I just recently started playing again with Cool 3D to create some menus for my DVDs. It seemed like an interesting product to do some cool stuff with, I had toyed with it a little bit earlier, but not done anything major. I had lost my installer, and the backup CD was bad, but I found another CD to install from, so things were OK.
Now I am having problems creating movies. Anything complex with a significant number of frames (currently trying 250 and about 10 objects that move independently) and Cool 3D will die during movie creation. No error, just stops.
When my installer was lost I send a support request to Ulead and have not heard back, they must be busy
Looking at the installer and my registration I realize that we are pushing 4 years since the latest version of this product was released. I am also a DVD Workshop user, another excellent product from Ulead, which has not had any significant (only smaller patches) update in 2 years. I used to be a Media Studio Pro user as well, but I moved to a competing product since nothing much happened with Ulead. It seems it took Ulead almost 3 years to go from 7 to 8.
So, what I seem to be asking, with all those words, is it really worth my aggrevation to try to resolve my "can't create a movie" issue? Is there any chance that anything at all will happen with this product anyway? I mean, a single patch in 4 years? There can't be a single developer at Ulead actually working on this product now, can there?
There are plenty of other people round the world who complain about another software company bringing out too many "new" versions of their programs and more or less forcing people to upgrade at considerable cost.
I am sorry if I seemed a bit down on Ulead, I really love DVD Workshop, even though it is in need of an update, and has been so for about a year, and I think Cool 3D is great when it works, but your response seems very defensive...
I really can't understand your comment about Microsoft. They really haven't released a lot of updates to their OS, some would say they haven't released enough of them. In fact, MS seems to upgrade their OS to a new major version every 3-4 years or so. About the time I complained was a little too long for Ulead.
Now, Microsoft is a huge company, and Ulead is tiny, but it is also enormously much more difficult to release an operating system than a video editing suite.
Ulead also regularly updates Video Studio, their low-end product, but upgrades to DVD Workshop, Media Studio Pro and Cool 3D are few, and way too far in between.
I used to work for a software developer with 15 employees, 4 products and customers from SBC to Nortel. We managed a new release of our software, bug fixes and feature upgrades, 3 times a year. We didn't charge customers for upgrades, so they didn't mind. In my experience, if no updates have been released for an application (as opposed to an operating system) in going on 4 years, that means nobody is working on said product.
This is a little weird, I am not sure why we are bashing Microsoft here, but I'll bite just the same. For the record, if any video editing software was available for Linux (no good video editing software exists for Linux), so I am not a Microsoft fan... but...
Windows 3.1 was released in 1992, with a minor update to 3.11 (needed by some, but not by all by far) in 93. Two years, in reality it was about 3 - 95 was very late, came Windows 95. Then came 98 three years later, and then Windows ME (which very few upgraded to) in 2000. So, I was exaggerating a little when I said 3-4 years between updates 3 average is more accurate.
Now, you could say Windows XP is an upgrade to 95/98/ME, but it isn't. In fact Windows 3.x/95/98/ME is just a discontinued product from Microsoft. The product used to be called MS DOS. Windows XP is a completely separate product with the following history:
Windows NT 3.x from 1993 and onwards. This was a version 1 product, so updates came here and there. Some were good, most were bad. Very few people used Windows NT at this stage. Version 3.51 was released in 95 with a quick upgrade to the first Windows NT version in much use, Windows NT 4.0 in 1996. This was followed by Windows 2000 in 2000, and Windows XP in 2001 (in reality in 2002). Again a release cycle of about 3 years, not particularly often.
Now, I didn't count the upgrade cycle of Cool 3D and DVD Workshop as one. Neither can you count the upgrade cycle of Windows 3.x (and later) as the same as for Windows NT (and later). They are two completely different products, one of which is now discontinued.
Considering it is officially almost 5 years since Windows XP was introduced, more like 4 years since it was released, and Windows Vista is still 10 months away, you can't complain that it is released too quickly.
Software upgrades are good things. They make the software run on later models hardware. Right now my computer is sitting a little idle while Cool 3D is working it's butt of creating a movie. If it had been updated like other software in this business, it would have been done now, not only at 55%. You see, I have two CPUs in my PC, but you know what, Cool 3D only uses one of them. The other is basically idle.
When I moved to a new computer, the MPEG-2 rendering time for one of my projects went from 1 hour 20 minutes down to 18 minutes. The rendering time for my Cool 3D project doesn't seem to have changed at all. The reason is that Cool 3D hasn't been updated to newer PC architectures.
I agree with you that software updates should not take place too often. It can become expensive to upgrade. A lot of the time there is no reason to upgrade, my father still runs Windows 98, why would he upgrade? His PC can't run Windows XP anyway. On the other hand, software upgrades are necessary. They are necessary for a number of reasons. Hardware upgrades like I mention above is one of them. Other reasons are introductions of new technologies. When Media Studio Pro 8 was released it had a ton of new, and very good features, but the main reason to upgrade would be if you have an HD camcorder.
The other reason a company releases software updates is that the company needs to make money. I want the company to make money. When they make money they can hire software developers who can add the features I need and want to the software I have bought and will buy. So, for that reason, new upgrades are good. They bring extra revenue to the company.
A company that doesn't release updates for a piece of software does it for one reason only. The software doesn't sell well enough to justify having developers work on it to update it. It is that simple.
The last part worries me. If no one is working on the product to update it, I will never see any updates. This means that if I would like to accomplish something that I normally would use this software for, I should probably look for an alternative where the software developer is conducting active development. Spending time on a product which is for all practical purposes and intents at its end of life would be wasting my time. I don't like wasting my time.
