Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9

I have had this software for a couple of months, and since the beginning I had problems rendering to a format for DVD Architect (yes I foolishly bought the whole suite, assuming that it would 'just work together' nicely).

Sony Vegas Platinum 9 is crippleware. There is an essential button which would enable you to customise the bitrates etc for the MPEG2 (DVD) codec, which means that you can re-encode large mpg's so they fit on a DVD, its a VERY BASIC requirement for video editing software, but it is greyed out. A software house spending extra effort on crippling their software? This is very 1980's thinking, and that mindset shows throughout the software.

Secondly, when you do manage to render anything, then try to burn to a DVD, the audio and video will be out of sync after about 5 minutes.

This is one of SVP9's most famous issues (see their forum) which is not resolved (despite my tech support ticket telling me it is) and for me, this is a total show stopper, it is in fact what I bought the software to do, and it doesnt. Tech support did come up with the brilliant idea that I buy version 10, which doesn't have the custom button disabled (I wonder why, lots of complaints perhaps?).

I tried (the demo of) v10 and the same issue remains. Why on earth would I want to buy MORE software from you, Sony? Pfff...

PLEASE, do yourself a favour and look elsewhere for video editing tools, this software is bloated, demands a massive overhead and simply doesnt work. It probably works great if you have a sony camcorder, and their quirky proprietry formats would probably be aligned, but for everyone else....avoid it like you would the plague.

I had been using Adobe Premiere Elements, but thought I'd give SMS9 a shot. I was able to quickly prepare a Youtube video that turned out great. I think that the documentation could be a lot better, especially how to transition from video composition to publishing. Regardless though it is a very powerful program and should be considered as a publishing tool for serious home users. The 1 point ding is on the documentation comment.

I used this software for six months. I am COMPELLED to post this review after discovering what many experienced users know - about the major software bug in all versions of Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9. I believe even the expensive "pro" version is affected. There IS a complex fix to this bug, but you should evaluate if you are comfortable implementing what many will consider a "complex" and risky fix.

Sony was apparently too lazy to correct the software's inability to access beyond 2GB of your PC's RAM for most versions of Windows. This is the problem. They KNOW of this bug. Fixing this probably requires they re-write huge sections of code.

Since Sony Vegas cannot utilize more than 2 GB of your PC's RAM, then it will crash when rendering requires more. For example, when you directly edit AVCHD (particularly 1080x1920), Sony Vegas will OFTEN CRASH while rendering to most formats (during the Make Movie phase). A typical example: I dropped just five clips onto the video timeline, for a total length only FIVE minutes long. The source video was 1080x1920p 24fps AVCHD. Sony Vegas was ONLY able to successfully render that 5-minute clip into Windows Media 512 Kbps 320x240 video, and sometimes successfully into MainConcept AVC/AAC *mp4 at 640x480 (typical iPhone-suitable format). So LOW res rendering was OK.

Yet, it could NOT render to any higher-res format because it would lock-up and crash part-way through the render, every time. It couldn't even get that five-minute movie rendered out at 720p. It wasn't about THAT video clip; i encoutered this error hundreds of times with various video clips rendering to a wide variety of formats! That is pathetic for a piece of software that claims in every manual and marketing document to support editing native HDV/AVCHD files and exporting to multiple HD formats.

You think my PC is too slow? Guess again. I'm running an i7 920 quad-core CPU clocked to 2.7 GHz, with 12 GB SDRAM DDR3 1600Mhz. That's one of the fastest CPU's you can buy, coupled with tons of RAM; what's more, it has a very fast read/write RAID10 hard drive array, plus a super-fast 160GB Intel X25-M SSD (which I edit my video files from). So my PC is screamin' fast and fully configured; so the bug isn't due to limitations of my PC. I'm running Vista 64-bit, but this bug shows up when installed on multiple other versions of windows! This is all reported in the Sony Vegas software user forums.

I found the software fix on the sonycreativesoftware web site, under the Support > Forums.

NOTE: once I implemented this fix, the problem was INSTANTLY SOLVED: Sony Vegas could immediately render to any format without crashing. Ah, but you need to see how complex the fix is. I'm a Dilbert type; I didn't find the fix complex, but many non-geeks will find this fix too complex.

Go to the forums at site sonycreativesoftware, go to Support > Forums , then bring up the FULL search menu (not the single-field search that is at the top right of the window) Then in the "Search Words:" field you should search for "How to fix render crashes"

Look for posts by "Mad Pierre", or "david_f_knight" or "blink3times"

This fix involves downloading CFF Explorer from ntcore, installing it, then running CFFExplorer as Administrator and MANUALLY re-setting the 2GB limit flag in about FIVE different Sony Vegas run files so they can handle > than 2gig address space.

You should find the detailed instructions in the forums before attempting.

MY ADVICE:

-if you have the money to burn, then just buy something like Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, because you know Adobe worked these kind of major bugs out of its video editing software; Adobe Premiere pro is well known to be stable.
-You could buy Sony Vegas Pro 9, expensive yes but at least a little less expensive than Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, and use a custom encoder like MainConcept which the pro users claim fixes these 2GB stability problems. But you need the Sony Vegas Pro 9 version in order to customize the encoder. I would buy Adobe Premiere before I would buy Sony Vegas Pro.
-If you do NOT have the money for Adobe Premiere Pro and are thinking about Sony Vegas Platinum 9, then I recommend you first assess if you are computer-savvy enough to implement the bug fix detailed in the Sony Vegas forums (see above). Don't forget that manually editing those files has unknown risks.
-You could buy Cineform Neo Scene (or similar) to convert all your source AVCHD files (and other formats!) to avi, then directly edit the avi files in Sony Vegas. On my system (and others report the same) this method also COMPLETELY eliminated the crashes during rendering. Editing avi files also has the benefit eliminating the slowing and frame stutter you see when previewing your timeline movie on a second monitor in "good" or "best" full-screen mode (assuming your PC is fast enough). This is because the avi files are far-less CPU-intensive for Sony Veges to work with. (AVCHD video is highly compressed and CPU-intensive for video editing software to work with). Don't forget to set aside MULTIPLE Terabytes of archive disc space, because of the HUGE file size of the avi versions of your AVCHD files. Yet, all that won't solve all crashes; you'll still crash anytime Sony Vegas needs more than 2GB RAM to render.

THINK ON THIS:

From a software re-write, bug-fix standpoint, it would have been EASY for Sony Vegas to fix this in rev 9 - IF the fix merely involves re-setting the 2GB limit flag on say five installed files. Why didn't they? Maybe there is more to it; we may imagine that probably re-setting that 2GB limit flag on those files creates OTHER instabilities that are even worse. Otherwise, Sony Vegas would have already implemented that simple (to geeks that is) fix. However, I will note that I have not encountered any "side-effect" instabilities from the CFFExplorer fix.

At first, this product is overwhelming. But if you practice with it, find as much advice as possible, you will do fine with it. It is overkill for my needs, but I got it at a good price and I can certainly grown into it. I do recommend it.

Works pretty stable and is a great value. The only hanging up/crashing is when I try to render 1920 by 1080 at 60 FPS video. It seems to choke at that data rate and the AVCHD format seems to work ok, just painfully slow to render..