After well over a decade of being a staunch defender of Vegas I'm very close to the end of the road now and have started looking at alternatives.

Functionality - fantastic.
Ease of use - fantastic.
Flexibility - fantastic.

Stability - dire, and getting worse, for me, anyway.

I had hoped that swapping out my graphic card and doing a clean install would solve my constant crashing issues but sadly that's not the case. Vegas 13 is crashing now on dead simple three track video/dialogue/music projects, without any added fx. If I can't trust it to do that how can I trust it to be stable on my usual complex projects with numerous tracks of different format source media, 3d, fx, titles, keyframes, envelopes etc etc?

Even with gpu acceleration turned off I can guarantee I'll experience numerous crashes - but even the oft-cited suggestion to turn acceleration off kinda gets me angry when it's a function I have bought and paid for and expect to work.

I'm happy for the many people who are enjoying a crash-free existence with Vegas - but I suspect that those people are creating somewhat less complicated projects. I can forgive the slightly new-feature-light release of 13 as the bundled add-ons (SFP11 and HitFilm) are useful to me, but I'm so disappointed that the stability issues haven't been resolved, at least for me . . .

I'll see what happens with the next couple of point releases and if theres no improvement I'll almost certainly be taking advantage of another part of my Adobe CC subscription . . . albeit with much sadness.

Edit: . . . and now I discover Boris BCC8 doesn't work with Vegas Pro 13 and you have no choice but to upgrade to BCC9 which is not available until June. A cynic might suggest that's an underhand move on Boris's part . . .

Very sorry to hear of your issues Ian. I would be devastated to have to leave Vegas, I just don't want to go anywhere else.

I can only speak for me, but I would swap out my MOBO and processor before I would switch NLEs.

Did you install Vegas on a new instance of Windows and install nothing but the bare necessities before trying Vegas?

Crashes for me are rare, they happen during CC or very fast editing when I add a quick succession of fancy transitions. I have learned to save often when I do those things and so far I've been lucky.

I edit mostly 3-4 cam weddings 1080i with maybe three lines of extra audio, that's as complicated as I get usually.

You're a good friend to many of us here and I for one really hope you can find the issue that will be the fix to get you stable.

It is very disappointing to hear about Boris.

i agree with geff...

ian, i think there's something seriously amiss with your installation, be it os, software, or even hardware.

i'm not one for keeping quiet about my opinion of vegas, and have at times thrown my hands up in utter despair and even moved to ppro, but found nothing matches the fluidity of vegas.

again, before you jump ship i suggest you try a simple, clean install. ie. image your system, then simply install os and vegas and see what happens. if all else fails you can simply restore image.

btw. have you tested ram?

Leslie, I suspect Ian is extremely well versed in PC things, so I feel the issue is either a software conflict or it just doesn't like his hardware. My thinking is if he installs nothing but Vegas to a clean install of Windows, and the necessary things he edits with, it might help eliminate narrow things down.

If that doesn't do it, then a plugin or something he is editing with is creating an issue (Boris, etc.) or his hardware configuration is just not liked by Vegas.

I absolutely feel very lucky, because I know that when an expert in Vegas such as Ian is having these kind of problems it it only by pure luck I am relatively stable. This whole thing is absolutely maddening to read about and I just wish Sony could figure out what is happening.

I actually have sympathy for anyone that has to design software to run on a zillion PC configurations. It is why Macs are relatively stable, because the software design issue is much simpler with the limited # of configurations normally found on Apple machines.

very true, and i have no doubt ian knows infinitely more than i do about pc and especially vegas - i've followed some of his tuts...

meanwhile, i'm still annoyed that scs hasn't done a single thing regarding their appalling implementation of gpu functions. you would have thought that the noise generated on the various forums would have made them put some energy into sorting it out rather than i'gimmicking and playing around with the gui...

so far 13, though not pushed heavily, is proving pretty stable. that said, i do have ALL gpu functions turned off - i really don't have time for half-assed coding that has me trying to figure out what scs should have figured out 2 releases ago...

and people still ask me why I'm still using Version 10 ? I have to wonder if new versions are maybe rushed out by their marketing department to make bundles of money as soon as possible when the software itself hasn't really been tested and de-bugged correctly ?

When I see multiple posts following the new version releases of all the tears and frustration that people who have upgraded to the "latest and greatest" I remind myself that I might not have all the latest features but I know I can drag all my clips onto the timeline and edit and render without any issue. Hence the reluctance to upgrade. Maybe I'm just a coward but for me time is money and I cannot really afford to contend with multiple crashes on a new version when clients are waiting for their videos.

Chris

i doubt you are alone in your thinking.

i upped to 13 because of a 'render as' problem. i could probably have gone back to 11, but hey, $150 in the scheme of things isn't a lot....

so far, apart from a mild heart attack when a couple of scripts wouldn't run (see thread over at scs) 13 seems to be ok. i haven't pushed it very much (then again, in the scheme of things i don't really do that much pushing - most of my stuff is more along the lines of long / short form doco rather than multicam or heavy fx).

as i wrote i'm certainly not happy about the state of gpu, but i'll give this release a chance to sort it out. if not, i can't see what scs can do to make me continue buying 'unfinished' software...

Vegas 13 is crashing now on dead simple three track video/dialogue/music projects, without any added fx.. . .

Once the frustration fades away I guess you would agree that it is very unlikely that this is a generic problem - Vegas really is quite capable of editing a dead simple three track project without crashing.

So the question is how to go about solving the problem. One way is to keep your hardware platform and throw some new software (Adobe CC?) at it. But that is more $$$, more time, and potentially a whole new set of issues.

Personally, before I went down that route I would try borrowing/renting a different hardware system, if only to convince yourself that the software can work reliably and maybe give you some insight into where the problem lies. Compared to your time, hardware is cheap!


Good luck!

Ian - I agree you may want to troubleshoot a bit further before jumping ship. I've had crashing episodes with Vegas myself over the years and while sometimes never completely resolved, I found a way to work around the issues (i.e if it does that when you do this - then don't do that). One thing I have found to work going back to release 10 ( I'm on 12 now) is to keep your dynamic RAM preview setting as low as possible. I have plenty of RAM on my machine so I don't know why this would matter but it just does. So I keep it at about 2000 while I'm cutting and then when I get to adding effects or color correction (when I'm most apt to get a crash) I drop it to zero. Give that a try

Art

Thanks everyone for the messages of support! Nice to feel wanted :-)

Yes, I did indeed post in a moment of frustration, although it's frustration that's built over several years of experiencing a distinct lack of stability in Vegas. I will, of course, give Vegas another chance - I've invested waaaay too much time and money into it over the years. However, this is not an endless font of patience as I have to run what has become a very busy business and I just can't afford to keep losing time to constant crashes.

To respond to some of the observations you've made:

1. The three track project seems to have been (hopefully) a one-off. I didn't mean to suggest that it was happening all the time, and I realise my words might be construed as meaning it was a repeatable crash, which it wasn't. In fact I had been playing around with a much more complicated project in the same editing session. Additionally I had used, then removed, a bunch of effects in the simple project so while they weren't operating at the time of the crash they had been active in memory during that Vegas session. Thought I should clear that up. However, it DID crash - and that's wrong.

2. I will do a clean install from Windows up - when I have a spare day! I have just invested in a very high end laptop for a specific job where the client wants the project delivered same day and I will be installing Vegas 12 (and yes, possibly Vegas 10!!) and my other bits and pieces on that machine so I have something to work with while I rebuild the big box. I'd add that I did a completely new install when I added those SSDs at the end of last year and the problems persisted. I did, of course, also add all my other goodies as well. The pc that Vegas sits on is purely used for media creation - but it has much more than just Vegas on it. It's a custom built (not by me) Hexacore i7 980 cpu @ 3.33GHz, 24GB RAM, Windows 7/64, and it's a beast!

3. Jeff, I tend to think hardware conflict is where my problem lies - although as I mention below, the issue only presents itself in Vegas, so I am blaming Vegas ;-). I have now replaced the graphics card (for a lesser model - I went from 580 to 760) and I'm not conscious of any stability improvement. Next item of hardware to replace is the audio interface. I have been using a Roland V-Studio 100 which is fantastic for the audio work I do in Cakewalk Sonar, however, I have noticed that the device keeps going offline at odd moments and I wonder if this is causing an issue. I have ordered a Focusrite Scarlett 616 which is supposed to be very stable (and is still supported, unlike the V-Studio) and will try that out. I wonder sometimes if dual display is also introducing a crash risk.

4. I will test memory - good advice, thanks Leslie. I'm a bit skeptical though, as I simply do not experience crashes in other high end apps such as After Effects, Cinema4D - and dare I say Premiere! (although I've only been using it for very simple projects, just to get a feel for it). Having said that, I have been experiencing odd crashes in Cakewalk Sonar hence my thought about swapping out the audio interface.

5. "(Crashes) happen during CC or very fast editing when I add a quick succession of fancy transitions". Same here, and I also save work frequently. However I tend to work very fast and often get carried away and make three or four changes before remembering to save - and it's the crash that reminds me! Aside from which it just shouldn't be the case that you need to save every couple of keystrokes. I haven't reinstalled Excalibur yet but when I do I will revisit the autosave utility.

6. I've always tended to use the default RAM Preview and rendering threads settings (200/16). I've played around with these settings based on other people's advice in the past but haven't noticed a major difference in stability. I'll certainly try again. Thanks Art.

7. Mark, I already have a subscription to Adobe CC (for AE, Illustrator and PS primarily, but the other apps come with it). However, the idea of using an alternative system to see how I get on is very good advice. As I mentioned earlier, I've just bought a HUGE laptop and I will be trying out Vegas on that.

OK, my wife has now come home and is expecting dinner so I'd better end here before I get yelled at!

Thanks again for the advice, suggestions and encouragement. I certainly AM frustrated with Vegas in a way that I am not with any other high end app I use. And I certainly AM still looking at my options. However, I'm prepared to give it another go (or two) as I really, really don't want to go anywhere else. But like I said before, my patience is limited, and whether or not the issue is with my hardware or other software or is a generic Vegas defect, it is only when I am using Vegas that these repeatable crashes occur, so I am looking to Sony to solve the problem.

As a final note of intense frustration, here's a very basic bug that's been reported by many and not fixed in v13: Create a new project, add some media to it, file/save as, create new folder - CRRRRASH. Every single time.

Oh, and where are my 'paste selected attributes'?! ;-)

Ian, you mention something going offline at times. Are your PC power settings set to never turn off hard drive? That can and will cause a crash in Vegas. You probably already know about that setting but if you haven't double checked it please do. This is especially true on laptops but holds equally true for the default settings of any new windows install.

Similarly, long ago I occasionally edited from an external "green" drive that would stop rotating every so often while I edited and it caused long stalls or a crash. When I finally figured out the issue I got rid of the drive and all was well.

Hi Jeff,

Great thought about the disks. I can see a setting for putting the display to sleep and one for putting the pc to sleep, but can't see anything for just the hard drives (this is in Control Panel/Power Options). Both are set to 'never' in my case.

The device that randomly goes offline is the audio interface (VS100). Sometimes I hear the 'USB disconnect' sound, sometimes not.

You're in the right area, but find advanced options below where you were and you should find a lot more settings to choose from including USB and disc power settings.

Aha!

Well, well, well. I guess when I last reinstalled Windows I didn't adjust those default values beyond simply changing pc and display to 'never' and never thought to do so since! Disk was set to 20 mins and USB to suspend as well.

I will monitor closely now that those settings are set to what they should be!

Many thanks indeed Jeff. Even if it doesn't resolve the crashing issue it should hopefully resolve the annoying disappearing audio interface!

Fingers crossed . . . .

"As a final note of intense frustration, here's a very basic bug that's been reported by many and not fixed in v13: Create a new project, add some media to it, file/save as, create new folder - CRRRRASH. Every single time."

I tried this...again, and again. It doesn't crash. Wonder if this is a disk access problem as suggested above? (Disk drive "going to sleep" when Vegas tries to access to create new folder, but doesn't know how to wait.)


Sounds like you are maintaining a sense of humour - that's a good thing!

Mark, that was indeed my thought but I've managed to crash it again twice :-( It's certainly been reported by others as well. Interestingly, I just tried it on the laptop and it did NOT crash (Win 8.1). Oh, the joy of technology . . . .!

Any sufficiently complex program user can hang up performing certain operations. I've been able to try except Vegas Pro virtually all of the other modern PC-based broadcast video editing applications including CS6, CC, Edius and Avid MC, but none of them has proven to be as stable as the Vegas Pro.

This does seem to highlight how different environments offer different outcomes. My experience is exactly the opposite of this - the others are stable whereas Vegas is not. My experience is limited to Avid and Premiere (from CS up to CC) although, as I mentioned before, never for particularly complex projects. With After Effects and Cinema4D, however, I work on very complex jobs and I don't recall a single crash in C4D and perhaps three or four over ten years of using AE.

What is weird is that I've seen long rants and discussions on the instability of Adobe PP. Apparently it's been improved in the last few years. In Adobe forums, I remember reading how horrible it was and how utterly unstable it was. I remember cases of people jumping ship to come to use Vegas because of it's stability.

It really is a matter of the configuration and hardware combo, I believe, but there is no clear combo that works or doesn't work. Maybe Sony should scour the internet for a dozen of the most stubborn cases of crashes and then buy the PCs from the customers and then study the machines to find the issue.

there was a period a few years ago that i felt i was on a trampoline....

but at the end of the day there's nothing approaching vegas's utilitarianism.

Haven't read the whole thread yet. But here's my experience ...

Just like everyone else, all the way from Sony Vegas 9 up until 12 I have experienced problem after problem. But I still loved the program too much to switch. What I have discovered is SONY VEGAS is VERY VERY VERY sensitive when it comes to your PC settings.

The cure for me was to always monitor my RAM levels. Whenever it reaches 90% I close down Vegas and re-open the project. Ever since doing this I do not crash even ONCE. All the way from creating a long 1 hour wedding film right up to rendering.

Sony Vegas is THIRSTY for Ram.

I'm running a i7 3770k, 32GB Ram (not any specific brand), R9 270x graphics card, 256gb SSD.

My projects are always complex, with various opacity levels, multiple layers etc.

I'm running a i7 3770k, 32GB Ram (not any specific brand), R9 270x graphics card, 256gb SSD.

James, I'm in the process of putting together a new computer and the R9 card is one that I'm considering. Have you always had it or is it a recent addition? Have you seen a performance increase with it? Are you happy with it?

also interested in the r9 (hi there mike ;-))

please let us know your thoughts and experiences...

Saw this in the "new posts" listing, so read it and had to add to this. I have left Vegas after 12. Same issues as reading here in 13. I still have to go back and re-edit Vegas projects on occasion. I've frozen my windows Vegas machine to V12. There is no way I'll go to 13.I have to tell you all, that Adobe PR and CC have been like a breath of fresh air. Crashing is so infrequent, I never think much about saving. Though I have learned from Vegas experience enough that I always catch myself and do, before trying anything crazy with CC.

Something has gone terribly wrong with Vegas since they started using GPU. I agree that 10 was far more stable than what came after it.

But I wouldn't blame anyone for trying something other than CC. Adobe isn't perfect, but they have really spent a lot of time getting their stability issues down. It's not a fluid as working in Vegas, and I agree with Ian that for raw ease of editing Vegas had it down. But you can't always be experiencing crashes. Other competitors don't crash like that. I've moved from Vegas to Adobe Pr and then CC on Windows, then moved from Windows to iMac in the last year. I have had no issues of consequence.

I only post this to point out that this is not a Windows issues, it's Vegas. Sony needs to get some better regression testing and developers into the mix. If this was fixed, it would be a significantly powerful package.I experienced this crashing on multiple machines, all with vast amounts of RAM and video cards of the highest calibre and none of them experienced the same problems on Pr and CC. With the same footage no less.

To be clear, I shoot HD AVCHD, 5Dmkiii MOV, and 50 Mbps mxf files. Very little grading. Documentary style shooting. On Vegas have used Boris as my 3rd party fx. It crashes far far less than New Blue.

I wish you all luck with this. Did anyone talk to Vegas at NAB?

James, I'm in the process of putting together a new computer and the R9 card is one that I'm considering. Have you always had it or is it a recent addition? Have you seen a performance increase with it? Are you happy with it?

Yes, any plugin that works off GPU acceleration has been improved.

Leslie, wish me luck!!
After almost a year of trying to convince my boss that I needed something more powerful than the i3 that the college gives to all employees (good for word processing but that's about it), she sat down with me to review some projects. The machine was struggling to play back an HD MXF file in Draft mode so she finally got the message :)
I'm swamped with projects right now but did get the go ahead to price out a "beast" so fingers are crossed that whatever I get will fly instead of crawl.

be interested in reading what you end up with, and of course, why ;-)

Damn. I thought i'd jump into the upgrade to 13 (from 12) and i can't even get 13 to fire up for the first time. It crashes on startup and i can't get any further! Not even after reboot. DOH!

The cure for me was to always monitor my RAM levels. Whenever it reaches 90% I close down Vegas and re-open the project. Ever since doing this I do not crash even ONCE. All the way from creating a long 1 hour wedding film right up to rendering.

While rendering a test project, a Yellow triangle warning showed up in my task bar telling me that my memory is low and that Windows needs to shut down one of the programs to restore the ram. It was showing Vegas as being the one it will shut down, which it did.

I never saw that one before.

I had been doing a lot of heavy work between multiple apps so I doubt if Vegas itself caused the problem.

The good thing is that it warned me instead of just crashing. I very, very seldom get a crash anyway.

My experiences to date, which is all I can go on, are that most cases of Vegas being unstable can be greatly improved by a number of simple steps. Especially in HD editing systems where a lot of data is being handled. They are:

1. Go to System / Advanced System Settings / Advanced and under 'Performance' select Settings / Visual Effects and then select 'Custom' and only have two items checked. These two are my own personal choices based on legibility and they are 'Smooth Edges on Screen Fonts' and 'Use drop shadows for Icon Labels on the Desktop.

Your beautiful Windows box will now look very plain vanilla after this but the resources and CPU calls made for running all that beauty is totally wasteful and impacts on OS and program run efficiency. Your system will now have more resources for mission critical operations such as Vegas.

2. While in this dialogue box go to the 'Advanced' tab and select under the 'Adjust for best performance of:' and select 'Programs'.

The next step I found that assisted in Vegas becoming more stable, much more stable in fact, was to run it with a decent 4 drive Raid running only a SINGLE partition. The next step was:

3. Still in the Performance Options dialogue box go to 'Virtual Memory', select 'Change' and follow these Adobe recommended settings.

Set virtual memory paging default | Windows 7, Vista (http://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/global/set-virtual-memory-paging-default.html)

I know this is for Premiere but have found this works well for Vegas.

I have done this on a number of Win 7 Vegas systems I have built and configured for a government video department and all are proving to be very stable. These boxes have now gone through v10 through to v12 and are still going strong. The only one that gave me any inconsistent unexplained hangs or crashes was on an existing box based on a Gigabyte MOBO, can't recall which model though. Swapped out the MOBO for an Asus one like the others and it is now having no issues. Don't ask me why I wouldn't have a clue. I just know it sorted out what issues that system had. Touch wood so far so good!

Obviously this is based only my personal experiences. I'm no computer nerd or tech head, just a cameraman / editor who wanted solid systems for my business and for other people who asked me to build their Vegas systems. Most of what I have come up with came from really trying to get my head around stability issues. Much of my decision process was influenced by studying many of the tips at Mark Russinovich’s Blog and various other sources. Russinovich’s Blog is at:

Blogs - Mark's Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs (http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2008/07/21/3092070.aspx)

If any of the above steps helps anyone out then that would be good news. I point out though that what works for me may not work for you, caveat emptor. If it doesn’t I may have to run away and hide :)

Edit: I just remembered we had some issues with PCs and drives going to sleep. PC power settings were changed to 'High Performance' and Put the computer to sleep was set to 'Never.' To overcome 'Eco' type green drives that wanted to spin down I used 'xSleep.exe' that can be configured for a number of additional internal/external drives to 'tickle' them and keep them awake and on line. I can't confirm but I have a gut feeling some hangs were due to Vegas needing a resource on a drive that had 'dozed' off.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

I always set up equal initial and maximum size of paging file.

Christopher, have you had instability issues that were fixed by your adjustments? Your suggestions are age-old, good standard setup suggestions.

I have adjusted ram and turned off Windows themes, etc., but have not found much difference in how Vegas peforms for me. I do find a slight edge with a paging file in use. However I have ran without a paging file for months, having forgot to turn it back on, with little ill effect. Vegas runs a bit better with it on, but not significantly so. Maybe it depends on the plug ins one is using, I don't know.

I have ran with no paging file, windows default, and with a set paging file size, and the differences I have found are minimal.

I have never thought of Vegas as a ram intensive program. It's CPU intensive for sure. I have read here someone posting that Vegas is ram hungry. Can anyone verify this? When I check my ram usage while editing it seems ram usage is minimal.

Jeff ~

What little stability problems I have had on the numerous boxes was improved with these settings. I must point out though that 95% of my Vegas experience has been on Asus MOBOs and the reason I have stuck with them is that the couple of times I went away from them I had unexplained hang / crash issues and the fault module causing the hangs wasn't necessarily Vegas. Usually some other .DLL or StackHash_xxx error was hanging the system. Not having either the time or knowledge to sort the issues I just went back to what worked, Asus MOBOs and Nvidia GTX cards.

Very recently a colleague friend completely rebuilt his system but with a new MOBO but same graphics card. The reason he swapped boards was that he wanted to build a Hackingtosh and try out FCP X. The new build had exactly the same OS, Win 7 Ultimate 64 SP1, same ram, same drives, same graphics card and drivers and the same software collection. He's running Vegas 12, Photoshop and AE and it has has done nothing but give him headaches with render crashes and strange timeline behaviour. Like the timeline will suddenly misbehave. An example, hit play and the audio plays but the video freezes and you can't move the cursor. BTW this was before he installed the Mac OS Maverick.

As you say the way I configure the systems is a well proven established pattern of doing things and I ask myself why wander off that path when it has given me so little grief. Most of my learning came building Discreet edit* boxes and once I had found a combo of hardware that worked I stuck to it. Building NLEs has always been a bit of a black art to me. In the middle of a biggish Physio training edit at the moment but once that is over it's time for v13 and hopefully the same stability.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney