Surround Sound Bug in Vegas 8

M

Mark Seibert

Well-known member
Hey All,

I'm stuck, and Sony is being rather unhelpful. I have several projects that I'm tyring to work with Surround Sound, and I'm getting some really strage behaviors. I've sent examples to Sony tech Support and here's the short answer from them:

" I can see that, in the project you uploaded, the surround panner does not work properly on the second event. Making changes within this project produces mixed results.

Since the surround panner works flawlessly in other projects, this is not a bug. There is an issue with the project you have uploaded. If you are reproducing the issue in other projects, then there is clearly a workflow issue, probably in keyframing the surround panner."

They go on to suggest that I dump ALL of my work and start over...which is unthinkable. I've got 40+ tracks on some of these projects, and hundreds of hours invested. Besides, what's to say this won't just happen again.

AND this is crazy - yes, my workflow might be revealing this bug, but to suggest it's not a bug because it my workflow is nuts! Has anyone else been seeing problems with Surround Sound? Clearly I've found a bug that they really don't feel is worth their time to fix, but if enough people report this problem it might get their attention.
 
I agree with you, what they suggest to dump your work does not make sense, except if the bug won't get fixed any time soon. It's probably a bug that does not happen often, and so it's very low on their priority list or something... Their customer support should simply file an internal bug report about it, even if it would be low priority and it might never be fixed.
 
Yep - sounds right - low priority would have been a better answer from them. I've posted this over on the Sony Vegas forum and it appears that there are a few others in the same boat as me. Unfortunately, probably not enough of us to get them to look into this. But who knows...maybe if someone is reporting this is might get others to speak up, or make them check to see if their surround sound is really working the way they "Think" it's working. I suspect there are a lot of peolple who just haven't noticed. It's a pretty subtle bug...but a bug no less.
 
Hey All,

We’ve finally gotten to the bottom of the surround sound bug, and it turns out it really was user error – with the caveat that this error even stumped the Sony Tech support people for several weeks. They have now acknowledged this as a confusing UI issue that they need to look into on future releases. Since there have been other people reporting this problem, I’m posting the solution in the hopes it might help.

The surround sound panner has two modes 1) the automation mode, and 2) the trim “offset” mode. Only one of these can be seen at a time, and the “offset” that can be set in the trim does not get visually represented in the visualization of the automation. Because of this, it is possible to have automation that shows sound being panned to a specific location, while the trim offset is actually forcing it to come from some place else.

Here is the example of exactly what happened to me. The surround sound panner showed this:
<See attached image pan1.jpg>

However, the trim was set like this:
<See attached image pan3.jpg>

No mater how I panned the sound in the automation, the sound persisted to come mainly from the Front Left…as it should have based on the trim setting. The problem was that I was unaware of this trim setting. To toggle the display mode between trim and automation, you need to toggle this switch:
<See attached image pan2.jpg>
I hope you find this helpful!
 

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Might this also correct the problem that was reported here in another thread where surround is downmixed to stereo in DVDA? Or, is that a separate issue and true bug?

Jerry
 
Actually, that was a different issue – but was a related one. In trying to track down the Surround Sound problem, I noticed that DVDA would not play back 5.1 sound, and that my 5.1 sound file was listed by DVDA as a “stereo mixdown.” It turns out that DVDA does not support playback of 5.1 sound, even though it does support using 5.1 sound on the disc. The “stereo mixdown” is what users will hear IF they playback within DVDA. So – not really a bug, just a strange limitation and nomenclature of DVDA.
 
In earlier versions of DVDA (Vegas 7 version),,,did it allow a 5.1 audio track to be played back as 5.1 without downmixing ?
 
Ok,,,,then its not a limitation thats peculiar to Vegas 8 Pro Right. I guess we will have to live with it. Though im still in the Vegas 7 Realm. :). David, do you find Vegas 8 Pro rendering and performing generally faster than Vegas 7 ?
 
A bit. I also find it buggier.

But I do like what the 32-bit floating point color can do with 4:2:2 footage.
 
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