And sorry for the sarcasm

What other commercial industry gets away with this?

Apart from the people who built my new conservatory?

Its sometimes difficult to know how to spark a response from Pinnacle. I know Marc reports what he can. Some bugs reported here do get fixed, such as the IFO file error that resulted in no sound on some DVD players. Occasionally there is refreshing honesty, such as the DC10+ PAL output bug, which "No promise" about when it could be fixed was made, as it affected so few people. (it never was).

I await the first public beta of 12 with interest.....

 

dstine:

 A competent programmer would be able to examine the source code and predict how this failure occurs, reproduce it, and fix it with probably a day's work if he was allowed to.

Interesting.

Hopefully the second person that reports the crazy handles in S12 will give a "Step by Step" instruction to reproduce the issue.

jjn:

Some bugs reported here do get fixed, such as the IFO file error that resulted in no sound on some DVD players...

And it sometimes helps to be annoyingly patient.  That "no sound" bug took well over a year to get settled (first reported on the user webboards in Nov/Dec 2006, finally "fixed" in Mar/Apr 2008).

At the risk of opening old wounds, it took the fact that a user was about to be banned to get Jon RT to take the bug seriously enough to get it sorted. Pinnacle didn't believe it existed in S11.....

There is stil a URL that I can't mention 

Pinnacle didn't believe it existed in S11...

It's not like it wasn't reported to Pinnacle -- with screenshots, sample .ifo files, offers of help, etc., over and over and over again.

Sometimes it takes yelling and throwing your toys out of the cot in order to get attention, evidently.

I just wish that some of us had yelled louder in the Studio 9.4.3 days.  It *still* miffs me that Pinnacle left that version so bug-ridden (introducing new bugs after 9.3.5 like the "sticky cursor" and the broken "enforce strict dvd compatibility" and the broken MPEG rendering, promising a 9.5 update, then reneging on that promise after it became evident that S10 needed all the attention that it could get).

Sometimes it takes yelling and throwing your toys out of the cot in order to get attention, evidently.

Which really should not be required. There are a few of posters here that have the respect of Pinnacle (enough to be private beta testers?). The bug reports of those people should be taken a little more seriously.

In theory, perhaps.

But then again: In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.  In practice, there is.

Agreed?

I agree (I think). In practice, if not in theory.

margaret45:

I'm using CD music in a short interview video.  For some music clips I can adjust the volume anywhere in the clip and it will stay where I put the adjustment handles.  In the last clip - this is hard to describe - every time I click on the volume in the timeline it adds an adjustment handle that stays where I don't want it.  I can eventually lower the sound, but I can't bring down higher adjustment handles that I don't want.

 I've tried to analyze what factors make that clip different than earlier clips.  I've deleted the problem clip and started fresh, but that one clip won't adjust where I want it.  The volume line is zigzagged up and down when I want a smooth fade or rise in sound level. 

 I've run into the exact problem on the main audio track. Each adjustment of a volume handle results in a new handle being added to the timeline.
 

Paul,

Are you using S12?

If so, that's the SECOND report...

 

People can find my "Volume Handle Bug Recipe" in this thread.

 

 

Dennis.

I've just tried you "Surefire" audio handles instructions in Studio 12.

I don't get any bad behaviour at all - both halves of the split.

I feel rather left out.

Are we going to have to look for hardware and driver differences? Realtek AC97 audio Driver 5.10.0.5950

ADDED

It's just occurred to me that the only time I might have seen the handles bug is on my laptop. I'll need to install S12 on it.....

 

 

I am looking forward to getting S12 installed on my machine and testing it.

Right now it sounds like it's "mostly fixed", but not completely.  Sigh.

Yes - Studio 12

I ended up cutting the audio from the clip and pasting in a new section. The handles work correctly in the new audio and also on a couple of other clips I experimented with.

jjn:

I've just tried you "Surefire" audio handles instructions in Studio 12.

I don't get any bad behaviour at all - both halves of the split.

I haven't encountered this obviously frustrating problem and can't seem to reproduce it. 

Just wondering. The volume handles problem seems to occur more often for NTSC users than PAL-I (or other PAL variant) users.   Are there any PAL-I users who've encountered the problem? Any version of Studio?

justaviking,

I used your recipe in S12. Volume handles are fixed. Before I installed S12, I had uninstalled S11. Due to S12 no longer properly importing my video files, I reinstall S11 after the fact and now have both up and running. I feel special. I can confirm that the exact same key combo in your recipe (same video/audio footage) breaksthe volume handles in S11, but not in S12 on the same machine.

Check Pinnacle's webstore - New T-Shirts on sale "Studio 12 - the beta is in the box".

The other new one is the Pinnacle Clarence Carter Commemorative "Patches - I'm dependin' on you son" Embroidered Tee.

Ok, so it is a little elusive, but most definitely not fixed in Studio 12 Plus.

Over the course of two hours last night I got a clip into that state 7 or 8 times.  That is reproducible, but I don't think it qualifies for being over-simplified into a "recipe".

I got the sequence down to about four clicks in one particular scene of one particular movie, but on other clips everything works fine.  There may be more than one path into the bad state, and they all seem to involve multiple steps.  I'm working with an MPG video from my Sony DSC-H1 about a minute long.  The automatic scene selection logic splits it into about 9 clips when you drop it into the timeline.  The audio is native with the clip and is mostly just background noise with a little talking.

Here are some vague hints which may be contributing factors: (none are smoking guns by themselves)

• Splitting, deleting and combining clips are all involved (should be examined)
  
• It's related to the fact that sometimes the context menu "combine clips" command is greyed out when you have two scenes selected.
• It can be caused by dragging a handle across a clip boundary
• It might be related to the fact that the time trimming tool (first one in the video toolbox) doesn't work (cannot find the beginning of a clip)
  
• It can be caused by aligning two handles in time (vertically) then separating them again
• If you expand the timescale on two clips with a boundary between them so that the first one hangs off the left side of the timeline, and the second one hangs off the right side and alternately select the clips the current position slider will displace incorrectly towards the click point in the left side clip.  I guess it's supposed to be going to the start of the clip which is not visible on the screen.

This all seems to boil down to the fact that the handles are getting out of order in time.  Changes in timescale, crossing clip boundaries, splitting and combining clips all probably recompute the timestamps on the handles and there is probably some arcane floating point roundoff error occuring with the timestamp calculations.

Just guessing. 

 

 

 

Shamelessly stolen signature.....

Mark,

Thanks for re-confirming that the "easy way to break volume handles" is fixed in S12.

 

Daniel,

It sounds like you're on to something.  Stuff like "crossing clip boundaries" and "aligning handles vertically" would certainly be a less-common occurrences (but if the software lets you do it then of course it should not corrupt anything).

I don't think floating point roundoff is likely, since the timeline is quantum (discrete steps... an integer number 30 frames per second), but I would suspect they're messing up somewhere in their bookkeeping.  Since neither of us has access to the code, guessing is sort of pointless (but fun, and I do it too).

Please continue to watch what you do.  If you can get to a point where you can force it to happen on purpose in a new project (a "recipe") please share it.  If someone can confirm it on another computer, then we have something than Pinnacle can use to duplicate - and fix - the bug.

You're doing a great job, and this last post has some good hints in it.  I'm hoping to install my copy of S12 this weekend...

Alright,

The specific volume handles problem is elusive, but there are so many other glaring bugs in this software that it has become unusable.  I'm planning on asking for my money back.  I don't think I'll keep trying to be their beta tester.

 

 

I am to attempting to break the audio handles, but having a difficult time to do so. So that's 2 reports of this incident. Please keep us posted for any progress(regress?).

Marc,

You don't get it.  The game's over.  Tell your management that they lost a customer until they invest in a testing department.

 

 

I always had a problem with the handles in 11 Ult. Tried to break them in 12 but can't yet. Also the "Delete Volume Changes" now works in 12 for me. Didn't in 11.

strawberrybob:

I always had a problem with the handles in 11 Ult. Tried to break them in 12 but can't yet. Also the "Delete Volume Changes" now works in 12 for me. Didn't in 11.

I'm with you Jerome.  I've probably played with v12 for 8-10 hours and nary a glitch with the audio; with v11 I would have had a couple.  They may still break in v12 but it looks like you may have to work a lot harder to make it happen.

Jerry