Not only is upgrading an option, it's a cheaper one! VF plus upgrade to VV is $270, VV is $419. I'm assuming there are no differences in support?

Ian G.

But don't I want to save (produce) mpeg2 for better resolution? Any idea how much the mpeg2 option cost is?

To my knowledge the Mpeg 2 plugin for VF is about $35 for the simple version and about $99 for the adjustable version.
I did understand that the $99 version is included in Vegas.
So updating to Vegas is a real deal.
I got myself the $35 version before I saw the update path.
I hope when I update to Vegas that I can get a refund.

Yea, I was going to upgrade to the $99 MPEG2 encoder when I saw the Vegas upgrade for $199 and went for that instead. Best thing I ever did. Vegas has the full MPEG2 encoder included. You won't be sorry.

~jr

Just to bring you guys up to speed that don't peek in the Vegas forum too often. One contributor, satish, has been developing a 3D plug-in package that does amazing things, and it is FREE. So if you are sitting on the fence and wondering if you should upgrade to Vegas, that's another reason, to upgrade. <wink>

So far there is a traditional 3D effect where you can rotate, spin, etc.., another that explodes objects, and just yesterday one that stretches. The difference between 2D (x, y) and 3D is you add the 3rd direction (Z) so objects can move further or closer from the viewer's prospective in effect adding depth of field.

I used the 3d effect on the billyboy mini-music video you can see over at Kelly's site: http://www.vegasusers.com/vidshare/ for the various text effects, and also to move the Poser figure and still images around.

johnnyroy--
hello here at the sonic forums. i got video factory and find it very useful. maybe improvements over studio 8, seems to me, first among which is that it's quicker, doesn't lock up, etc.
just looking around tonight.

only problem i've had is it seems as if the rendering (avi) is not so good for the type/text (titles, scrolling text, even just text inserts). Any clue what can be done here?

Saw another complaint on this board about the MPG2 rendering -- is this a known issue with Sonic's products?

PS--did you note that the management at the Studio 8 board erased a msg or two and close the thread there?

los santos

I'm quite happy with the mpg2 rendering, just with the standard encoder.
It might me a known problem, but I don't know about it <g>

Hey Los Santos!

Welcome to the forum. Just to bring the other Video Factory users up on our previous discussion: Both Los Santos and myself have Pinnacle Studio 8 and he asked a question on the Studio 8 forums about how to best do a slide show of still images using pan and zoom techniques (ala Ken Burns). I suggested that he look into Video Factory. I explained that I had been using Studio for about 2 years and that it didn’t handle still images that well and that earlier this year I was doing a project that required pan and zoom on still images and I spent a week fighting Studio and it wasn’t cutting it. Then I bought Video Factory and finished the project off in an afternoon. The difference between the two products is that great. I was just being honest. I didn’t realize that Pinnacle deleted my post and closed the thread.

So Los Santos, isn’t it nice to use a video editor that isn’t riddles with bugs and doesn’t blow up on you every 10 minutes? You’ll find VF to be much more stable than Studio. As I said in my previous post, I loved it so much I upgraded to Vegas.

I see you have started abother thread on the text and MPEG problems so I'll answer them over there.

~jr

To Vegas Users who upgraded from VF:
Is there much of a re-education curve?
Reg

RWatts: not really. I was a little surprised at first by two simple things. 1) there are no default tracks in Vegas. You have to add your audio & video tracks rather than having a fixed number of them already on the screen. 2) The Begin & End buttons in the effects screens are gone.

These aren't really problems though; they're actually benefits. You can add as many of each kind of track as you need. Instead of simple begin & end transitions for the effects you'll now have keyframes for more precise control. Other than these two items, i really can't recall any VF functionality that i had to relearn differently in Vegas.

Almost none. If you want, you can use Vegas just like you did VF. Some things are different like the dialogs that pop up for transitions and effects have a key frame timeline instead of the “begin” and “end” buttons. You can ignore the fact that you can do multiple key frames and just use the |< and >| buttons to jump the beginning and end of the event like the two buttons in VF did. Pretty much the interfaces are identical and you can ignore the extra VV stuff until you’re ready to learn about it. VF is really just a subset of VV. I found it to be quite easy to get use to.

~jr

Chienworks and JohnnyRoy:
Thanks loads, sorry I'm late getting back to you,
Maybe Santa will upgrade me!
RW

The only draw back is that the Vegas Forum has 4 times the amount of topics.
You can easily be bussy for an hour reading them every day.
Keeps you longer away from your loved ones.
Best luck Ruud