A guy I do work for uses Avid. I showed him Vegas one day and his jaw dropped. :) He currently has an editor that uses a Media 100 system..... But, when he needs something done that "can't be done at all" (to quote his editor), he calls me and Vegas! So, my AMD XP 1800, 80GB firewire drive, and $350 copy of Vegas is going to replace the other 2 editors he's used: the current one with Media 100 and the other one with an Avid system. :)

Well, they will. Contracts gotta end and stuff. :)


Oh, Zippy... you are different. Is the stress of your piolet being accepted gone now? :)

Truthfully, to be really zippy with Vegas (or any application) you DON'T use the mouse, you use keyboard shortcuts, many of which were determined/designated by AVID's workflow. At least that's my opinion. Keyboard editing in the long run is much faster once you have the flow down, IMO

EXTRA EXTRA read all about it:

"ZIppy Gives Vegas His Seal of Approval"

That should be incorporated into a marketing campaign along with his countless posts.


"Vegas.....Converting Jaded Editors One Project at A Time"

You'll come up against this sort of attitude in certain circles - it's a sort of perception ahead of reality situation.

At one level it's understandable - if you've spent a lot of money on an editing system, you're not going to leap for joy when someone tells you that their low priced one is better!

But there is so much blinkered snobbishness, particularly in the Mac/FCP world, and obviously among Avid users too.

It's quite possible, fortunately, to produce at any level using Vegas alone, and the results can be judged on their quality.

This is the kinder more gentler Zippy--but things could change quickly

To compare the two is pretty pointless. Avids interface just plains scares me and FCPs isn't much better. If I wanted to deal with that daunting number of things in front of me all at once I'd be flying jumbos.

However your mate does have one valid point. You can work on a project in DVX, take it to any avid system, load the project and hit conform and your up and running. You cannot beat that, it is a real scene stealer for people who edit every day in multiple formats and who have to work quickly.

That in no way detracts from VV, its just horses for courses stuff. Avid do what Avid do very well, Vegas does what it does just as well. I doubt I'll ever get closer to a Smoke system than to drool on it so it's a pretty irrelevant comparison. If you were talking about someone who wants to edit home movies or do an indie movie then it is relevant.

My main beef with Vegas as opposed to any other edit system is that actually making edits seems a little awkward... things like marking ins and outs and adding things to the timeline. It's too easy to accidentically click somewhere and lose your in/outs in the trimmer. I totally hate how you scrub through material (which we've been over before). I suppose if Vegas is all you've used, you'd get used to it... but I'm having a hard time switching gears.

I'm an online editor/designer and work on AVID DS all day. I'm used to a very definitive way of marking an in/out on a source clip, and an in/out on the timeline, and things like 'insert', 'overwrite', and 'replace'. I wish you could make the timeline look different; The thumbnails are usually just visually confusing and make it difficult to see where your edits actually are (and yes I know you can turn it off, but then you have the opposite problem - these nameless generic white boxes... and it's tied to the audio waveforms, so you either have to have both or neither.)

Vegas seems more "eyeball it" and drag-and-droppy.. and it just operates quite a bit differently from almost every other editing app out there. Take even DVE; "Event Pan/Crop" is just plain backwards (although it is a handy interface in certain circumstances).

I haven't done any hardcore editing on Vegas yet, mostly just putzing around with my own junk and trying to figure out how it thinks. I do like it, and bought it because at the time Premire was just too big a piece of crap to even consider (I haven't seen Pro first-hand yet, but I've heard from others that it's a gigantic improvement from versions past). Vegas is very snappy and capable.. just a bit foriegn.

And by the way, I agree with you that the AVID Media Composer/XPress editing tools are still a bit goofy for trimming/slipping etc... having to click lots of buttons and use the trim/slip window. DS works differently, and IMHO is the "best of both worlds" in that you can more directly manipulate clips on the timeline if you want to without having to click lots of buttons and tools.

In my opinion about this part of Zippy's message: "I tried to convice my friend that Vegas was a repectible editor, but even with me showing him first hand he didn't want to believe it. He said that "AVID is what is used in the industry" and "nobody needs Vegas editors...you won't get work".

Here in Holland it's like... 20 years ago people went skiing and used ski's that had a straight line.. THAT's real skiing (AVID)!!!
Nowadays everyone can do it because these carve-ski's.. THAT's not real skiing (VEGAS)..
Many AVID-users think because they had to learn a lot and it's used in broadcast-industry that it's the real thing.. and the real thing ONLY. Anyone using carve-ski's is not really editing, just toying with consumer-software.

I hate that way of thinking. Bottomline is: You can have the toys and you can be great at using them... but it's the editing decisions you make that make you a great editor!!!

Mark

". . . it's the editing decisions you make that make you a great editor!!!" Excellent point, Mark. Well put.

I like the old Zippy better ;) Yeah I know Vegas is a great program and all that, but the incessant praise... give me a break!

Laurence Kingston

Well, if you want to be employed or freelance as an editor then AVID is good to know. It is an industry standard (and an expensive one). If you're self employed and your clients are not picky about what software you use then use whatever you want. I'd go for Vegas. I think there will be some really cool things in the next Vegas+DVD build/version.
Best/Tommy

> You'll come up against this sort of attitude in certain circles

This is so true and something I came up against when I used to use Risc OS on an Acorn computer. The operating was far superior and faster than Windowz although it lacked some of its functionality and only used up 4M and was in ROM. Plus it was very stable.

Unfortunately it was frowned upon as it wasn't considered industry standard like a PC - any one care to flarify what and industry standard PC is?

Anyway, eventually the Acorn systems weren't being developed as quickly as PCs, especially for video editing so I had bno choice but to jump ship. But I still yearn for old system quite often.

Another point is that people often think they have a better system just because they paid far more for it. We'd all like a Rolls Royce but a Nissan or whetever gets you fram A to B wit a lot less running costs.

Just my pennies worth.

I am the Exec Producer of a Fortune 100 aerospace AV dept. We own four Apple-based Media 100 systems, a couple of FCP systems and an Apple DVD Studio Pro station, all fed by DVCAM, Betacam SP or DVCPRO25/50 via SDI, Ethernet, composite, component or YC as required.

Media 100 revolutionized our operations several years back when we transitioned from linear Betacam bays to NLE. M100 is easy to learn and its interface is standard across bays as opposed to each Betacam linear bay being so different and quirky that only a dedicated Editor knew how to turn the system on. We once owned a SoftImage that cost something like $100K that no one knew how to use, even after attending training classes.

Now anyone can sit down at any system and make it work.

Budgets being what they are, we produce shows with bare minimum crews of one or two and the Editor is most likely the Producer as well. My guys in reality are Producer/Writer/Director/Camera/Editor/Accountants.

When these overworked guys sit down to edit, Reliability is paramount followed closely by Simplicity, then Speed.

We rejected AVID because:
1) too expensive (think 1997)
2) AVID wasn't interested in supporting us lowly industrial AV types and
3) AVID, while it is the Hollywood/broadcast standard, is more complex to learn.

Bottom line: I know Media 100. But I personally own and use Vegas at home.

It is getting increasingly frustrating to watch Editor/Producers at work struggle and give up doing something in Media 100 that I can do in Vegas in seconds.

For instance, we need to do Year-In-Review videos for several departments composed of a bunch of still shots just screaming to be zoomed around on to add intererst quickly and easily--tailor made for Vegas's Pan/Crop feature that can be addressed on each shot without exiting to Boris or After Effects or some other program. Need to slow a shot down or speed it up? Velocity envelopes are a cinch. And it's cost effective and fast, too.

Apple keeps telling us their machines are screamers, but my experience, even with dual processor OS-X G4's driving the dedicated and very expensive Media 100 hardware, is a slow, plodding set of problems.

Media 100's new flagship is the 844X, built on a dual Xeon Windows box.

All my output ends up in a Powerpoint briefing or on a CD as an MPEG-1 or WMV or MPEG-4 or AVI, on DVD or VHS. Why not keep the media in the Windows arena?

Converting from Quicktime to MPEG via Cleaner takes about 28:1-- a 2 minute clip takes an hour to render from the M100 timeline using Cleaner. This is unacceptable with a VP's briefing to some general waiting.

I'm still playing with Vegas at home, but it won't be long before it's a real player for us at work, especially as the Macs age to unusability and we have to decide what to replace them with.

Sidecar,

When you edit with Vegas what formats do you use?

Sidecar, that is the same reason i'm doing editing instead of the media-100 guy. He kept saying "this can't be done." I said "give me five minutes." :) But, once you send lots of monry on a piece of hardware/software, you want to stick with it even if you find something better. After all, you can't keep buying the "better" thing all the time or you'll go broke! :)

I use DV right out down the Firewire. It's one of the reasons I think Vegas is a player for Industrial: we use DVCAM a lot because the image is good, the cameras are reliable and within our budget and the tape runtime is long (up to three hours per reel). When we edit on the M100, we take DV down the Firewire, so in spite of all the high end SDI 4:2:2 capabiliites Media 100 has, we end up with 4:1:1 DV anyway most of the time.

If we originate (rarely, now) using the Panasonic DVCPRO50, it's 4:2:2 and looks great...when the equipment works. Panasonic is unreliable and always has been. Sony is bulletproof.

Increasingly, we originate on MiniDV or whatever is handy.