[Asbjorn Grandt]

That reminds me of an old (funny) ‘Work Rules’ poster I once saw in Cape Town.
Especially rule 3 and 4 seem to relate to your post.

[Asbjorn Grandt]

It would certainly make the Lower thirds tool more useful. Especially if the user defined templates can be organised in at least one level of sub directories.
The tool could then display them in the drop down as for instance
[News] Large
[News] Main
[News] Small
[Sports] Basketball
[Sports] Football
[Sports] Generic
[Sports] Rugby

If the concern is competition with the GrafPak’s on VASST, you could limit the initial ‘slots’ to for instance the same amount that are in a GrafPak (12?), and we could then buy empty GrafPak’s for more ‘slots’ if we need them. The tool would then scan the user templates, and just add the first 12, or whatever we can use, to the tool, ignoring the rest.

Best Regards
A.Grandt

[Asbjorn Grandt]

Didn’t you get the serial by mail when you first ordered Vegas 9?

The Email would have the subject line :
Sony Creative Software Order Confirmation 0000000-0000

of course the last 0’s would be your order number.

[Asbjorn Grandt]

When creating the test tones in for instance Sound Forge (or any other editor for that matter) what dB levels would you use ?

-8 dB seems like a sensible choice, as that would allow the +8 dB peak above reference (the test tone ?) that some apparently specify as the max.
Or am I getting this completely wrong?

Yes, I’m new at this 🙂

Best regards
A.Grandt

[Asbjorn Grandt]

I don’t know 64bit vista, but have you tried the newer Vegas Pro 8.1 which is designed for 64bit Vista?

As you have the Pro 8, what is the Pixel Format in your Project Properties?
If your input source is AVC as well, you might want to recode that to an intermediate formate, like CineForm.

This is merely speculation on my part, but so far I see decreased stability when the Pixel Format is set to 32-bit, especially on HD material. Also when the input format is AVC.

[Asbjorn Grandt]

That actually answer my question somewhat, if you are using Vegas Studio, you are using 6-bit pixel format.

Another error scenario I’ve seen is with AVC to AVC encoding. Using an intermediary format tends to add a bit of stability.

Overall, I’m happy with Vegas Pro 8, however the instability and intermittent crashes are an annoyance that I hope Sony are taking seriously for future updates.

[Asbjorn Grandt]

Sorry, I should have been more specific. It’s only an option on Vegas Pro 8.

In the Project Properties blow the Frame Rate, you have the option Pixel Format, where you can choose between 8-bit and 32-bit floating point.
The 8-bit is the one used in older versions of Vegas Pro, as well as the Studio versions. The 32-bit is supposed to give better colour resolution (less banding among other things), however it is far slower, more crash prone, and some plug-ins don’t like it very much.

[Asbjorn Grandt]

Are there a difference between using Pixel format “8-bit” or “32-bit floating point” in Project properties ?

At least on my XP, the 32-bit setting is virtually Crash-guaranteed, where as the 8-bit seems to be very solid.