The next update
 

Hello chaps,

I just thought I would start a separate thread regarding the next update of Vegas. I had a call from the support guy this week. He was very good despite not actually not being to solve any of my problems. I asked him what the reports of the general reliability of Vegas 8 were. He told me there were quite a few issues with the original release, but the 8.0a update was considered very solid. As a point of reference I asked him how solid the new titler was in the 8.0a release and he suggested it was solid, but I would probably be best off using the old generator for the time being due to ease of use.

Now, if they considered the new titler to be within their definition of solid, then I guess saying version 8.0a in general is solid is not that great an endorsement at all!

Anyway, at the end of my call I asked when they expected the next update to appear. He said they envisaged it to arrive in the next 30 days. Now to me, that suggests they know there is still a huge bunch of issues, and perhaps still a lot of development going on. I can not help but think that there are a lot of dormant features within Vegas 8 that are waiting to be completed or debugged before they are rolled out, perhaps maybe not even being activated until version 9 now.

Anyway, my suggestion to all users is thus: Document all problems you are having. Save crash reports etc. and every new problem you have, flag it up as a support ticket on the Sony Media site. I do actually think they have the systems in place to feed back problems directly to the development team, so they would probably benefit from such information.

Don't listen to any old pony they might give you about problems with your system. If your previous versions work ok, and your .NET Frameworks installed ok, then the only problem can really be with bugs in the code of the software. If you are getting crashes that produce reports, then you can quite clearly see what is going on, and it is mainly memory violations. These are caused by poor bug checking and non-existent Alpha and Beta stages in Sony's development of Vegas 8. It is up to us to ram their folly down their throats and force them to fix their problems.

For me the problems seem to be centered around the GUI and rendering. In general the software seems quite unstable, but if you switch to another task for any period of time, the GUI seems to become much more unstable.

Rendering is pot-luck, particularly in WMV format, which seems to fail 90% of the time with a hang or a crash. I have just noticed that 5 short clips in the middle of about 30 I rendered in Lagarith format just the other day have produced corrupted files. The actual files have gone to disk and been encoded by the codec ok, but the images it has been passed to it have weird horizontal coloured corruptions. This points to poor memory handling on Vegas's part. My notes show that Vegas crashed after the last of these dodgey clips were rendered. So at some point a portion of memory became corrupted by Vegas, and the stability went to pieces. Then it sat dormant until the corruption reached a part of memory that affected code execution and caused Vegas to call a bad value to a dll, which caused the program to crash. Memory handling in the version of Vegas seems to be pretty atrocious.