[David Shirey]

Glad that updates are being worked on. A shame it was posted here one day after the last sale upgrade price expired. Guess I’ll wait until the next sale and install a new trial on a different computer to see if any of my issues are fixed. I assume there are measures in place to prevent me running a week long trial again on the same computer?

[David Shirey]

Unfortunately the age of clients getting scratches and fingerprints on their discs won’t be made any easier as we move to clients playing videos on their virus-infested decade-old $500 Dell PC’s and complaining about playback being skippy. When possible try to push USB sticks as a delivery medium. As more people get SmartTV’s and other playback devices, it’s hard to mess up the ease of use and quality of sticking something in the side of a TV and hitting play. These devices nowadays have so many features people don’t even use. Friends and family are always impressed when I have photos/videos on my phone of them and pull up Miracast on their own tv’s or blu-ray players to show it at gatherings.

Caveat to usb sticks: For maximum compatibility you want to keep the drive’s FAT32 format, which means you’re bound to a 4gb file limit. Longer videos might want to be broken up into two parts so you don’t have to lower the bitrate.

[David Shirey]

Since we’re on the topic, this is as good a place as any to to bring up “the cloud”. These days people are becoming way too reliant on the internet, and there’s this erroneous assumption that if someone sends you a link that it’ll just exist there until the end of time, as though the internet weren’t constantly in flux and everything were free. One of the things I like about wetransfer is that the e-mail it sends tells you hey, this link is good for one month and expires on this day. Get your media you paid for, back it up on your own devices, and take ownership of it. If you’re in the business of hosting clients’ videos and charging an annual fee that’s great, and we can use iplayerhd.com for that if clients so desire, but that all needs to be worked out with clients so that no one assumes anything.

On the other hand we don’t charge clients anything to retain videos here at the office, so when people call up and have lost all their DVD’s from 2008, we just pop in the hard drive and shoot them an mp4 file and they’re very pleased. Especially since now they have something in HD they previously only had in standard definition. For the record we do make blu-rays too but despite our best efforts educating clients we still get people who want HD then call up because their blu-rays are broken and won’t play on their DVD player 😛

[David Shirey]

I think the era of receiving more money based on the number of DVD copies you sell is coming to a close. We make sure we get paid an appropriate amount for the work we do to create a final product. Once that product is delivered we want our clients to share it with as many people as they like. If they like our work the word of mouth only helps us.

As for delivery medium I’m a big fan of wetransfer.com No one needs to sign up for an login, it’s just a simple download link. The free service does 2gb, but if you pay for the plus service you get a landing page at whateveryouwant.wetransfer.com with your own custom backgrounds, and the ability to not only send up to 20gb, but clients can send you up to 20gb too, which comes in handy for us. It’s just unrealistic these days to expect clients to understand ftp sites and wetransfer makes things easy. Their mobile app could use some work but mobile is a whole other ballgame since iphones won’t even let you download files.

[David Shirey]

I’ve been using Vegas since version 4. The office I’ve worked at for 20 years used to be Media 100, then made the switch to Final Cut Pro. We got tired of paying a lot for Macs and having to use them for 5 years to get our money’s worth, so I orchestrated switching the whole office to PC’s I built, and moved the other editors to Premiere since it was a pretty similar feel to Final Cut, with myself being the only Vegas user. It hasn’t affected my output one bit.

That being said I’ve had my share of technical problems with Vegas over the years, but so have the Premiere guys. Like others here have said, it’s the artist, not the tools. If you’re producing your best work in the most efficient manner with Vegas then keep using it. If one client needs you to use Premiere because they may one day need to open the project and make changes, you can either do what the client wants or move on to the next project. I guess the one upside to Adobe’s subscription model is that if you only need to do one project you can just rent the software for a month and ditch it.

[David Shirey]

I would download the trial and play with it for a week on your system. If it doesn’t crash like crazy and you have a use for the new features it comes with like Mercalli then sure, it’s a fair price. If you’ve got Vegas 13 and it runs well, and the new features don’t interest you and/or 14 crashes often enough to make it functionally useless like it did for me, then no, don’t spend the $200.

[David Shirey]

I would have expected them to rush an update out before the promotional sale ends 10/16 to see if they can get people who tried the trial when it first came out to give it a second chance. I’d happily risk the investment if they could give me a build that could open old projects without immediately crashing.

[David Shirey]

[John Norton] “My laptop was down all day, windows update, freeze”

That update freeze is getting pretty annoying, and the workarounds are about as inconvenient as the problem itself. I believe October is when MS is switching to monthly cumulative updates, so we’ll no longer be allowed to decide which updates we can and can’t install, it’s all or nothing. Hopefully they at least fix the update problem with this though.

[David Shirey]

[Peter Holt] “Anyway I have multiple options here. Probably the best is to investigate using Handbrake to merge the 4GB chunks with the minimum loss.”

I guess so but it seems like the best option would be to try Sony’s official software that John and I linked to. You know it’s designed specifically for that camera so it ought to do what you’re seeking. Is transferring huge video files over wifi very efficient? I have to say I’ve never tried it, but if the gel in the waterproof housing really “wastes” away through usage you should probably be leaving negative reviews for this thing all over the internet, as that’s a glaring flaw in an action camera. I’d always prefer to connect via usb or eject a memory card and put it in my own usb 3.0 card reader.

[David Shirey]

You might want to try Sony’s software specifically for that camera. I found them here: https://esupport.sony.com/US/p/model-home.pl?mdl=FDRX1000V&template_id=1&region_id=1&tab=download#/downloadTab

I’ve never had the problem you’re having though. You say you speed up the footage to 300% and shorten the clip to 1/3 the length so it ends at the same point the footage originally ended, then butt it up against the next clip, and there’s some sort of gap in the action? Is there a glitch in the action at real-time speed, or it’s creating a glitch only when you triple the speed? If so does it create it at double the speed, or just triple?