I promised myself after buying Vegas 16, that I would never buy another upgrade to Vegas again, but just like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown, I fell for it again. I've been using Vegas almost everyday for as long as I can remember, since whenever Sony Vegas 4 came out. Because of my work, we have about twenty years of Vegas files, so switching to another video program is not an option. Sony Vegas used to be an exquisite gem before Magix took over, at least for me it was. I used to leave huge, four hour long files rendering, fixing each frame, with tons of effects on them, color correcting, sharpening, brightening, uprezzing whatever and there was no doubt in my mind that my crummy Pentium 4 computers and Celerons would not crash and they would work flawlessly. I honestly think I went YEARS without crashing. I've been editing for many years and digitized multitudes of stock footage and old public domain footage and it petrifies me whenever Vegas comes out with a new version. Invariably, they add all this crap I would never use or care about, take away things I like, and make the program more unstable. How many versions and upgrades and bug fixes does a program need before it stops crashing? (and don't say it's my computer. I have 10 great Intel 7 and AMD workstations and laptops which run Vegas 12, and Vegas 14 flawlessly. Vegas 15 and then 16 were so unstable for me and crashing all the time, I asked Magix to cancel my two Vegas 16 activations for two more Vegas 14 activations instead. I actually DOWNGRADED to a better program. I've actually made tests with Vegas 12 versus Vegas 18 with all its GPU acceleration nonsense and Cuda crap, and there's zero difference in my rendering time.
Magix tempted me to buy Vegas 14 because they bundled it with a FABULOUS, and in my humble opinion the BEST and easiest, green screen program from Boris FX and the proDAD Mercalli stabilizer (which is far superior to the stabilization program in Vegas.) To my horror and dismay, Magix doesn't tell you that the plug-ins you bought in a previous Vegas bundle, won't work in your NEW upgrade. Screwed again. Anyway, I fell for buying the Vegas 18 Post suite for $384 because I thought it might be more stable and the motion tracking looked cool. The green screen program was too complicated for my simple mind and Vegas 18 changed some things I liked so when it crashed on me the third time, I stopped using it. If you use Vegas 18 on a Vegas 14 project file, you can never bring it into Vegas 14 again so it's made worthless and Magix only gives you two activations so forget using it on your computer at work or on your travel laptop or on a computer that doesn't have internet access so it can check if you dared activate on another one of your computers.
So, yesterday, after 3 months of non-use, I decided to try Vegas 18 again. I opened up program and it says that there's a new update. I think to myself, "Oh cool, new update! Maybe the software geniuses at Magix came up with some great bug fixes. I'm gonna kick this football" It took me 35 minutes to download the 700mb update file. I activated and opened up program, then added a video file to timeline. NOW the program won't even RENDER !?!  If you try to render anything, a pop-up window comes up and says "An error occurred when creating the media file. Error Ox80131501 (message missing)".  So I uninstall program and upload the 700mb installation program again from My Products in my Magix account. Same problem. The thing won't even render now! I was going to ask if I could go somewhere and download the previous of version of Vegas 18, but I don't really care anymore. I'm just gonna go back to using my Vegas 14 and start buying more Boris FX and Ignite plug-ins. I'll try to look at the wasted $384 I spent on Vegas 18 as a small penance for my sins.