According to the website you can upgrade from Vegas+DVD to Vegas+DVD for $249.95. Does that mean $249 is the cost of replacement, heh?

I sure hope the upgrade to V7+DVDA4 doesn't cost that much. When you've purchased two pieces of software from one company, one hopes two things: That you pay a significant less for the upgrade from the same company, and that you pay even less because you're upgrading two from the same company. I'm that price is totally reasonable and I'm just a poor college student, please let me know. I'm pretty sure I'm a poor college student, at least.

Within the first month or so the price for upgrade is $199, that's the special they've had since Vegas 4, 5 & 6. That's in the first month or two of release, for registered owners of Vegas Professional software.

Thanks for the update, ooo, $199 is nice. I just think of it as 100 bucks for the new vegas and 100 bucks for the new dvd architect. i'll have to play a few extra gigs to keep the editing on the cutting edge.

Jonathan, I'd say that the current pricing schedule already meets your criteria, even without the "early bird special."

New, full copy:
V5 alone: $450
V5 & DVA3: $675
Diff: $225

Upgrade
V5 alone: $200 ($250 less than a full copy)
V5 & DVDA3: $250 ($425 less than a full copy)
Diff: $50

If we assume that the DVDA portion is responsible for $225 of the full copy price, then it follows that you're getting it for $50 in the upgrade.

(Actually, consesus has been the AC3 encoder, which Sony used to charge hundreds of dollars for, is what you're really paying extra for in Vegas+DVD, with DVDA just being an added bonus. More and more authoring apps are including an AC3 encoder these days, though, and in much cheaper packages, so I'm not sure how true that is anymore. Unless, of course, Sony's encoder is just better.)

Rob

I think we did pay $199 for Vegas 5 to Vegas 6 upgrade didn't we? If Vegas 7 is another $199, then I wonder why $400 for so little innovation between Vegas 5 to 7.

I used my old Vegas 5 install last month while troubleshooting. I realized that I wasted my money on the Vegas 6 upgrade. Now I see nothing interesting for my needs in the V7 features... V7 should be priced as a $59 introductory upgrade and $99 official upgrade. Anything more is pure Sony greed for a token upgrade.

Just use your old Vegas version with the free .m2t splitter (http://strony.aster.pl/paviko/) and 90% of users with have everything they need and more!

As I recall the upgrade prices were:

Any version to Vegas 6 alone: $150
Any version Vegas + DVDA: $199

John

Working from the old maxim of "you get what you pay for" I'd say nowhere near enough.
Seriously, I'd gladly pay 5 or 10 times more than what been the going rate over the past upgrades to get something actually worth paying for.

Bob.

Working from the old maxim of "you get what you pay for" I'd say nowhere near enough.
Seriously, I'd gladly pay 5 or 10 times more than what been the going rate over the past upgrades to get something actually worth paying for.

Bob.
==============
Bob,

If Vegas 7 does NOT have improvements to the basic editor and/or improvements to the titler and credit roll generator as many of us have been complaining about for the last several versions do you really think that it is a matter of money? I could easily picture a higher cost and STILL no improvements to the basics. Short of a widespread botcott I don't know what it will take to get them to do it.
John

over the past upgrades to get something actually worth paying for.

Not pleased with the last lot of upgrades then, Bob? Care to list them?

Grazie,
Many of us have been crying for improvements to the basic editor. We see no reason for this to have been ignored for so long in favor of bells and whistles.

None of us are saying that the editor is so bad that it is like putting whipped cream on a turd or anything. It is more like giving Viagra to a 70 year old man which is like putting a new flagpole on an old ship.

John

That'd require me to list what we haven't got!
But here goes:

No real support for BWF.
No support for Rewire.
No support for ASIO 2 drivers.
No support fo 10bit / HDR
No real support for SDI, current support is still a joke, BMD tech who is a Vegas user suggests buying PPro. And no sign of any improvement in V7 from what I've heard so far.
No TC / EDL support, had real editors rolling on the floor over this one.

That list is far from exhaustive.

So what's everyone wingeing about?

Text, ye gods guys, go buy a product from someone who knows how to do text for video, Sony never have, even for their broadcast stuff.

Oh and hang on, seems we're getting red eye reduction, wow, why the heck do I need that, if I've got stills with red eyes I fire the photographer / learn how to use a camera.

And what else have we got in the past, ah yeah 3D planar thingies. Must be the worst effort at 3D I've never seen, if you need this go buy a 3D application.

And Beziers, pretty useless without tracking but again plenty of good applications that actually do this right, yeah they cost real money, sob.

You get my drift, we're paying money for either Mattel features or poorly done things that you can do better with other apps. What we're not getting is a better, more capable editing system, a system that can simply edit anything you throw at it, from DV to 14bit 4K.

End of rant.

Bob.

I think somebody nailed it somewhere, (maybe DV magazine letter to editor?) where they mentioned that ever since Sony bought Vegas from Sonic Foundry, it's been kind of a stepchild software program to Sony, not fully supported by Sony in the degree we'd all like to see.

Agree re significant improvements are long overdue to Vegas, to make it more competitive with PP and other high end software, especially re titling and other core functional improvements (vs whipped cream on a turd surface/minor functional changes), that we've seen these last two versions.

Compared to forums like those (excellent ones!) run by Serious Magic and Digital Juice, the near-total lack of administrative and tech support, and involvement, in these forums this past year by Sony support staff confirms this.

I think Sony hasn't put nearly the resources into upgrading and enhancing Vegas (and support) that it needs to, to be a world-class serious contender in the market space in which it's playing, that's my professional opinion. I still love Vegas and will use it as my core editing app, but that's mostly because I don't want to go through another learning curve, to master PP.

I hope Sony will dedicate more marketing, programming and support resources to Vegas, because it (and us) deserve it.


Ken

Ken
I'd like to put it around another way.
Sony have never had a flagship editing system, well not to the best of my knowledge. Xpri looked promising and they've scored some very significant sales with it but it's hard work given Sony's poor efforts in the past.

With the purchase of SoFo I had hoped Sony would seize the chance to finally add a decent edit system to their lineup. Things looked promising for a while, they were talking to the Xpri team, looked like Vegas and Xpri were going to have a mind meld, whoopee. But then it seems to have died.

Then Maddison puts out Blu Print, so the team has what it takes to write a real application and obviously Sony trusts them to do work at that level, lets face it, if they've screwed that up there'll be hell to play and I mean big time.

So why aren't they being briefed to go after the high end of the market, is Sony worried about upsetting Avid?
Or is it Apple or is it just game, set and match to Adobe?
Or do they figure go after the easy bucks. Vegas is pretty popular and as pointed out elsewhere there's a good market for a cheap editor that'll edit anything for YouTube or Sony's new toy, Grouper.com.

Bob.

Here is a nice long article about the state of affairs over at Sony.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/sony.html

- As others have said before, Sony has many divisions that don't always co-ordinate that well with each other. So what happens in one part of Sony (i.e. the rootkit fiasco) doesn't necessarily indicate anything about other divisions of Sony.



V7 should support Aja hardware. To me, Aja seems like it's more serious about providing good support for its products... unlike Blackmagic, which releases drivers that are obviously broken for Vegas. It might be a case where the two companies point fingers at each other and the product incompatibilities don't really get solved.

Whereas with Aja, the two companies might work closely together.

No TC / EDL support, had real editors rolling on the floor over this one.
I'd agree about proper EDL support.
EDLs tend to be a universal standard, unlike AAF MXF and XML (which tend to have too many flavours to actually work). In some high-end systems, the most pragmatic way of bringing things is is via an EDL and video in via SDI or frame sequences.

2- The problem may be that the consumer market is a lot more profitable than the professional market. If you wanted to target the professional market and be profitable, you'd have to charge Avid or Xpri pricing (or maybe a little less).

In the case of FCP, the professional features are really there to drive consumer/prosumer sales (where the big majority of their sales come from).

If Vegas were to target some professional users, I think Vegas 7 (and its updates) should really focus on the news market. An efficient XDCAM workflow would make a lot of sense. Vegas is strong in that you can do 95% of what you want to do inside the program quickly.

3- If you wanted to make Vegas a more viable online editing tool (like what an Avid does, what Discreet does, etc.), then it needs work in terms of:
performance (needs to be a lot faster than it is now)
interface - not quite suited for CC or effects work
better effects tools built in, and/or integration with effects packages (maybe like what Xpri did)
more hardware support (v7 should address this)
better than 8-bit quality.

You wouldn't need more audio features.

So really it comes down to what market Vegas is targetting. Probably for most of its existing users, it could refine its ease of use (i.e. why is s for split so obscure? why does ripple all have to be such a fingerful) and its performance (which v7 may address).

I am going to withhold judgement until the product is released, but let it suffice to say that at this point, this will be the first upgrade I will not buy. I understand the XDCAM stuff----a good move on Sony's part because I hear the cameras are selling very well, as for the HDV stuff---why give Cineform the money (I guess they might be licensing it from Cineform) Everything else listed is underwhelming. Red eye removal is a total joke.

Thats not to say that Vegas isn't a nice product as is---but it is a mature product and thus, I don't see how you can do much more with it (unless of course you want to rethink and redesign the product). Anyhow, for the little bit of titling that I do, it would be nice to have a module titler like the one that PPro but I guess that will never happen.

Anyway, I will continue to use Vegas for all my DV projects, and Premiere for everything else.

I think somebody nailed it somewhere, (maybe DV magazine letter to editor?) where they mentioned that ever since Sony bought Vegas from Sonic Foundry, it's been kind of a stepchild software program to Sony, not fully supported by Sony in the degree we'd all like to see.
IMO, I like that Sony Media Software hasn't really messed around with the software like Adobe does with Premiere. The releases are fairly stable and bug-free, unlike Premiere and (to a lesser extent) unlike Final Cut Pro.

You also don't have Adobe's annoying activation scheme.

2- What Sony could be doing better is working on its "synergies" between its products (I hate that silly buzzword, but it applies in this case). And I think they are doing this with Vegas 7... the workflow between XDCAM and Vegas would make a lot of sense.

Shooting on disc means less time wasted in log and capture... integration with NLEs like Vegas means that you can mark clips for background import, further saving a step in a data-based workflow. Normally you'd just have to copy all the material on your media onto your workstation and/or manually indicate which clips you want to be copying.

as for the HDV stuff---why give Cineform the money (I guess they might be licensing it from Cineform)
Native HDV editing makes a lot of sense for the XDCAM workflow, since just making the intermediates slows you down.

Agreed editing using DIs slows you down but hang on weren't we told editing m2t on the T/L was a BAD thing to be doing?
And now we're going to get it??
Maybe it's just quality be damned I guess.

I certainly don't begrudge anyone who wanted this and got it, could well be I'll find it usefull too.

However why is it that the high end CF codecs will not work within Vegas. CF are the guys giving serious creds to Adobe, why Adobe and not Vegas?

What has the PP / CF union produced?

Cinema quality editing on desktop computers. How many will actually use that? Vey, very few. How many will buy PP because it can do that? Thousands, maybe even millions.

"How many will actually use that? Vey, very few. How many will buy PP because it can do that? Thousands, maybe even millions. "

I think you just made the best case for features that "no one will use".

Oh, Red Eye. They had it in the home product so they threw it into V7 too. Maybe the tool is more flexible than just removing red eyes.

To me this goes back to the idea of offering three products: Vegas light, Vegas Small Studio (what we're using), and Vegas "MultiSuite". Or something along those lines, I'm just making up names. Modularize the products to use each other's parts, make each fit into a production flow, and manage the customer's expectations for the products.

I don't see why the light version couldn't fit into the picture as something good for consumers but also good for reviewing and logging footage, making simpler assemblies, working on the road, etc. It would need to produce things that could be used farther up the chain. Like basic timelines, batch capture lists, still exports, a storyboard, subtitling, etc.

Rob Mack

great points re *significant* performance/render speed increase capability would be at the top of my list, as to what would get me to buy an upgrade.. so that Vegas could take advantage of new dual-core pcs more efficiently

another big plus would be a significantly improved titler, either integrated or as a plug-in

it seems that Sony does a great job with their hardware (except for no dualshock controller for upcoming psp3 - what a gonzo mistake that'll be) , but the software division doesn't have the same internal level of support/funding/manpower, to make significant improvements. It's almost certainly tied to sales volumes and what's justifiable re budgeting etc.

Anyways, I'm a Vegas fan, it just looks like it's not going anyplace special anytime soon. Great opportunity for plugin developers to step up and enhance this with user-needed features.


Ken