What's the Verdict on Vegas 9 ?
 

Currently using Vegas 8 Pro. Is it worth upgrading to V9 at this time? What does it do that V-8 doesn't ? (yes I know it has the 2nd monitor, but I can live without that).
I am thinking of waiting for V10, unless some one can tell me that there is a great performace boost or feature set in V9 that I am unaware of. I tried doing a search, but got almost every thread with V9 in it, so Thanks in advance for your helpful opinions - PK

Vegas 8 has the "second monitor" as you put it. It's the TRIMMER. It's just docked differently in 9 by default than it is in 8. In fact, 8.0c added many of the new trimmer features now found in 9.

You could look over my April 09 newsletter which lists the major new features. Then you can make a better informed decision as to whether or not to upgrade.

Has anyone figured a solution for the decreased preview window frame rate in V9? I've disabled the automatic quality setting in V9 and that has made a little bit difference but my playback frame rate is still only 50% of the playback performance of version 8, for the exact same project. By anyone's definition, that is unusable..

Thanks Bill! I'll try that out tonight!

Thanks Edward, I'll check that out this evening.

On a different note; I am having problems with DVDA. My AC3 audio sounds fine when played in VLC media player. It was encoded with V8, as was the Mpeg-2 Video using the BluRay Mpeg-2 encoding preset. The problem is, that in DVDA, almost all of the sound is in the right audio channel. If you look in the timeline you can even see the volume bars in the left channel are diminutive by comparison. What is causing this? How do you correct it? I can't seem to find anyway to adjust channel volume in DVDA. I should add, that the .ac3 audio is in 5.1 surround format. Thanks for any info - PK

Nice find!
Thanks

Thanks Bill! that fixed my playback issue. I also found this page which seems to address the same issue but with a different resolution. Weird... http://www.custcenter.com/cgi-bin/so...ted=1242423710


Now rendering to Sony AVC and see if it crashes like it always does in Vegas 8c...

A big issue for me is the lack of Frameserver compatibility in Vegas9. I relied heavily on that in Vegas 8 and am very disappointed that I can no longer use it. Why this functionality isn't built in to Vegas to begin with is beyond me... Anyway, I'm still hoping for a solution to come along.

Be patient for a bit longer.
It was reported on the Sony Vegas Pro forum (May 30 of this year to be precise) that Satish is currently working on the Vegas 9 Frameserver.

I'd somehow missed that, I hope it's true! There's no mention on the DebugMode home page that I could see. Really it can't come soon enough as it's making my work-flow significantly less streamlined without Frameserving. If I were Sony I'd buy the code from Satish and implement this from within Vegas. Does Sony have a suggestion box? ; )

I've downloaded and have been using the trial of Vegas Pro 9 for about a week now. I've been doing a bit of playing getting to know it (previously using FCP on another machine) to see if I like it. However I'm having problems with it crashing fairly regularly, often when I hit Ctrl+Z to undo. Has anyone had any problems with this in the full version? My laptop is well within the recommended specs so I don't think that is the problem.

Thanks in advance
John

For me, Vegas 9 is terrible, bad, crappy.

I've found it's timeline performance is the worst I've seen. I just installed Windows 7. Initially Vegas 9 64 bit Vegas 9 ran a bit better than it did on Vista, but 32 bit is bad.

Others say it works fine for them. I run a i7 processor, lots of ram, and the only program I have that gives me issues is Vegas 9.

Adobe Master Collection runs perfectly, and that says a lot about the state of my PC, as that collection of programs can be pretty buggy.

There are a number of compelling features that make it a "must buy" for me. Several things I opined about on the Sony Pro forums got included including DPX and OpenEXR, REDCode compatibility, and XDCAMEX native compatibility.

I'll live with the growing pains for a while.

It's still missing some critical items (especially for broadcast work) but is really shaking off it's also-ran status to play near the front of the pack. I just wish Sony and Avid could bury the hatchet on the MXF format and read each others formats. That would make me VERY happy and keep me from jumping through dumb hoops every time I wanted to share something with the local TV stations.

Timeline performance? What's that?

Certainly, it can't be the UI of the timeline.

Adobe apps are famous for being obtuse. But oh, when you finally get used to them you get to enter the priesthood - and you must cling to your obtuse app like a unix programmer to emacs, lest someone pull aside the curtain and find out it's just another NLE, abeit with a crotchedy UI.

Adobe bombs out all the time. Vista's got it's problems, but it don't take no Data Execution Protection lip from anybody, and Adobe's no exception.

I'm getting ready to try Win 7 myself.

NO!!!

Vegas 9 just sits on my computer. I am using Vegas 8. So far Vegas 9 was a 100% waste of money!!!

Danny Fye
VidMus Video - Music Productions

Hmmm. Pity I can't find a copy of Vegas 8 still on sale anywhere. Just heard yesterday from a friend that colleague of his is looking to sell an older version of Vegas so I will have to contact him and see if it is version 8.

Same here...using 8.0c and waiting for an update to 9.0....

I would love to sell mine, but I don't use Vegas 9 at all either; like Bob I'm waiting for 9.0a.

In my case, I've been using 9 for months! It does what it's supposed to do. Plus the 64-but version is MUCH better than 8.1.

Loaded Win 7 yesterday. Noticeable performance improvement so far.

Project loading snappier. Moving thru transitions which normally bog smoother.

Not bad so far.

I was apprehensive about updating from Vegas 8.0 Pro to 9.0 after all the negativity Ive read here.. but i jumped in and to be honest its fine.

All but one of the presets for the rendering migrated over. Thats been the only problem, and it took a couple of minutes, literally, to fix.

Ben

I've hit a few bugs in 9.0 that I've reported and that will be fixed in 9.0a, but overall, I use 9.0 all the time now and it's working well for me with XDCAM SD and HD.

The only thing that really disrupts my workflow is not having Satish's frameserver working with it yet, I hope he fixes that soon.

And there is one bug I can't really report cause I can't explain how to trigger it... There seems to be some sort of memory or resource leak or something... Basically, sometimes after editing for a while, my playback rate will slow to half what it should be based on what I know my computer can do. When this happens, I have to save what I'm doing, shut down Vegas, reboot the computer and relaunch it and reload my project. At that point, everything that should be playing back at full framerate will. This same problem actually causes it to not be able to temp render to AVI on disk, it'll lockup when trying. And the RAM temp render was playing much slower than normal, too.

I'm gonna try that new aviplug.dll mentioned earlier in this thread and see if that helps.

Being that I am still on a 32 bit system I cannot realize the advantages of 64 bit just yet.

Once Windows 7 is officially released and I build me a new system with the latest and greatest goodies then maybe Vegas 9 64 bit version will shine through for me?

For the time being it will have to be Vegas 8 and my current 32 bit system.

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I can forget about that so-called special price on the Windows 7 upgrade because and from what I read that won't happen from Windows XP Pro OEM! If I had the non OEM version it would still be a problem because I would have to go to Vista first and tests have shown that Micro$oft is full of it when it comes to their claim that it works. At least on older systems. Even so, why the 2 step non-sense when it should be a 1 step? Sorry about the off-topic but it relates to what I can do in the future with Vegas.
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I noticed that my favorite settings for my layouts are not in Vegas 9. How do I get them there?

Such things should be more automatic with the upgrades!

Danny Fye
VidMus Video - Music Productions

Just purchased Vegas 9 with the free New blue pak, completed my newest project without issue, sold my Vegas 8 to a co-worker, only complaint thus far is the runup time in the preview window during multicamera editing, should be fixed in the next update, Vegas 9 is a keeper for me....

Tried it again...
Because Ed said it should work and because I installed the new .dll to solve the playback issue.

9.0 64bit will not work with my neoscene transcoded clips. I only get audio, no video on the timeline.

9.0 32bit does appear to work with the neoscene clips, but it constantly crashes before I can do anything with them.

So...back to 8.0c until 9.0a comes out.

I gave up on Cineform ages ago. Too many issues and too many limitations. Now I cut proxies or I used DNxHD if I need full HD.

Looks like I spoke too soon about Vegas 9.. I was all clamoring in another thread the ability of rendering to Sony AVC without crashing... well my Vegas 9 just froze up while rendering..(I had to do a hard reset on my PC) same as v8c, and on the same project which I had previous rendered without any issues.. man I hate this thing! I have no confidence whatsoever in them.. Don't tell me they'll fix it in version a.. if version "C" of 8 had the same issue what makes us think version "a" of 9 will contain the fix?

Yang, what is Sony AVC and what is it used for? Never mind, I googled it. Its basically a format for blu ray discs, is that correct?

Ah well, I tried the new dll to see if it would help me with another problem I've been having, Vegas Pro 9 crashing when rendering to AVI when it changes from normal render to no recompression parts. Unfortunately, the new dll didn't help me. SCS did say they have some issues with AVI no recompress rendering that they are working on from a recent bug report I put in.

So now I'm rendering out a long project in Vegas Pro 9 in pieces and putting it together in Vegas Pro 8.

It's an H.264 codec that you can render to from Vegas.. You'd use it for Bluray authoring or for posting HD content to Vimeo or YouTube..

When I rendered my full 4 minute project, the progress bar was stuck at 8% but the remaining time kept decreasing - A well known bug in Vegas 8. I haven't experienced this in version 9 until tonight.. sigh..

EDIT: looks like I found a post which might help with the Sony AVC crashes.. http://www.avforums.com/forums/camco...vc-format.html

Eugene: Sorry to hear your workaround.. your story is making me sick.. I hope I don't have to go to that length when I edit my first long form project in version 9... :(

Yes, I would bet that lowering your number of threads to 1 or 2 would help immediately. There are lots of suggestions that would appear to work actually.

Well first of all, I'm not convinced that lowering the threads will help..(due to past experiences with version 8) Second of all, why do we still have the attitude of accepting the fact that version 9 can not utilize 4 or more cores? I mean it's 2009... most users who are editing HD videos have multi core systems.. since Vegas is allowing us to set multiple cores, it should simply work! We're not expecting Vegas to support leading-edge technology, just mainstream technology that is current to its time.

Edit: I should add that I'm very happy with everything else about Vegas.. it's just the horrible Rendering component that is dragging the entire application down. Version 8 has been horrible for rendering and so far looks like version 9 is about the same..

You don't have to try it Wen. It's an idea for a workaround. If you are like me with lots of work to do you do what you can to get the job done.

That Vegas should work as it is, that is quite obvious.

Lowering the number of threads takes approximately 10 seconds to try. It costs nothing.

Wow.

I just discovered Windows 7 shows m2t files as thumbnails. Nice surprise.

I also just tried editing m2t files in Ultimate S Quad Cam and it seems to act the same as SD on the timeline...seems to be fine. This is a nice development...it would be nice to not have to make proxies. We'll see as this progresses.

No what I was say is that I've tried it in version 8 for when I had strange rendering crashes and that never solved the problem for it... It was a constant battle.. multiple attempts until it gets rendered without any crashes...

You using 7 RC? I was thinking of installing that but didn't want to deal with the reformatting since RC doesn't have an upgrade or uninstall feature.. I placed a pre-order for $50.. nice and cheap!

Yes I'm using the RC and it is awesome. I quoted an Hewlett Packard Tech chief earlier who praised it and I am seeing more and more why he did. It is so much more responsive.

It is a no-no to run the Aero theme in Vista because of the resources it hogs, at least I found it to cause intermittent issues, but with Windows 7 I'm running Aero with a desktop background slideshow that changes images (cool images by the way) every so often, and I've burnt DVDs while rendering another project on the same PC at the same time (another no-no) and the DVDs came out perfect. In other words I'm pushing it beyond reasonable limits and it is performing like a champ. For it to burn good DVDs while rendering HD to SD is pretty darn cool. I will not do that routinely, as I was just testing it, but still I'm impressed.

The only issue I've had is that every time I boot up the internet connection is dead, and I switch ports and it is fine. Strange, but I'm loving it so much I don't care.

Just the fact that it plays m2t files in windows media player natively and shows them as thumbnails is big to me.

This is a common misconception on Win 7. It does have an upgrade, and it can do a clean install too without a reformat.

As for an unistall - no. I don't think there's ever been such a capability. I made a backup first.

Incorrect - You can ONLY do a clean install of the release version of Win 7. In other words, there is no ability to upgrade from RC. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/faq.aspx

Photoshop, After Effects, Flash are industry standard applications and every version I've used over the years have been flawless in the sense that they have always been stable enough for me as a user to concentrate on the creative aspect of the work as oppose to always be mindful about the technical working of the application. "Oh if I do this, will it crash? Maybe I should save now before I do this because it usually crashes right about here...". The best rendering bug in Vegas is when the progress indicator bar freezes at different and random points everytime you attempt to re-render. If you get lucky, you might be able to render the entire segment without it freezing up :) You can hardly put Sony Creative Studio in the same category as Adobe..

Try this in Vegas 9.. undo 2 or 3 times consecutively which involves shifting around video events... that always results in a forever frozen app, which requires a kill from the Task Manager.. Pretty ridiculous IMO.