitalVideoStudio

[Al Bergstein]

Thanks to all for not making me feel like some kind of traitor here. Overall the Vegas Video experience has been great, but the kind of constant crashing that seems to plague me on a daily basis is just too much. I just want to edit video and produce movies!

Perhaps Vegas needs to put out more stringent guidelines about acceptable video cards, since NVidia seems to be the root cause. This is not so odd, as ProTools does the same thing, and believe me, you need to follow the Protools guidelines! Another reason I went to the Mac was because of the problems I had getting Protools to work on Windows. It just worked on the Mac. I think we all would appreciate that kind of guidance.

My latest episodes were caused by simply copying my AVCHD files from the reader in the machine to my external 500GB USB drive. I can reproduce it at will. The BSOD calls out the NVidia driver as the problem. I upgraded it to the ‘latest’ November driver and boom, it still happens.

I understand that I will probably still have problems with the Mac. I’ve been around enough of all computer worlds to know that there is no perfect situation out there. But I have to say, I originally bought my Macbook Pro because I was trying to simply do home movie making and audio production on an XP machine in 2006, and there were so many problems, even simple ones like properly controlling the video intake from a High 8 camera due to firewire jitters. I bought the Mac in frustration and iMovie did the intake and camera control out of the box with no problems. I don’t have that problem these days with Sony, the intake of my latest family Christmas event on that old camera worked just fine.

So I’ll probably keep the HP around, since desktops are cheap, maybe upgrade the video card to something that supports Vegas in a real production way, but I’m going to go get a Mac and try out FCP and Adobe on it. Hopefully the transcoding won’t make my new HD look too bad. The quality is just amazing.

Alf
Panasonic HMC-150 & Vegas Video 9.0c on Win7/64bit

[John Rofrano]

> The BSOD calls out the NVidia driver as the problem. I upgraded it to the ‘latest’ November driver and boom, it still happens.

Actually, that’s not always the best course of action. I would uninstall the drivers that you have now and load the latest NVIDIA drivers from the graphics card manufacturer. The difference being that the manufacturer has tested the card with those drivers while installing the latest generic drivers from NVIDIA may actually cause problems if the card doesn’t closely follow the reference design.

I had a problem once with OpenGL support in Cinema 4D. I had all the latest drivers but still had screen corruption. Then I install the drivers from the card manufacturer (MSI at the time) which were quite old, but all of my graphics problems disappeared! Lesson learned.

Note: Dell and others have a NASTY habit of selling you crippled video and audio cards. They actually have NVIDIA or whoever make cards use LOWER SPECS and then pass them off as the real thing. I know because I bought one and the GeForce card that I paid for had less memory and slower chips than the “real” card that was sold in stores. Dell also crippled the sound card by leaving out the MIDI and digital ports and passing it off a real SoundBlaster Live when, in fact, it was a special crippled card made for Dell. Needless to say I will NEVER buy from Dell again.

I don’t know if HP does this with their home line as well, but if you buy a computer from HP or Dell home line and you upgrade ANYTHING that didn’t come from HP or Dell you are asking for big trouble. These are NOT upgradable machines. They are meant to be used with the drivers they are shipped with. The power supplies (PSU) are speced to barely run what you ordered. If you start adding hard drives, you are asking for trouble. As a video editor, you just don’t want to buy these machines. They are designed for people who are afraid to open the case and as soon as you open the case, you are opening up a world of trouble.

~jr

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

[Rob Franks]

Interesting.
I’m on windows7 64 bit, quad core, 6 gig ram with nvidia card and I can’t remember that last time I’ve seen the BOSD. Most if not all my work in Vegas is avchd now…. Its’ rock solid. I am not however xferring to USB drive. Maybe your problem is in there somewhere?

Mac is a good machine. I think a bit overpriced and I’m certainly not one to swallow all the ‘fanboy-ism’ that exists. Sorry… no… they don’t make you breakfast in the morning and no, you can’t have ‘relations’ with a mac!

Now one can argue whether or not they’re more stable though. I think because there are fewer hardware/software combinations with a mac then there are fewer ways you can screw one up. As a result they do have the appearance of being more stable.

What I don’t like about macs and what has kept me away from them is the fact that they’re simply not very avchd or blu ray friendly. You can certainly muddle your way through by converting avchd and using things like Toast with an external BD drive, but this all isn’t a mac issue as much as it is a political-type Apple issue… and i don’t see Apple becoming very supportive any time soon. I don’t think they even care to be very honest

[Bob Peterson]

I NEVER upgrade a computer to a new version of Windows. That’s a recipe for failure and frustration. If I want a new version of Windows, I buy a new machine which has all the software and drivers in place, tested, and functioning.

That said, you seem to have opted for Apple a long time ago, and to have a rosey view of what you will find. That has not been my experience with Apple. Apple frequently does not work, and frequently lacks ANY work around. BTW, I haven’t had a Windows BSOD in years.

[Al Bergstein]

Well, I’ve had less problems with Apple, traditionally. However, some thoughts in thinking this through with all your help:

– HP Pavilion – Now I see that it has only a 300 Watt Power supply, so it will not work with any additional addon dedicated video cards from NVidia, for example. So any people looking to buy a machine for doing video work ought to be told that the power supplies are critical to getting into high end cards. While I have expansion slots, I can’t expand! Apple builds their desktop MacPros with the right power supplies, out of the box.

– Shared video memory: I would bet that this is where the problem is coming in. I was not really aware of shared video memory on this machine. Again, since the BSOD happens when I transfer a large (5GB) file from my SD card to the USB drive, (extremely reproduceable), I assume that the copy process is somehow stepping on video memory that Nvidia is supposedly “sharing”. So this is another gotcha. No one doing AVCHD should probably be using a shared memory video card. For a small price I can go out and buy one that has onboard video memory, and perhaps my problem will be solved. But I can buy a macpro and not have to worry.

-Oddly, transferring the video files to my local hard drive works! And transferring from the local drive to the external USB, works! So this again points to something in the way that NVIDIA uses shared video memory and the USB memory management… hmmm.

Anyway, I’m certainly too old and grey to be a ‘fanboy’ of Apple. I just want to produce video without constantly hassling this stuff!

Best of the new year to you all…It will be a few days before my Macpro comes in, and I’m not going to part with this HP just yet, as I sold my Dell laptop this morning to a friend. So you may see me asking questions around here about video cards.

Alf
Panasonic HMC-150 & Vegas Video 9.0c on Win7/64bit

[Danny Hays]

I’m running Windows 7 32 bit with Vegas 9a. It’s alot faster with the preview but it sees my .m2t files as AVCHD but capturing from it with my HVRA1, it has problems, audio drops out and the video is cut into sever pieces?? I just use OnLocation to capture with. Danny

[Norman Willis]

I was frustrated out of my mind with my Dell, probably because of what JR said about Dell having substandard parts. I was ready to ditch it, and was seriously pricing Mac, like you, out of sheer frustration.

I got a BFG GTX260 OC edition, and have not had any problems since, except once I got a bad install of Vista SP2. I had to roll back the machine, and re-installed, and then everything was fine. But you cannot really blame that on MS.

My other problem was that I accepted the MS driver for the BFG GTX260. That was a mistake, and I won’t do it again. Now I carefully screen out the MS version of video card drivers. I have not had any more problems.

I am sorry to hear you are having a bad experience. Like some have said, it is probably not because of MS: it is probably because of your consumer-grade parts. I wrote Sony and suggested they post an ‘approved parts’ list (kind of like Avid), but they did not do it (probably because it is just too hard to keep up on it). But when I build a new machine some day, I will probably do as John recommends and build a home-made box with top-notch parts.

I wish it was working for you. If you are seriously considering dropping the money for Mac, you might also seriously consider an HP Z800, or something. It is too rich for my blood, but I guess some people really have great success with them.

I wish you the best, no matter what your platform.