About this Excalibur thingy

lnetzel wrote on 7/9/2003, 8:20 AM
I have checked out the Introduction Video on Excalibur on their site and for sure Excalibur seems like a VERY useful tool and bla bla bla.. and I would really like to have it...BUT

Am I the only one who thinks this should be for free and included in vegas?.. like the "Gettign the audioback" if you have deleted the Audio track for a video track.. for some reason I feel that's a basic feture that I actually thought already existed in Vegas.. and now I have to PAY EXTRA FOR IT???? Same thign goes for many other of the features in Excalibur

This Excalibur is also written by "Vegas guru's" so.. why is it not In vegas or in forthcoming update maybe? This smell like a commercial get together to make more money of us... and yeah it's a commercial tool and yeah it's a commercial world but damn... you gotta have some respect for the buyers too!!

I will probably end up buy ing this though cause the features of Excaliburs are really great.

Why is this Excalibur seen as a "side" application when it's written byt the same guys and also very basic and obvious features that should be included in vegas???

Comments

swampler wrote on 7/9/2003, 8:26 AM
You can do everything manually that Excalibur does, but they have put them into scripts to automate the process. I do agree, though, that some of the scripts should have been built into Vegas as normal tools.
lnetzel wrote on 7/9/2003, 8:35 AM
oh really, so if you know the scripting thing you could actually do the same "application" yourself then?

JJKizak wrote on 7/9/2003, 8:35 AM
Just curious, what if Vegas incorporates all of the Excalibur stuff in 4.0d? Do we then
acquire two more enemies?

JJK
John_Cline wrote on 7/9/2003, 8:38 AM
You're assuming that the two guys who wrote Excalibur work for Sonic Foundry. I don't believe that's the case.

John
Grazie wrote on 7/9/2003, 8:39 AM
$30USd? - What's your edit time worth? Hmmm..... Yes, we can wait and see, and yes "should haves" are always in the back of my mind . . .and yes, maybe this MIGHT appear in subsequent versions of Vegas. I'm from the "Bird-In-The-Hand" brigade. DO I feel somehow let down by not having this in V4? - Ah maybe! Do I wanna spend time and learn scripting? - NO! - Do I want other Wizards added to Excalibur? - You betcha!

$30USd? - This has been my no-brainer of the year.

. . Ah go-on! Go-on! Spoil yerself . . . .

With all the time you save . . . you could . . . .

Grazie

ps - I have nothing to do with the creators and publishers of Excalibur!
jetdv wrote on 7/9/2003, 9:06 AM
lnetzel,

I wrote the code for Excalibur. Gary provided many of the ideas for what to include in Excalibur. Neither of us are Sonic Foundry employees. We tried to pick things that are missing in Vegas and/or provide easy workarounds for existing problems people face. We priced the product so that anyone could afford it but decided to sell it so we could get a little reimbursement for the time spent creating yet.

If you would like to ask me any questions about it, feel free to e-mail me at editdv AT jetdv dot com.

Edward Troxel
farss wrote on 7/9/2003, 9:47 AM
This is pretty much the way it works with software. Just look at uStuff.
The standard way for a software company to go belly up is "feature bloat", I'm sure there were guys at SoFo saying "if we delayed the product another week we could add this great feature to it", and next week another great idea comes along...

So jetdv and his mates took a gamble and offered to fill some of the holes that some of us might find needing plugged. Good luck to him, I hope they get enough to justify the time they spent on it AND their overheads. If SoFo do incorporate these features I'm sure he wont be peeved, at least he hasn't mortgaged his life to develop the code unlike others have done, been offered a juicy takeover deal that falls through only to discover all the features they'd developed turn up in the next OS release with the same look and feel as theirs.
Grazie wrote on 7/9/2003, 10:40 AM
farss - was it always thus.

Grazie
BrianStanding wrote on 7/9/2003, 1:13 PM
Actually, if SoFo/Sony is smart, they'll simply buy the rights to the code from jetdv and the Excalibur team and make it a standard feature of Vegas in the next update.

That way, everyone wins. The Excalibur folks get reimbursed for their time and effort (and maybe even make a profit); and Sony Foundry gets a fully-tested and refined software product that is guaranteed to enhance Vegas. That's how an awful lot of software development has occurred over time; start as shareware/freeware, get bought out by a larger company.

In the meantime, I agree, $30 is well worth the price to avoid having to wait for the next Vegas update.
dvdude wrote on 7/9/2003, 1:33 PM
I wonder if SoFo/Sony as mentioned in the last post might get shortened to SoFony after the merger :)

Andy
StormMarc wrote on 7/9/2003, 1:40 PM
I think we should just be happy that SF adding scripting support for Vegas. It's opened up a whole world of possibilities and Excalibur is well worth the money. Just think of it as a cheap plugin.

Marc
BrianStanding wrote on 7/9/2003, 1:51 PM
LOL! Or maybe... Fony Soundry? Or, Sonyc Foundry?
JJKizak wrote on 7/9/2003, 2:12 PM
I really do think that they will not use "Sofony" . This forum sure does come
up with the stuff.

JJK
Chienworks wrote on 7/9/2003, 4:03 PM
No Baloney Foundry?
No Sonic Baloney?

Or does anyone beside me even remember the "baloney" reference?
busterkeaton wrote on 7/9/2003, 5:25 PM
lnetzel,

It's called a plug-in. Are you familiar with the software world? Premiere has hundreds of plug ins. The Vegas gurus who wrote Excalibur are independent Vegas gurus. That's why you do not buy it from the Sonic Foundry site.

I think it's great that they wrote it. It's the sign of a healthy user base that people
A. want to make the product more useful.
B. think that there are enough users to make it worth their effort to make something like this available

Excalibur does work quite nicely. They have already updated it once.

Your post was suspicious and snide, and come close to defaming the reputations of those who created Excalibur. One of them has graciously offered to answer any question you have about them product. You probably should post again to apologize and make clear you were basing your comments on mistaken assumptions.

Buster
rmack350 wrote on 7/9/2003, 6:55 PM
I have to agree here.

Excaliber is a third-party plugin. It automates things that you could do very tediously on your own. It also makes use of a free progamming language that you could learn to use if you had the time and inclination.

The scripts included in Excaliber are copyrighted. You can read them, you can study them, but you can't copy them and claim them as if they were your own.

There are lot's of scripts available. Some are free. Some ask for money for their creator's efforts. I'm sure that some of the ideas will get incorporated into future versions of Vegas-especially attempts to do batch jobs, create EDLs, etc.

If you actually NEED the tools in Excaliber then $30.00 isn't much. If your time is worth money then $30.00 is nothing. You'd make it back in a day. It's not a big imposition to buy a set of useful scripts from other Vegas users

Rob Mack
dvdude wrote on 7/9/2003, 7:46 PM
"Sonyc Foundry" -- Good one!!!

The editor's name will naturally change to "Wegas"

Sorry, it's been a long day - time for my nap now.....

Andy
PeterWright wrote on 7/9/2003, 8:22 PM
The notion that SoFo should incorporate peoples scripts is overlooking the idea behind application scripting.

It gives us, the users, an open ended ability to make long tedious jobs happen easily - SoFo have done their bit by adding scripting - as far as I know Vegas is still alone in this - the rest is up to people's ingenuity and ability - what a great idea!

The fact that Ed and Gary have taken this a step further by putting several scripts into one with an easy GUI is a great example of this ingenuity.
Goodness know how many hours they put into it - I hope that the modest price they are charging has more than compensated them.

With the proliferation of scripts, the only improvement I would like to see is an increase in the max number of icons for scripts above the timeline - maybe some kind of drop down arrangement will save space.
jetdv wrote on 7/9/2003, 8:54 PM
With the proliferation of scripts, the only improvement I would like to see is an increase in the max number of icons for scripts above the timeline - maybe some kind of drop down arrangement will save space.

That's one of the reasons Excalibur is 12 tools on ONE button!
RichR wrote on 7/9/2003, 11:42 PM
Excalibur paid for itself the first day I used it. Get your $30.00 and go get it! SoFo included scripting for just this purpose.
lnetzel wrote on 7/10/2003, 2:07 AM
I'm not gonna appologies for my questions and thoughts but if people were offended sure.. sorry, that was not my point. I did'nt know that the people that create Excalibur did'nt work at SF, I got the idea that they did. I got the feeling Sonic Foundry did another "CD architect" kinda thing.. which pissed me off at the time too... For those of you not knowing of this, SF, removed the support for the CD Architect pluging in Sound Forge 5.0 and then released it as a stand alone application, to make more money. Made me not upgrade from 4.5!

I think Excalibur is a great thing and will probably buy it as I wrote before.






sqblz wrote on 7/10/2003, 10:08 AM
busterkeaton,
how harsh !! do you smile, ever ? ;-))
busterkeaton wrote on 7/10/2003, 7:58 PM
sqblz,

I only smile when I am out of character. :|

By the way, it really bugs me when critics say Buster Keaton had an unexpressive face, when it fact it was supremely expressive, but at the same time very subtle. You could always tell what his emotions were even though the changes in his face were minimal.

lnetzel,

You don't have to apologize for you questions and thoughts and I can understand your anger at Sofo for the CD architect thing. However, I didn't want that anger directed at the Excalibur folks who have always struck me, on this board and others, as pretty decent folks. Someone who has only checked your first post may have gotten the idea the Ed and Gary were kind of shady and that is not the case.

Buster.
GaryKleiner wrote on 7/10/2003, 8:41 PM
>Am I the only one who thinks this should be for free and included in vegas?.. <

Yes.

Gary Kleiner
Co-developer of Excalibur and not an employee of SoFo.