Hi Dave:
That would be a long list. The general direction Avid is taking Media Composer for one. Version 5.x is considered by most MC users to be a total disaster, and the most buggiest version in 20 years of the product's existence ! Changes made by Avid to the application's UI are illogical and slows one down dramatically in their workflow. Also, the TCO of the MC product is too high to justify for our business size and operations. MC has the most limited list of certified PC and MACs it's guaranteed to work on. Of that narrow list, only the highest of the high end laptop workstations, costing thousands of dollars to purchase and configure will meet Avid standards to run their MC software ! With almost every new *full version update of their MC product, one must also upgrade their PC system to run that new version of their software resulting in hugely expensive upgrades to hardware matrixes as well as software !

*Last, but not least: The horrendously nauseatingly arrogant attitude of the company toward the client !

Time to switch,

Mark

"The horrendously nauseatingly arrogant attitude of the company toward the client !"

That has always been a huge problem with Avid.

Just so you know (and I'm sure you do), there's people here who feel very similar about how SCS is treating Vegas it's user base.

On your topic, I just used my wife's Core 2 laptop last Saturday to sit down with a client & go over a video. Straight playback of HDV from an external USB2 driver was 30fps at some points, dropping down to 11 at others on Preview - Half resolution (was just the little preview window in Vegas, not full screen). No fx, etc. I believe the frame rate drops were due to fragmentation.

Normally I ram render what I want to preview if I did complex compositing or FX.

Best thing I would suggest is try the 30 day trial. Only thing you can't do is mpeg-2/ac3 renders. Treat it like a real project. It's going to be different UI, responsiveness, etc., so be patient.

You might want to read this thread to get an idea of what to expect.

Mark Job from the dpsEdit list, right?
Always a pleasure to welcome a convert to Vegas :)

Here are two recent threads for you to take a look at.
Core i5 laptop editing?
ot: new 17" laptop WITH firewire?

Mike

Hi Mike:
Oh, I didn't say I was a convert. I simply am researching some of the other software NLE alternatives out there on the market. I still swear by and not @ Velocity with the Altitude HD hardware accelerated board. However, I have heard many good things about Sony Vegas, so I've decided to investigate it.

Mark

Vegas has got many, many good things.
You seem to be looking for Nirvana and on a laptop at that. I personally think you've set yourself up for a fall no matter what software you look at. Adobe with their Mercury playback engine might get you close however I don't know of a laptop that's got the GPU to run it.
The problem gets back to todays high compression long GOP codecs that are not that edit friendly.
In your quest I think you'll find "one man's meat is another mans poison" is pretty much how it pans out with NLEs at the moment. Vegas's huge strength is audio, no other NLE offers what Vegas does in that regard.

Bob.

Oh, I didn't say I was a convert

Mark, we can only hope that you soon will be :)

My workplace (community college) left Velocity behind back in the 8.2 days as it was just too much for non-video students to learn.
It's still here but the only time it gets used is when I have greenscreen work to do on Digital Fusion.
Vegas is a real dream for me as I can get someone up and running doing basic edits in under 2 hrs.
The only thing I miss about it is all the real time features it had.
Other than that, the audio tools in Vegas blow it away.
Maybe it's gotten better since I dropped out but the poor audio handling was always a sore spot with me.

I don't know if you've had a chance to download the trial version and play with it or not but I would encourage you to do that.
Give yourself some time to get used to it as Vegas does things a lot differently than most of the other NLEs out there.
This is a great forum with users ranging from beginners to seriously experienced professionals who are always willing to share their expertise.

Mike

Mark -
The grass is always, etc....

You will hear from all sorts here as well. There's a couple who often threaten to jump ship *to* avid, but they somehow keep showing up in the Vegas forums.

I've had very few interfaces with Sony support and they were always pleasant. I have a dual-core laptop that I take into the field, but I would never edit anything HDV or AVCHD on it because the preview would be too jittery. In the studio I edit on a quad-core HP computer and most of my HDV work previews just fine.

Vegas does not use the GPU for preview rendering. There's a lot of forum controversy over this, but when you realize the hardware flexibility of a processor-intensive program, you'll appreciate *not* being tied to a specific hardware platform. (Coming from Avid, you should really appreciate it all that much more). Vegas likes lots of RAM and lots of CPU power.

Hope you hang around...

Steve

Hey Bob:
I don't need Nirvana, I need cost effective functionality at a reasonable TCO path.

Mark

I have a similarly powered HP Core2Duo laptop. It runs great with mpeg2 in .m2t or .mxf formats. It also runs great with footage converted to the Cineform Neo HD codec. Nowhere near as good preview performance with other formats.

Vegas has a niche that it fills nicely. That is, for the editor who is working on projects by himself from start to finish. You can't give a project to a Pro Tools audio guy and have him fine tune the audio on a Vegas project. You can't do an EDL list that somebody outside of the Vegas world can make any use of. Vegas doesn't really handle timecode off a camera properly.

None-the-less, if you have an EX1, EX3 or HDV camera, you can put the footage on a timeline right off the bat and get right to work. If you don't mind transcoding your footage into Neo Scene or Neo HD, you can work quite nicely with other cameras as well.

There are some other differences. Vegas previews at reduced resolution on a system like your laptop. This doesn't bother me, but if you are working in a situation where a producer is breathing down your neck and wants to look at high resolution images while you work it can be a game stopper. On the plus side, you don't need to render out your transitions. This makes for a fast work flow.

The audio in Vegas goes beyond what most editing software can do, but not as far as if you are handing off the project to a Pro Tools editor. For me this is great. I can do pretty much everything I need to do in Vegas and don't have to go outside of this environment. If you are working on Avitar 2 however, Vegas may not give you all you need and you simply can't open a Vegas project in other audio software. It just can't happen.

Vegas uses scripting. This is incredibly cool and something that editors in other formats don't have. I have scripts that generate slide shows, normalize all the selected audio clips at once, batch convert formats and a whole bunch of other useful things. This is my absolute favorite thing about Vegas and perhaps the main thing that has kept me from switching to anything else.

For me and I suspect most others here what we'd like is full raster playback from the T/L at full framerate, that is our Nirvana.
To achieve that with things such as AVCHD and H.264 on a laptop is difficult, Vegas likes lots of CPU grunt and plenty of RAM.As others have said why not simply download the trial and try it for yourself, do the same for the competition.

Vegas has certainly been very cost effective for me over a decade. I've used it to earn an income doing both video and heaps of audio only jobs, in fact I've probably made more out of it doing audio only.



Bob.

Hi Mark
download the demo and give it a run,

i had the misfortune of using MC5 a couple of weeks ago the amount of time wasted compared to using Vegas Pro was huge

i was glad to get back to my own editing suit

i use Vegas on a sony vaio lap top when im doing any conference filming so i can put a fast edit down to show the clients before the end of the conference
so far its never let me down,

then ill take it home to my main editing system and iron out anything that needs sorting,

so give it try its worth it

well lawrence summed up the 'problems' very neatly in his above post. vegas is NOT a collaborative nle by any stretch of the imagination - so don't even think about it.

nor can i comment vis a vie mc5 since i haven't touched another nle in any seriousness for years. why? because vegas does everything i need as an indie producer of everything from tvc's through to dvd release features.

but i think you'll find the ui will take some getting used to - but once you get over it, you'll be more than happy.

as often written, download the trial - there's nothing like a hands on experience to get the feel of something. (i did that with the 'new' lightworks. shame really....)

Hi Lawrence:
You wrote: "Vegas doesn't really handle timecode off a camera properly."

….Oh man ! This would be a deal breaker for me ! I simply have to be able to work with the "Source Time Code," from HDV source camera tapes. I also need to be able to capture source TC from SONY XDCAM HD 4:2:2 clips from a Convergent Design Flash XDR or a Nano Flash solid state digital CF Card recorder.

Mark

Well, Vegas reads the TC in the DV/HDV file, and it uses it in EDL's. It doesn't display the TC in any way & if you want you can manually type in your own time code for the media file/event to use.

I think Lawrence's statement may need some qualification. For me, over 9 years from DV through HDV to now MXF files from an EX1, Vegas has always been reliable for handling source time code from a Camera. The exception, strangely enough, is that the very latest version, 10.0c, and maybe 10.0b too, has inexplicably lost at least part of this function. There is a thread here where it was discovered that applying TC FX at media level, which should produce a burned in TC panel showing original camera TC, each clip was starting at Zero. I assume this is being corrected for the next update.

There maybe other types of cameras with problems, and perhaps Lawrence knows more about this ...

"That would be a long list. The general direction Avid is taking Media Composer for one. Version 5.x is considered by most MC users to be a total disaster, and the most buggiest version in 20 years of the product's existence !"

Yes... well I have said for a while now that MC5 is pretty much proof that Avid is a bit 'lost at sea' and have no idea which way is up or down anymore. It's clear that they're trying to appeal to a larger audience than just Hollywood now and they want to (and NEED to) involve the smaller indi groups and independents. The problem with that is they need a program more like Vegas with COMPLETE ability as opposed to just a great cutting ability. They clearly recognize this and have done things like AMA, which was SUPPOSED to make file input a bit more universal... but in actual fact has pretty much belly-flopped.

IMO.... MC (in its existing form) will never be a complete program for the smaller independents and the more Avid tries, the more threads like this we will see. MC was never supposed to be a universal one-stop-shop and attaching a bunch of 3rd party programs and throwing AMA into the mix is nothing but a band-aid solution. The catch-22 to all of this of course is that Avid is now in a position where they MUST enlarge the MC user base. And of course after getting rid of express pro, Avid Liquid.... and soon Adrenaline, all the eggs have been placed into this one basket. This has all become one major make-or break scenario for Avid and how it all plays out in the near future will be interesting to see.

Now, having said all of that, Vegas definitely offers things that MC can't. It's got pretty much everything required to input what you wish and output just anything you would want in a final product. On the other hand it can't offer the level of cutting detail that MC can... and I doubt it ever will... but then I tend to cherish Vegas's fast in and out approach much more and will use Adobe after effects if I happen to need a higher level of detail in a given clip or scene.

Laurence mentions the lack of source time code and that certainly has been a thorn in Vegas's side. Motion tracking (or lack of) is one of my peeves. Now there are ways around these things... which I for one don't mind doing since I find Vegas to be such a fast and efficient work flow to start with. But I think Adobe CS5 would be the only other real contender here. However I dislike the workflow of PP so intensely and there are so many more mouse clicks involved in a given task as opposed to Vegas.

I n the long run though.... you're the only one who can judge what's good in your eyes... and Vegas does offer a trial.... so take advantage.

Vegas will certainly display source TC, apart from the bug in the latest release this works just fine for XDCAM EX, HDV and every other format I've tried it with.

Vegas cannot read or write an EDL as such or any other industry standard interchange format that I'm aware of. You can use 3rd party tools such as Cui Bono to get around this. There's also the issue of all rendered files having TC start at zero no matter what, so that in some workflows could be an issue as well.

Bob.

" I simply have to be able to work with the "Source Time Code,"

Explain please.

I do multi (3) cam video editing with multiple external audio files projects every week and the lack of camera time code has never impeded me in any way.

I use http://www.singularsoftware.com/pluraleyes.htmlPlural Eyes[/link] for the little bit of multi-camera and audio sync stuff that I do

"I do multi (3) cam video editing with multiple external audio files projects every week and the lack of camera time code has never impeded me in any way"

I do multicam video editing with multiple external audio files and I use camera timecode in Vegas to sync them. I don't know where this notion that Vegas does not display camera timecode is coming from, maybe some people need to either ask questions here or RTFM.

Bob.