[Jeremiah Brown]

I started using Vegas at version 5. Version 6 and 7 were really really solid and I used to think Vegas was way ahead (and I still think it was then). With 8 it started with having to wait for updates in hope for stability. Now, at version 11, I’ve had it! Since Sony has been sticking to their “nested projects” baloney, I delved into Premiere and as rigid as it feels, it hasn’t once crashed on me and GPU acceleration with my 460 is really excellent and lives up to the promises it came with.
Vegas 11 is now at the third update of this release and the first “workaround” you read about when trying to find out what all this crashing is about, is “turn off GPU acceleration”. Cut it out, please! That fixed the crashing with color correction and other fx sliders, but it’s still crashing on a bunch of other occasions.
It’s running on two different machines here, and while the crashing behavior seems to be not quite the same, the extent pretty much is.
We’re not even going into functionality or things that just don’t work (any longer: deinterlace in preview, anyone?).
This is the last project with considerable complexity that I’ll finish with Vegas. Then I’ll pass up a couple of rounds until they get their act together, if they ever will. It’s simply no fun anymore and doesn’t point to the future no how either.

And never forget: “Press escape to exit fullscreen” – you might just see something else. (How ridiculous to show that every time. Give us some playback controls in fullscreen mode instead, to start with some innovation!)

I am sorry, I’m usually not such a grumpy bastard, it’s just that working with this software has lately cost me a lot of nerve, another crash happened, and I just had to do something else, winding up here.

peace and have a good day y’all!

[Jeremiah Brown]

Another thing I forgot to mention: If you moved files around, like copied the project to another disc – great fun if you have nested projects! You will have to open every individual nested project to show Vegas around where the files are now. On opening the master project Vegas will only tell you that there are nested projects with offline media. A real treat.

I recently bought a license for Vegasaur, which helps a great deal with nesting, too, as you can make a selection and have it exported as and replaced with a nested project. Still, you have these humongous audio proxy files, that have to be rebuilt every time you change something in a nested project. And all this to and fro between the projects.

Coming from Vegas, Premiere fells painfully rigid, yet it is a different kind of film making with multiple sequences available in one project environment, and decent media management, too. Not to forget being able to monitor all adjacent frames while trimming.
And it’s really stable and has great performance now, which I can’t say about Vegas any more (since version 10, and version 7 being the last really really stable release), which occasionally just disappears without even saying goodbye.

I guess you don’t feel this so much if you do a lot of shorter projects, rendering here while you capture there and look at some other stuff in another instance. But if one complex project is your major business, it’s just really a different environvent.

Anyway, happy editing to every one! -J.B.

[Jeremiah Brown]

I forgot to mention: When I had set Dynamic RAM Preview to significant amounts, at render start Vegas would go really fast using all the CPU power until it filled up all the dedicated RAM (like 2, 4, 7 GB)and then drop CPU usage to 20 and some, while it keep holding on to the RAM it seized. And Vegas didn’t even let go of the RAM after project termination. What gives?
Now that I set Dynamic RAM to 1, I am right now rendering a 1hr video sequence with three video filters active in 23 minutes at 97-100% CPU and 1,95 GB Memory usage constantly.

The term Dynamic RAM Preview to me suggests that this is solely about the timeline preview. But then the RAM amount assigned here is filled up during the render process, so here’s clearly an interaction between the switch and the render process.

Pray please, how is one supposed to figure this out when the terminology is so misleading?

[Jeremiah Brown]

I was going insane: a new machine i7 2600K 8GB RAM SSD SATA III . . . and MPEG-2 encoding was humming along at 20-25% cpu usage, taking 1hr20 for 1hr’s worth of video to encode! I read all these things “it only works with certain codecs”, bottlenecks lurking everywhere, disabled the pagefile, rendered to different drives etc etc.
It was the Dynamic RAM Preview amount of RAM assigned. I’d set it way up, I’d set it to the middle – didn’t do anything, I turned it off, that was even worse, like 18%, but it showed that it did SOMETHING.
So I went from 2048 over 1024, 512…16…8..4..2..1: I saw 95-100% finally! Now the video took 20 minutes to encode, and me is happy as a lark about the purchase. This is what I bought it for: save time and do things I could never do before.

Please, someone report back if it worked for them, too.

I would like to hear why something like Dynamic RAM Preview would do anything at all with the render/encoding process.

regards

[Jeremiah Brown]

I am absolutely with Dan Rapaport!
Lack of sequences is THEE Major drawback in Vegas with a capital M.
Nested projects is absolutely no substitute for and not on par with sequences.
It’s the reason why I would never consider Vegas for a longer, complex project, much as I love it for short productions, and even there I often miss the option.
The model of sequences is non-intrusive to the workflow. If I have five sequences and a master sequence, I can just look at them all and switch and drag&drop between them with the click of a tab. I don’t have to have multiple instances of the program opened. And.. I don’t have to wait for Audio Proxies to be built, that take up a lot of disc space to boot.
I have one project file that I work with, and all the sequences and the respective assets are organized in this one window. I don’t have to care about organization any more than necessary. It’s tidy.
That’s why Avid, Premiere, Final Cut etc. use this concept, and not because they can’t do it like Vegas does.
I wish they’d own up to the inferiority of the concept of nesting and give up on it.
Greetings all,
J.

[Jeremiah Brown]

How to enable ac3 Pro in Vegas:

copy the “ac3plug” folder from DVD Architect’s “FileIO Plug-Ins” folder and use it to overwrite the one of Vegas in its folder of the same name.

This is what worked for me. Looking at how long it took me to find s solution for this, I care to share.

[Jeremiah Brown]

“Technically, that bit you quote from the manual doesn’t claim to trim the media without re-encoding. It says it will trim the media.”

But it won’t. If it’s a DVD compliant mpeg it will do no such thing as splitting the file and re-encode. All you get is an error message.
And here’s where I would put my Period, because that’s what the post was about. The manual doesn’t state that the option is not available for correctly prepared DVD media as mpg and ac3, which is a major confinement and hence important to mention in order to not let users run into this dead end. When a feature implies that a certain route for your work is possible, then prerequisites and limitations need to be stated.

jeremy

[Jeremiah Brown]

Well, for better clarification, I reckon the fact with the matter is that the feature only works with source files that DVDA will (re-)encode anyways. When you put in your AVI file, then the “Disc Space Used” calculator does something (using the encoding specs you put in the preferences). – This is what should be pointed out in the manual, but is not, since how many releases now?
With mpeg files that wouldn’t need re-encoding by their specs, you simply get a message that the file is too large to fit on the media.
How lame is all that?

[Jeremiah Brown]

For the description in the DVDA manual about “Set in and out points” it reads:

“If you don’t want to burn the complete media file to your disc, you can use the Timeline window to set new in and out points to trim your media.”

My own experience and everything that reads on this page goes to show that Sony is advertising a feature that is non-existent as described. This remains a fact until someone reports to have successfully used the feature as described.

Technically is it not necessary to re-encode if you want to split an mpeg file. Many programs available does this and write new headers for the parts, many of them freeware, no big trick.
I relied on the above statement and authored a 2-DVD project with a single mpeg file.
Without third party tools I would have to go back and re-encode more than two hours’ worth of video. And I need to be careful to keep the markers in the projects for chapters, because later on DVDA will probably not import any markers from the new mpegs.

Regards

[Jeremiah Brown]

I think it really is Vegas 8 being the problem. Same project with Vegas 7 ran smoothly, no problem having a preview of HD material at “best full”. Now I have to go down to “good half” to get smooth playback for DV, with no effects at all! And it is really unresponsive, a total slug. Also had to un- and reinstall a few times, because the program hung at start up at initializing audio and scipting. This is 8.c on xp sp3. I remember trying the first release of 8 and my impression was the same. So I waited until this release, but it’s really a huge disappointment to find that my favorite vehicle now runs at only half speed in the new version.