Sony Vegas Movie Studio 8 Platinum Edition (PC)

July 5, 2008 | By Doug In Digital Camcorder |

Sony Vegas Movie Studio 8 Platinum Edition (PC)
Customer Review: Disappointingly buggy.
Agree with other review’s comments about ease of use, etc, but this software is inconsistent in it’s presentation to the user and has some minor and one major bug (so far) that I and others have discovered.

The worst aspect of Vegas 8 Platinum is that it will hang on building audio peaks when loading a captured file to the timeline if there is corruption in the file. Having looked at a couple of message boards for any fixes to this problem, it looks to have been around for a couple of releases. The only way to carry on is to end the program (or if, as is sometimes the case, this will not work you have to trash it in Task Manager) and restart it. But then if you try and recover your project on restarting the program, it tries to pick the corrupt file up again and hangs. Because you can never tell if a captured file is corrupt before you try to open it, the only way around this that I can see is to save a new generation of the project before dragging any new event to the timeline. There is no error handling for this condition. Poor, very poor.

There is inconsistent behaviour when trying to insert a Marker into the timeline. Sometimes the Marker is inserted where playback was begun, and sometimes it inserts it at the point that is being played back when M is pressed. If you don’t notice that the marker is at the wrong position you end up editing to the wrong mark.

When saving a project file (.VF), the program does not present the last place a .VF file was saved, but the last place a file of any type was saved. This contrasts with Make Movie, which always presents last place a movie file was saved.

Make Movie does not warn if the output file name already exists and creates another generation of file.

Horizontal scroll bar to change viewed region of the timeline does not appear every time the program is started, but sometimes displays as a black rectangle without any detail such as scroll buttons or the sized slider bar.

If you run out of disk space while capturing video files you don’t get notified until all the capture action ends. So you might have 20 minutes of video to capture over 10 takes, run out of disk after take 2 and not be notified until a capture has been attempted on all takes. Even then the error message is woolly, in that all it says is words to the effect that “some files were not saved for some reason”.

Original review posted 27 Feb 08.

28 Feb 08: Didn’t take long to find another inconsistency - when doing a Make Movie, if the output file name is changed and then the user selects the Advanced Render option, the output file name in the Advanced Render section reverts to what it was before the name was changed.

06 Mar 08: During some actions such as Make Movie, parts of the Vegas window does not redraw correctly, and patches of the Desktop or parts of other windows are displayed “through” the Vegas window. Looks bad.

Also, once the full version of the software is purchased and installed over the downloaded Trial version, the .VF project files are still tagged as having been created with the trial version.

It’s been a bad day - this is the third new problems to report today. The software hangs in mid-operation. This is not associated with the hang described previously when corrupted video files are loaded to the timeline, but seems to be associated with high data bandwidth requirements. The only way to end the program is to trash it in Task Manager.

Prior to today I thought the software was poor, now I’m regretting buying it at all, and if it was possible to do so I would reduce my current two stars to one. A big name like Sony shouldn’t be putting this sort of rubbish on the streets.

Customer Review: It would be great - if it worked properly!
I bought this software about 4 months ago and have been in contact with Sony Tech Support ever since. Like the other reviewer says, they are utterly useless at getting their software to work correctly.

I have to say that I do like the user interface and concept of Vegas Studio, but every time I try to render a file which is more than 25mins long, it crashes. Sony are unable to explein why this happens. I’ve now tried it on 3 different computers and the same fault occurs on each of them.

So, if you want to render files longer than 25mins, then don’t waste your money on this program! (like I did)

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Li-Ion Rechargeable Battery (originally packaged factory-new merchandise)

Features of this rechargeable battery:

safety due to heat and overcharge protection
real lithium-ion rechargeable battery, more power than the original rechargeable battery
no memory effect ? recharge your battery whenever you like
excellent fitting accuracy, certified quality merchandise, not an original accessory
the standard battery charger can still be used

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Li-Ion Rechargeable Battery (originally packaged factory-new merchandise)

Features of this rechargeable battery:

safety due to heat and overcharge protection
real lithium-ion rechargeable battery, more power than the original rechargeable battery
no memory effect ? recharge your battery whenever you like
excellent fitting accuracy, certified quality merchandise, not an original accessory
the standard battery charger can still be used