Hey all you gurus... long time no post. This is probably going to be long so I'll apologize now. I haven't posted in long time, because frankly, I only cruise forums, in general, when I have a problem. I'm still using Vegas 7, because the relatively few projects I've been doing over the past few years are shot in DV with my good ol VX2100 and PD170, and edited on my good ol Dual Xeon. It's all very "good ol" and I have a trouble-free workflow, no problems to speak of.

However! I'm considering (again) doing weddings on the side (which I actually love doing), but I've always said I will only pursue clients with a decent budget, and provide top notch production values... fewer gigs, but more $ per gig kind of paradigm. Well, today, that obviously means HD.

This thread has grabbed my attention, since I'm researching a new rig, and the AVCHD issue is part of the new landscape that I I need to consider at length. But in reading the thread, this general concept of how much Vegas is or is not "software that just works" really resonates with me.

When I got into video, it was late 90's-2000ish, Digital8 ruled the consumer arena, miniDV was coming on, NLEs were just becoming practical on the desktop (PC... I'm a PC guy and that's that). I got some Pinnacle crap, with a cheesy breakout box with a firewire port, and made my first vid. I was hooked, but hated the software. It was clunky, crashy, proprietary hardware locked up, terrible real-time capabilities, limited track count, fat... just lousy. I knew this, because I was coming from a DAW background, and had already been using SF SoundForge for all my stereo work, and knew how smooth, stable and fast SF products were compared to everything else. I immediately started reading about Vegas and Premiere, and whatever else was available, and it was obvious that SF was doing what they had always done: made uber-stable software that performed death-defying feats of editing that made other software on the same platform look like it was years behind. At the time, Premiere couldn't even do real-time transitions without prerendering, and I'm pretty sure had severe track count limitations, and all that.

I bought Vegas Movie Maker on sale (or whatever they called the consumer version of Vegas 2), and was astounded. I could just drag clips from any source onto the timeline, slip edit, make auto crossfades, lay on some titles, play with opacity and compositing, work with sound the way I was used to... It was heaven. It never crashed. It was real-time enough. I could monitor live via firewire through the cam back to TV. Wow...

I did one project and immediately went out and upgraded to Vegas 3, which had just come out, and I think introduced velocity envelopes for the first time. Are you kidding me? The filters and plug-ins that came with Vegas were great tools... stuff that users on other platforms were paying for separately. You could stack them with ease, and they always worked smoothly. The way Vegas handled audio compared to the competition was light years ahead... basically getting Sound Forge built into your NLE for free. But above all, in real-time, things were fast, fast, fast compared to pigs like Premiere.

On the (relatively few) DV related forums back then, folks were telling these crazy tales of woe trying to get Premiere and other solutions to work worth a damn, on computers that were 5 times as powerful as mine. On the SF forums, we were all one big happy family, gently scoffing at all those chumps out there struggling with their much more expensive, less effective workflows. Problems existed in Sonic Foundry Land, but it was always fringe behaviors, and SF quickly patched things that proved to be internal to the software.

By 2003 or so, I was starting to do the occasional commercial job. Always DV, always low or no budget. A lot of home videos, of course. But I've basically always been an advanced hobbyist... never much money in it for me. I've stuck with Vegas until my most recent license for Vegas 7 (as I said, haven't needed to move up since my whole DV setup is circa 2007, and I've seen little compelling reason to upgrade to Vegas 8--although that was when they FINALLY put in a a better titler, I understand... that I wanted).

But since the Sony acquisition, I have slowly become frustrated. I still love Vegas 7 for the reasons I've always loved Vegas. It's like a refined version of Vegas 3, but only a few core functionality changes appeared (like 3D track motion and subclips). But while I love USING Vegas, in recent years, it just seems like it's become kind of isolationist: it may as well not even exist, apparently, if you're a plug-in creator. And in the world of modern HD, although I admit I'm just now getting serious into the research, It doesn't seem to be keeping up with the Jones' in terms of it's famous speed, compatibility, and basically trouble-free operation. For a general example: I've always HATED the chroma key filter. I don't think it's changed one iota since Vegas 2. I've experimented, read countless how-to's relating to getting a good key, have figured out that Chroma Blur prior to keying works wonders, but can only do so much. Yes, I know that DV sucks for keying. But cripes! During the second half of this decade, when you talk about down and dirty commercial production work, green screen is implemented in half of what you see. It's just completely mainstream. You'd think in 10 years, such a critical tool for the average editor would have been enhanced a bit. When Serious Magic came out with their Ultra 2, I downloaded the demo and was blown away. It could produce fantastic finished keys with all it's fancy algorithms and knobs. I thought, "ok...either Sony or a third party is going to see the bar has been raised, and I'll get something that will fit right into my Vegas workflow any month now." Nuh-uh. To this day I don't see any way to get a clean key without buying something stand-alone, and actually, I'm not even sure what that would be (again, hobbyist - don't have a compete handle on what's out there). I guess Adobe gobbled up Serious Magic. In fact, I've become so jaded about almost any plug-in that I get wind of never being available for Vegas that I've pretty much stopped paying attention to any of them.

And After Effects... It seemed obvious to me years ago that all the post production trickery that we were starting to see on the tube, all the compositing, motion tracking-centric techniques that poeple were twisting out of conventional editors was becoming mainstream. When AE appeared, I just KNEW that Vegas would either develop their own stand-alone FX tool, or expand the Vegas built-in toolkit to address the modern techniques.

I guess what I'm saying is, once upon a time, the only way a casual (or pro) desktop DV enthusiast could get broadcast level product out of his PC by tossing stills, WMV MOV AVI files, MP3 audio tracks or "what have you", with fantastic features, lightning fast speed, and truly amazing stability, was to use Vegas (or spend thousands with the competition to achieve the same abilities). In a nutshell, "it just works". Nowadays, Vegas does seem a bit like an "old school" tool, to me -- kinda like what Bob is saying. I'm not the kind of person who wants to use what everyone else is using because it's cool... but I have found over the years that using the computer products that are "popular" can be a very good idea because of the resources that tend to be available for the "popular" stuff: more forums, add-ons, tweaks, and usually more reliability because of all that support and feedback. It just flat-out bugs me that Vegas has not become "The" tool that everyone is using and writing plug-ins for the way PP, AE and FCV seem to be, and the way I always thought Vegas would be. It bugs me that there seems to be a lot of chatter about it not playing well with this kind of file or that kind of codec or what ever.

ALL THAT BEING SAID... (and look at all that... jeez, sorry) I'm positive that I'll be upgrading Vegas when I setup the new rig, because A) I've "come to love the cute cuddly nature of Vegas". Yup, it's like going into the womb, it's so comfortable to me - again, just a hobbyist at this point - and I know Vegas inside and out after a decade. B) cheap to upgrade - out of pocket for me. C) I think jumping into the forums after all this time invariably makes one think that a product is just a train-wreck, since you basically are just seeing the gripes. But I can tell by the posts that many HD Vegas 9 users are cruising right along with a variety of source material, just as I always have in my DV world, without a hitch. And D) Really, the things I wish I could do in Vegas that I can't, are truly the domain of a program like AE, and I'm just going to have to go down that software path if and when I want to do more hip and happnin', motion trackin', super 3D commercial project work.

Sorry If I'm a bit out of date - trying to rectify as we speak - but I really wanted to let off a little steam and back bob up on a few of his sentiments.

I'll be researching the forums for a while, but if I can't find my all my answers regarding HD, I look forward to benefiting from the always sage advice from this crowd.

later
Graham