I've used Vue 4 and Pro on my Macintosh and Poser with a love/hate relationship. I love the results but I hate the buggyness and constant crashes. Is Vue 5 better as far as stability? I'm very shy about dropping more money on the HOPES that the next version will be better and fix my problems!

It is always a difficult question. How to define "stability". I work with all versions of Vue from 4 over Pro to 5 and Poser on Mac and don't have more problems than with other programs - or the operating system itself. I know there are some issues when other applications (i play some games, chat or surf the Internet often while working in Vue) run the same time as Vue and/or some issues with the Wacom tablet driver. But these problems other applications like Cinema, Quark XPress, Freehand do have too. Right now i prefer to do my scenes in Vue 5, feels good to me (in capitals: TO ME). I only miss some Pro features and therefore go back for parts of scenes to Pro as well. To me 5 is as stable as 4 is but feels smoother in the workflow. The results with the expanded light options are outstanding. I even re-render a lot of my old scenes right now and exchange the gallery entries here slightly. I don't give you any advice - applications can react too differently on specific systems (for example i threw away the new Internet browser Firefox because it was not working properly on my system - even when the whole world is jubileeing about it). Conclusion? None really. Maybe you try out the trial version and see - the closest you can come to the real thing.

It would be very interesting to hear from other Mac Vue users to get a variety of insight to the Mac and Vue experience. Thanks

Well, I've downloaded the Vue5 demo and imported a basic V3 figure with hair and a bikini. So far no problems and actually very smooth. I'm going to try a figure that I've had problems with in the past after I finish playing with the lights.

I haven't used it enough to give a fair evaluation. It did crash on me while working with the new Procedural Terrains, but that bug is listed as fixed with the beta 5.02 patch. I had many crashes with Vue 4, but it got better with each new patch. Remember Vue on the Mac is still relatively new compared to the PC version. That said, I think you will find as stable as Vue 4 or a little better. This is not bad considering it is a new app and there are likely going to be several patches to come... As for OSX, as a long time Mac user, I can say that there is no comparison between OSX and previous OS versions. OSX is rock stable, for the most part. I think I can count on one hand how many times it has failed. Regards, Paul

Thats exactly what i meant - for you OS X is rock solid, for me it brought a lot of problems. Problems i never had before. That even between 10.2.x and 10.3.x whole applications do not work anymore, crashes when using applications in classic mode etc etc. All things that i never had since i used Macs - and that is since 1986. But i don't complain, i simply say it depends on the individual environment. All needs to be tested on the personal system - in terms of stability. With Vue 4 i never had many problems, only with the very first version - which was called 4 but on Mac was in reality a version 1 i had some issues. With the first patch this was sorted out and still is.

Well, if you are having all these problems, something is definitely wrong with your system. I have been supporting more then 50 Mac OSX systems, and rarely do we have a problem such as these. One thing you may want to try is to create a new admin account and use this account to see if the problems disappear. I had one user that was crashing a lot and had apps start then immediately quit. It turned out to be broken permissions and a bum user account. Creating a new user and repairing permissions fixed the problem. If I was having the problems you are having I wouldn't be too happy. If it were me, I would backup my data and do a format and complete system reinstall. I do this anytime a new Major OS version is released on either Windows or Mac. I then reinstall my apps and copy back my data. It sounds like a pain, but it really isn't that big of a deal. Well it is more of a pain on Windows. A little off topic, but hopefully useful. Regards, Paul

Systems Reinstall? What do you think this is ... WIndows? LOL.

In the past 8 years that I switched to Mac's, I've only had to do a complete reinstall once and that was with OS9. I'd sure hate to have to do that. But I will try a ne admin account. I must say that Vue5 Demo has been pretty smooth so far. Still want to run a few more Poser files through it though.

Thanks Paul.

hehe. No we don't want to say that! Mix a Mac and Windows and you get either a Wac or a Mindows. Neither one of those sound good! ;-) I find that good house keeping also frees up a lot of space and gets rid of junk I have tried over the last year or two. Things always seem to run faster for a time, until the system gets cluttered again. hehe. Cheers, Paul