Why Sony Vegas will most likely never be a Mainstream continued...

A revisit and pseudo update to an ongoing software failure...

So literally just two blog posts ago I started venting about this, well, let's call it a tragedy. The tragedy - Sony Vegas Pro V12 (and prior) and possible even their consumer versions. Why even call it a tragedy? Well, when something looks so damn good to work with (their interface is awesome), get promoted to be the simple do it all, mix and match, load all things multimedia and oh, "we are Sony and can do no wrong" , and not to mention 3D which I could give a crap about, fails as miserably as this product - one just needs to vent and define it as a tragedy. This is based on first hand experience now for several years while always hoping that someday this would finally function without random crashes and bugs appearing and popping in as if they were "Murphy's" cousins. I digress.

So Sony Creative releases an update in the last couple of days. Being hopeful as most would be, I installed it. I am talking about V12 64 bit... fuggetaboutit.

This piece of software simply can have all the so called patch or fix releases it wants, but all that is happening is a simple stretching of a proverbial band-aid. As they tug on the band-aid to strongly towards one side, it opens a new wound on the other side. Useless! I wonder why heavy products such as Adobe After Effects, along with all the plug-ins can work so nicely, rarely have issues and make use of a true 64 bit process and memory while this software just seems to puke at any chance it gets?

One has to ask, was this software a bad version of a 32 bit app that has been patched to death and now the company can't retreat as they have gone too far? Do their technical support peeps all look like Van Gogh as they don't seem to hear any of the problem and bug reports. What the hell are they doing? Are they simply building a database of issues and are overwhelmed? As it still is the case, their best solution seems to be, Uninstall - Reinstall. Like that would make a difference and not an option (again) since this upgrade was just freshly installed!

Sony! Listen up! You are starting to lose it big time! You bought this company several years ago. You didn't pay much attention to it as all you seemed to think was that since you make cameras and such, you also needed to have some editing stuff. You acquired, but you didn't fund. A few years ago you felt it was necessary to finally make the "Creative Software" division more prominent so you threw a ton of money at it. But did that money actually work for you? Based on what we see out here, a big NO! This just proves that even if you are a big company with a ton of cash, simply throwing money at something doesn't necessarily mean it will be put to proper use.

This somewhat reminds me of how cheesy your remote controls for the Blue-Ray/Internet Ready boxes are. But that is yet a whole other story altogether.

You make awesome cameras. You have some cool hardware - but when it comes to software, perhaps you should consider farming that portion out. That is all. Maybe not... seems I am not a lone ranger on a quest...

See what other interesting articles one finds by simply doing a Google search using the phrase "Sony Vegas is a piece of crap".

If only the crashes had some consistency - that would be actually nice. But this P.O.S. simply has no consistency.
 

Being Careful in How One Uses Certain Words

Every once in a while one gets the privilege to create from ground up a project. Simply put, you get almost all of the creative control (with a little help of course!).

Here was the challenge:

Create a "crowd funding" (money raising promotional) video production for the purpose of raising funds for a non-profit organization's project. The project goal - to raise a significant amount of funds to pay for a full sized (8 ft. plus) memorial statue of the "Buffalo Soldiers". The name of the project would be "For Duty, Honor and Country".

After a few revisions of a script (the narration), we came to a great starting point as this script also became the "story board" for the entire project. We were careful not to step on anyone's toes and to keep it real! This was probably one of the more challenging parts as there were several places where we could have done more harm than good.

As the story goes, this was about the "Buffalo Soldiers" that helped win the west. Their battles ensued over time with famous (and originally I used the term "infamous") and historically well known Native Americans know as Geronimo and Cochise. As you can see, we changed the term "infamous" in the final as this was not well received by certain parties. Fully understandable for many reasons. The point: Just one word could possibly offend. This was the challenge. Making sure that we stayed on track and also, due to the nature of the subject, kept our "noses" clean.

For me, this was a lesson in history. It is always interesting to learn new things, particularly when it comes to history. Or should I say the "real history" of events that unfortunately many school and history books simply glaze over and in many cases even tell the wrong story.

Obviously and most importantly in my mind was to treat this project with respect all around. It was important for me to ask the questions (the old elephant in the room scenario) on just how to phrase things so as to not offend any party. "What"; I asked; "is the correct term for the soldiers in that era?" What is the correct way to define the race in any era for that matter? Was it "Colored Troops?" as was used in many movies. Was it African-American? Negro? Black? I got all the correct answers from my collaborators, the current men and retired military of the non-profit known as the 10th Cav Troop B. Foundation, who also happened to be the client.

In a nutshell, this was quite simply "a really cool and fun project".  I learned a lot about some of the unspoken history as well as got to know some really interesting (and extremely pleasant) people that have and know quite a bit about this history. Now that isn't too bad for a Swiss-American Caucasian fellow. :)

Why Sony Vegas will most likely never be a Mainstream Professional Product

I have been (to my own demise) been using Sony Vegas Pro since version 8. Now as the years have passed and the Vegas Pro guys actually got more money and credibility from the mother ship, Sony itself (a couple of years ago) it seems that they simply have lost their direction. Or maybe they are being forced into creating crap by the mother ship. Who knows.

The only thing I know is that I am migrating away from SVP as fast as possible. This fat, buggy and buggier by the version, expensive (anything that you pay for that doesn't function is expensive) and time wasting piece of dung needs to a) be put out to pasture b) needs to be totally revamped or c) get killed altogether.

It seems the guys that create this monstrosity are simply following suit to other big boys that have this attitude that an upgrade doesn't need to function better, remove bugs of yesterday, and be faster, but rather, add new bugs, make old bugs stronger and oh, by the way, make this a fat clunky piece of crap that loses functionality as you use it more.

There have been hints along these lines from several users over time. If you happen to look at the Sony Creative Support or knowledgebase, well, that's an oxymoron.

Report a bug - you get a generic boiler plate message back a few days later telling you to totally uninstall  add a new user on you system with admin privileges and then re-install under that user. Perhaps they should stop at the uninstall part and leave it at that.

This typical response seems to be Sony Vegas' only solution. Does it work? Hell no! It is the most useless information, strategy, method, option, concept that could ever be contrived. The Sony guys seem to think that we all have time to tinker and experiment on their behalf. Perhaps this "boilerplate" concept was created to appease the user that blew a good 600 bucks to start, and then blew 300 more each year to keep up with the Jones' by constantly upgrading and thinking things will get better for sure with this new version. Hey, they changed the desktop icon... now that is improvement!

Sony, I hope you are reading this. I hope you take this to heart. I hope you actually take note and start really fixing things. I have reported to you diligently over the years about your damn memory leakage... (for those interested, just start up Vegas, open Task Manager and watch the processes, particularly the Sony Vegas one.... it just starts eating up memory even while sitting idle. God only knows why.)

But that's not all... you have trouble rendering to your own codec, particularly when it comes to simple internet mp4's. POS! (no, that does not mean Point of Sale)

You crash randomly almost as if someone, perhaps Sony's Other Brother (SOB) is spying on us and sees when we have stuff to get out on deadlines. You make the software puke like no tomorrow.

Then you invite companies to create plug-ins for you or you even team up with them so that before SVP even loads, we have to look at a crappy advert that makes the system crash. I knew blue wasn't my favorite color all along.

I may be ranting here... but I have had it with your shenanigans and your absolutely useless support fodder. Get real! Get some knowledgeable people involved. Listen to your users! Oh my god, that would be a concept in itself.

Oh and by the way, the BS parties (actual marketing soiree) that you throw at NAB every year... yeah, those are sometimes cool. But I wonder just what kind of magical machinery and software the presenters actually use, to be able to with good conscience, speak so highly of your software? Or is it that you simply pay big bucks for endorsements?

Yes, this may sound like a rant and another rant from a guy that has lost much time due to crashes (time is money), and that has spent way too much on upgrades over the years, and that was very optimistic until this last issue - new system, new install, cool GPU, lots of memory, awesome processor... and well Sony Vegas Pro 12 (whatever batch) - acts absolutely no different!

It's really too bad that it has to end this way. You actually have some neat features that no one else has. Too bad they are part of this atrocity that you call software.