Tech Support for Vegas Pro 11

[Danny Hays]

I think it has to be a new blue efx problem and Vegas Pro 11 as I just tested a 1440 HDV to MP4 with a chromakey pluggin and it renered fine, but I noticed the blur in Vegas’s keyer doesn’t work now. It puts a blury shadow half way up the screen. Just when I thought Vegas’s chromaker could be any worse. HA! Thank God I don’t, can’t use it.

[Ken Lininger]

While I don’t have a solution, I can second your frustration level. I have been very dissappointed with Vegas Pro 11. So much so, that I am going back to version 9.

I too am a novice, weekend warrior and have had zero success with Sony Tech support. I can add a few things I noticed in the past weeks trying to deploy version 11. First some quick background. I shoot from numerous devices producing wide variations of ‘HD’ video – home environment you can imagine. Our niceset camera is capable of 1080p, 60p video which is somewhat new to consumer grade equipment. I went with Vegas Pro several years ago due to the ease of blending all of these ‘HD’ formats together to make nice DVD’s and web capable movies for the family. That is all I use it for.

I originally purchased the New Blue Effects and Blends but never installed them with version 11 and still immediately started have the ‘stopped working’ crashes randomly while processing. I do few effects at this point, so the New Blue plug-ins are not the issue. I have a kick a$$ machine, GTX580 GPU, win 7, 64bit setup that has been great since version 9. More than meets the requirements.

Definite 1
When applying any of the standard text media generators, the application crashes much more fequently.

Definite 2
I typically render to wmv, but have switched to mp4. If you have more than one resolution media in the timeline, I have significant render problems. If all the source media is the same resolution, it seems to go okay (only an occasional crash). At this point, I have reduced my standards to an occassional crash as ‘okay’. 🙂

Definite 3
Any 60p video unwittingly included in the timeline is a show stopper for sure during render, no matter what I do. Few players can handle 60p media, so I have not tried the 60p render template with 60p source media. (There is a specific button on our camera that activates 60p mode. Users not in the know can accidently activate it and not realize it. Until there is a fix, this source media is useless to me now or go back to 9)

Definite 4
Turning GPU accelleration on or off makes little to no difference in render times or crash frequency. What does make a huge difference for me is having a preview window still open when you start a render. If you have it set to good/best-full render times are double versus off altogether or set to draft-auto. CPU/GPU usage seems to be split with different settings, but total render time is not shortened for me.

Overall, unless the bugs are worked out, I feel as though I wasted the $150 for the upgrade. Version 9 did just what I needed it do, and I never remember a crash – even when leaving the application open for weeks at a time working on a project.

– an empathetic response, Ken.