I agree with DSE. Avid offers many excellent things that I wish we had in Vegas. While I use both extensively, Vegas just has a better feel to it. Vegas, while powerful, has a simpler interface and Avid can be overwhelming for a first time user.

That said, I love the speed of cutting with key strokes in Avid. I still do a lot of point and click in Vegas with a few key shorts here and there. MT and MC are definitely needed in Vegas even though there are some nice MC plugs out there already.

The only thing I HATE about Avid is the amount of time it takes to create OMF files. Its ridiculous.

I think it's a matter of workflow and job requirements. Remember that in cutting most feature films, you don't stay in just one piece of software. Audio post, DI's and FX are all done in separate applications (for the most part) - I think Vegas fills a ton of gaps that even higher end NLE's don't however it really depends on the job. Is Vegas a great film cutter? No. It's not meant to be or Sony would have implemented the tools for it. However for just about everything else, it runs circles around most apps. I love the ease of cutting in FCP but for most of the DV work I do, I prefer Vegas especially when it comes to file format workability and basic compositing.

You'll never find a carpenter with just one screwdriver or hammer.. consider Vegas the multitool that like most other tools still can't do everything.

cheno

Well said Cheno.

yeah importing to OMF isnt fun.

But then again Avid is so good at handling clips with effects on them. When you render them, you can cut, move, even trim without killing the connection to the prerendered data.

One thing i really like in Avid is the ability to lets say we have 2 video tracks. On the timeline you drag a selection over the clip you want, and lets say it only selected a clip on track 1, but you wnated the clip on track 2. All you have to do is click the track 2 icon on the left and it grows your selection up. This way you can cut, trim etc the 2 clips.

this workflow gets even better and more complex. Lets say you have 5 tracks and you want to at a cut "S" in vegas, to the clips under your time cursor, but you only want to add a cut to the clips on 4 tracks and not through-out your entire edit. So you basically just select the tracks you want to cut on the left, then press H in avid (same as pressing S in vegas)

Basically in vegas, if you press S, it will slice EVERY CLIP under the timeline ON EVERY TRACK. Thats so useless to me and frustrating. (This applies to cutting clips, pasting etc. Why cant i select the tracks i WANT it to cut from? Why do i have to manually micromanage my selections with the selection edit tool (which is a workflow breaker because I can only get to it by clicking it in the tool bar, atleast make a quick way of switching between the regular edit tool, and the selection tool by holding control or something.

It just seems that Avid has cutting down so well. Overwrite mode, lift, etc. Vegas is great beacuse its easier to drag trim the edges of clips, but avid is far better overall at handling cutting/trimming/pasting etc. Vegas's simply transitioning of clips by just overlapping clips is nice, but at the same time, AVid's behavior is nice too. Lets say you paste clip on top of a bigger clip. It simply cuts the bigger clip and places the smaller one there. In vegas, they overlap and blend.

I move much faster in Avid when it comes to trimming things etc.

I just end up with so many tracks in vegas, because i cant overwrite like avid, and then i'm forced to go and micromanage so many tracks and clips. It's quite frustrating.

And i know i'm not mentioning vegas's strong points, and beleive me, there are plenty or i wouldnt be here wishing Vegas had a little bit more of avid to it.

BTW i agree with Cheno. Vegas is very good at what it does, but i still think it needs to improve greatly when it comes to cutting. Being a film cutter vs DV isnt an excuse for lacking a better workflow. Just like Cheno said, Vegas is so good at handling larger than DV resolutions, many file formats etc. Xpress pro is so limited in resolution and formats but yet it still is a better cutter. It has a much faster and easier cutting workflow.

Just thing si wish Vegas would adapt. Sometimes when i use Avid, then Vegas, i start to wonder if anyone at Sony's Vegas dev team has used Avid. There are things worth "borrowing" and it would make me insanely happier.

These things have me so torn between the two apps. I flow in Vegas pretty well excep tin the area of cutting.

Also why does "paste events" have to paste EVERYTHING? even velocity curves!

Why cant there be a copy velocity curve, paste velocity curve seperate of paste events?

There's just things that seem to be unrefined, and i get frustrated because cutting in avid is much faster for me. Avid's keyboard layout makes far more sense and i've tried to change Vegas's keys but Vegas lacks the features to complete the workflow.

IS there even a quick key or function to select the clip under the time cursor? I'm guessing not, because Vegas doesnt factor selected tracks into its selection filtering.

I also find it anoying that Vegas takes so long to open an edit with a lot of clips and lots of bins

> "in vegas, if you press S, it will slice EVERY CLIP under the timeline ON EVERY TRACK. Thats so useless to me and frustrating."

JCF, I'm sure you've raised several good points, but to do what you want here in Vegas, select each event you want to split, then "S" only splits those events at cursor position.

I put my AVID MC 9000 ($120,000 including drives, monitors, Aladin Genie and other crap) on a shelf in the garage, picked up Vegas 3, and never looked back.

QUOTE >>>"JCF, I'm sure you've raised several good points, but to do what you want here in Vegas, select each event you want to split, then "S" only splits those events at cursor position."
QUOTE END

You can do that, but it's quite difficult to select events because there are things like the transform and event effects icon on them, PLUS, its very hard to tell which are selected and which are not due to the thumbnail frames and selected loop region is either in the way, or anoying the hell out of me. The loop region drives me mad beause often i just end up drawing a new loop region when i'm only trying to jump my time cursor to a new spot.

Also if you have a lot of tracks, selecting clips gets very hard if not impossible because the clips start to get very tiny, and it becomes even more difficult to see which are selected and which arent. Sometimes you just cant tell whats selected and whats not. It's rather frustrating. It would be much easier if it were done like Avid where you simple select the tracks you want, by selecting the tracks on the left using their titlebar/volume/mute/solo etc box. You know what i mean. You can select tracks now, but it has no effect at all what so ever on selections. Which is not acceptable because the workflow is so common in Avid and its expected.


Seriously, do this.. Draw a loop region over part of a clip. Do a CUT and it cuts all of the clips on all tracks. OK we dont want that, SO lets try it again.... Draw a loop region over a part of a clip, then select the video clip (OK it turns green so its selected), then shift select the audio clip, and now the video clip turns WHITE, which is how it looks normally unselected, and the audio clip turns dark blue!

This is confusing as all hell. The selected video clip turns white!? Thats the color of an unselected clip and yet its selected?! How the hell am i to know?

The workflow should be this.... "Draw your loop region over a clip, then using the track control panels on the left, select the track or tracks you want that have a clip on it, that you want to trim with your region. Then do control X. or Control T. (the problem with control T as it is now, is that it will cut all of the clips outside the region unless you select which clips you want. I'm not sure if that can be avoided workflow wise... but the fact that selecting clips is so awkward and hard to read visually... it makes control T hard to use.

The green color is hard enough to read as "selected" because the thumbnail frames on each clip dominates the clip visually.

It just doesnt make sense to me. Its sloppy and needs to be addressed before stuffing in some other new features.

Also the timeline cursor/loop region select markers do not snap to clip ends like avid's cursor does. In avid, you hold control and drag your cursor and it will snap to every in and out on a clip, on any track. In vegas it doesnt snap once you have drawn your region in vegas. This makes it hard to adjust loop regions and selections because they are oddly mixed together often.

I haven't used Avid, so I have no basis for direct comparison. However, I think the key to a fast workflow in Vegas is to use keyboard shortcuts as much as possible. I know I've been much happier with my Vegas workflow since:
1. downloading johnmeyer's "Cuts Only" and "L-Cut/J_Cut" scripts;

2. remapping the keyboard to make the features I use most often single keystroke shortcuts, instead of the Vegas defaults (see thread: http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=303853)

3. I started using the J,K and L keys for scrubbing and the Numeric Keypad for trimming

4. Turning OFF "Snap to Markers" and "Snap to Grid Marks" (so you ONLY snap to edges/cursor)

5. Not a keyboard shortcut, but I'm also becoming more productive after really digging into Media Manager and Tags.

Maybe being able to turn those thumbnails off would be nice, they take forever to draw but they can be very helpful at times just that mostly they clutter things up. I'd add audio waveforms as well, very usefull when you need them but a pain to wait for when you don't.
One thing I've seen on many other systems is instead of drawing a waveform they use an envelope, visually more useful perhaps and less CPU overhead to render.
Bob.

You can turn off waveforums and thumbnails if you want, Farss. In Prefs, turn off "Draw Waveforms and Events." (In Vegas 6b, it's under View) It would be GREAT if we could just have a representative thumbnail for a frame, ala Premiere though. Or, you can also draw 8 bit waveforms, and they don't take nearly as long.
Not an answer to all your wishes, but part of an answer, I guess.

yeah DSE is correct, you can turn off the thumbnails but vegas looks so bland when you do it. I'm with Spot on this, It would really be nice to have a single representing thumbnail and clip name on the "event", like you have in premiere, or Avid. It would make things a lot easier to read visually. Hell they could go as far as making it completely configurable.

BTW i can NEVER find that option in the preferences in Vegas. I know i used to see it all the time, but now its hard to find. Now i go to the hidden internal options and change it because i swear i cant find it in the regular preferences now.

View menu. There is now a keyboard shortcut for it, too. CTRL+SHIFT+W
or, you can remap it. I've mapped the "Event Names" to a key because I need to turn these on/off a lot.

Vegas is a heck of a lot better than a ShopSmith, and safer too!

Rob Mack