Using Vegas for Feature Length Films??

[bigox]

I talked to some guy over the weekend who made a feature length film using the Vegas editing program and said he would never use it again. He said it was great for short projects, but not for a feature length film. Said he got a lot of crashes and that he split his movie up in over 100 scenes and when the tried to "drop" the scenes together he had a lot of trouble.

Are the problems this guy was experiencing common or is this not the norm?

I'm interested in Vegas for feature length movies. I just wanted to see if anyone else had experienced similar problems or if they have been editing features on Vegas with no problems?

Thanks in advance!

[David Jimerson]

Hogwash. I've edited feature-length stuff with no problems whatsoever.

[24Peter]

The thing I love about Vegas is it almost never crashes. I've used ver. 4, 5 and now 7 and I can't remember it ever crashing (a few freezes in ver. 4 I think but didn't lose any data.) I've done 90 min wedding videos and up to 45 min narrative (short films) without issue.

Try it yourself for 30 days free.

[HorseFilms]

I agree. I've been a user since Sonic Foundry Video Factory 1.0 and crashing has never been an issue.

[plainman007]

Yes Vegas doesnt crash (quite the opposite to premiere pro :) ). At rare moments if you try to import an incompatible file type it would freeze for a few secs and then come back to normal. About your question regarding feature length films. That wouldnt be a problem. Unless there was some incompatible/corrupt file in the bunch of files your friend tried to import. In fact i just finished editing a full feature documentary of 2 hrs length IN UNCOMPRESSED avi. The avi was 240 gb in size (Thank god i had a terrabyte of space !). It loaded onto the vegas timeline as if it were a 5 min clip. No stalling except it took a few mins to build the waveform for the sound. Once loaded. I was surprised as hell when i grabbed the scroll head and scrubbed the timeline. I thought it would stutter at least a lil bit. But the damn thing just scrubbed the uncompressed video as smooth as silk. 0% stuttering even jumping to extreme ends of a 240 gb uncompressed video. I was all smiles. So your question is answered i guess. As a side note though Vegas stutters when i import an uncompressed avi of 10 secs duration that was rendered out of 3ds Max. Im puzzled why. The only difference i noticed between this and the former avi was 32 bit and 24 bit. Perhaps David Jimmerson could chime in here and let us know why.

Is the 32 bit avi carrying an alpha channel ?
Does the 32 bit represent the bit depth of each pixel ?

I would be happy if David could explain...

[David Jimerson]

A 32-bit uncompressed AVI can carry an alpha channel. A DV AVI can't.

Not sure about the bit depth of each pixel.

[plainman007]

David since you work with max too. Is there a method as to how i can render out a 24 bit avi out of 3ds max so my animations would run smoothly within Vegas ? I cant seem to be able to render out an uncompressed avi of 24 bit from within Max.

[DVXSanDiego]

We are in the middle of editing our second feature on Vegas 7 now. Our first was shot on two DVX100s - this one was shot on a HVX200 so we're editing with Raylight. First feature went straight to DVD, where we had occasional stumbling blocks with post-production house, but Vegas is so much easier to cut on (than FCP) we will gladly work with something other than "one of the industry standards".

[David Jimerson]

David since you work with max too. Is there a method as to how i can render out a 24 bit avi out of 3ds max so my animations would run smoothly within Vegas ? I cant seem to be able to render out an uncompressed avi of 24 bit from within Max.

Actually, I don't work with that. I *have*, but not very much.

[Sherlock256]

I just finished a 21 minute short, shot in 1080 with my HVX, edited in 720p, using raylight 3.0, with magic bullet 2.0, with approximately twenty audio tracks in the 5.1 surround mix. Other than the ocassional hickup, crashes are rare. Vegas is my choice for cutting things together. I hope version 8 includes the ability to use multiprocessors during previews. (fingers crossed)

This short is part of a 90 minute documentary. I rendered a test this morning - no crahes, glitches, or problem.

[Daygola814]

I've edited three features now in Vegas and many short films and I have no problem. You could always render part of it as an uncompressed AVI and import that. I had to do that for one of the features.

[USLatin]

I am getting frequent crashing but I am 99.9% sure that it is my dang northbridge which can't keep up with the different voltage requirements of the Q6600 Quads... it happens mostly after several hours of intensive previewing on long sessions and mostly during the hot hours of the day...

...why am I sharing this since it doesn't have to do with Vegas? Because not a single time did Vegas fail to catch the progress when I opened the auto saved project. So even IF Vegas were to crash, I can vouch for it's safeguard after over 50 crashes... :laugh:

...I never got a crash with my Duo setup, and yes I am getting the right MoBo for the Quad this week, I simply didn't have the time to rebuild and reclock but now that I am (almost) done I will.

[Erik Olson]

We've cut lots of short-form projects on Vegas, starting with version 5. While our finished material is almost always 22 minutes or less, we often have ratios of 10:1 or more, so you can imagine how much raw footage we deal with.

I'll reiterate that Vegas almost never crashes, though it can hang-up for a moment (or a half-minute in rare instances) when importing an intensive file, say a high-res PSD image. We work with Vegas in HDV and DVCProHD100 MXF through Raylight and I can truly say that the MXF footage almost seems to work better.

The auto-save function is really robust and works entirely in the background. We recently crashed when an external drive powered down during the edit and Vegas opened a recovery file after a warm reboot of the sys., no data lost all the way up to the last action performed.

Oh, this is an important caveat for anyone who logs footage by TC. Raylight MXF does not currently display in and out timecode in the bins, however, it will burn a window into your footage in the preview window in Yellow mode and higher.

e