My understanding is that Liquid is a unique interface, original in its thinking but a completely new and different learning curve from any other NLE out there. It was recently purchased by Avid, not developed by them.

I'm not an expert on these things but have been reviewing Final Cut Studio 2 and Avid Xpress Pro, and was struck to see that the color correction capabilities of FCS2 still do not have Curves features in addition to the tri-color wheel, as the Avid NLEs do. Vegas 7 (and back to Vegas 4) has had this and it is invaluable for both luminance blowouts on DV footage and all manner of general and spot color correction.

I moved to Burbank from NYC this year and the more I try to make a decision to supplement my knowledge by buying either FCS2 or Avid Xpress, the more I appreciate the feature set of Vegas. In the end I think Avid wins on color correction with its patented technology, but Avid's timeline functions are way out of date.

If you don't plan to do a long-form project like a low-budget feature like the one I worked on, then you can go as far as Vegas 7 and be miles ahead of the competition.

I know nothing about Avid, but if you're upgrading from VMS to Vegas, wait about two to three more weeks and upgrade to Vegas Pro 8 instead... Should be officially announced in the Sept. 6 - 11 timeframe, at IBC.

Usually Sony offers a very nice (i.e. cheaper) upgrade deal in the first month or so after a new version comes out, though I don't know if there would be such a deal for a VMS to Vegas Pro upgrade.

Tim L

If insiders at Avid are to be believed, Liquid is likely just about evaporated. Which is sad, because other than the workflow not "being Avid" it's a better product (IMO) than is Avid Xpress or Media Composer.

I have liquid and use it quite often. The interface does take a bit of getting used to however.

Liquid was own by Pinnacle which of course was bought by Avid and Avid wanted Pinnacle for 2 reasons. The first being Pinnacle studio... they did not have a consumer level product and a lot of money is made in that area. The second is that liquid works extremely well with HD long gop. Liquid was the first NLE to be able to work with long gop in its native form and avid did not have much to match what liquid could and can do. There are things that liquid can do that quite frankly can't be done with avid's higher priced NLE's.

Pinnacle products do not rely on the leasing of a mpeg encoder like other products... (main concept for example). Instead it has its own and it produces a pretty high quality output... I would say better than that of Mainconcept. It also has a mpeg smart render system which is becoming increasingly important with the flood of HDV on the market.

The main difference between liquid and vegas is that liquid does not rely so much on real time functionality as vegas does. This can be both an advantage AND disadantage. The vegas interface is faster because the effects/transitions work on a real time basis... drop them on the time line and play them back right away. Liquid does have a small arsenal of real time playback effects/transitions but it also comes with GPU/CPU effects which are processed on the time line by the cpu and/or gpu. This takes a bit of time because the effects have to be PRE rendered prior to viewing through an automatic background rendering system. But the advantage is that these effects are insanely customizable. You can customize them quite literally to the point where they might as well be noted as your own construction. Vegas on the other hand is geared to do things in real time so the effects are a bit simpler and you are given limited control over customizing in comparison.

Liquid also comes as pretty much a self contained system with it's own multi cam sync routines, direct timeline disk author/burning... etc. It's also somewhat of a hardware dependent program. You need the proper hardware to run it... as an example the gpu effects are processed by the graphics card memory so you have
to have a proper video card. The playback preview is also silky smooth because of the hardware dependency, even with HDV.

Liquid's problem however is that it has not quite kept up with the changing times and the bragging rights of being the first NLE to do native long gop will only get you so far. The interface and such is a bit old and outdated and needs some pretty serious updating. The Vegas interface on the other hand is quite fast an efficient in comparison. It's ability to input/output different files types is quite limited compared to vegas and it lacks things like docking/undocking abilities, scalable interface...etc.

I'm not sure I would go as far as Spot in saying that it will evaporate, but Avid will need to do some work in getting it up to speed, that's for sure. Avid representatives have gone so far as to say that liquid is safe here to stay, so I can't imagine it disappearing or evaporating any time soon.