Has anyone specifically used the vpx15 for video projects lasting 2 hours or more, with approximately 30 tracks involving video clips, audios, images? If so, was there any problem with the loading, crashing or exporting time?
I haven't done a very long project in quite some time. I do have an ongoing project that is getting quite long overall, but it's spread over a dozen Movies, each of about 15 to 20 minutes. This takes a while to load and save. VPX has to load and save the timeline objects as well as the Project Temp Folder objects, so an equivalent project in Movie Studio would load and save a little bit faster.
I have had a couple of crashes recently, but nothing significant. One crash is more or less repeatable and is with titling, particularly with multi-row titles, one template in particular. Knowing this, I try to make sure that I do a save before and after editing a title.
I had one crash yesterday and I forget what I was doing, so I can't repeat it. Other than that, nothing much. I usually have several programs open, so who knows how they affect VPX. Yesterday, I had VPX, Movie Studio, Edge, Xara Designer Pro X, MS Word, and a few Windows Explorer windows open, plus a screen capture program from time to time.
Loading time
VPX does not like certain variable frame rate files and can take a long time to load them and then play them. These show up as causing the hard drive to go to 100% for several minutes. I try to identify these and run them through Handbrake.
With many objects, VPX has to go get them, thus how quickly it can do this depends on the quantity and location and the hard drive speed, and more if on multiple hard drives.
Export time
This will greatly depend on effects and even some title templates that are used. Remember, VPX has to modify every frame with one or more effects - takes time. Some plugins can take a very long time to process. Depending on what I have, I will export parts to Magix mxv files and import them into a new project, or at least a separate Movie to create the final timeline. That way the final export will go much faster.
This is more a hardware issue than a program one. Some of my short videos of under ten minutes can push the processing power and ram usage to my systems limits especially with text, multiple audio tracks playing at the same time and using Pips. All of which gets put into memory to help keep synchronisation of the objects in use.
Even the adding of one effect or title can push ram or processing limits.
So yes the programs (VPX or MMS) can handle multiple tracks with multiple effects on complex projects but be aware of the hardware hit it will cause and the limits to the project it can have.
Source Monitor - thus 2 monitors, Preview and Source
Meters (available in the Source Monitor) - Vectorscope, Histogram, RGB Parade, Waveform monitor - you can see better what is happening, especially when making colour correction adjustments
Advanced exposure tools with curves (under Brightness/Contrast) - and watch the meters when making adjustments
Project Temp Folder (except that there is currently a wretched bug) - for various reasons
Ability to micro-adjust audio objects. In MMS, you can only adjust audio objects by frame increments
Nesting - a movie can be used as an object in another movie
Adjustable Bézier curves
Mono channel duplication - I often have videos created using other tool (screen capture) containing stereo audio but with audio on only 1 channel. Can quickly switch both channels left (or right).
There are probably a couple more that I use infrequently, like the 3 wheels in Color Correction.
Exactly as you summarized, below with some difficulty I found some good tutorials specific to VPX on YouTube and one of them even has really comprehensive courses (30thcenturycom). I leave it here because others may be looking for it too: