Does Walter spend hours lamenting on a user forum over $200?

What monica said, and...

...if lamenting $200 on a user forum is bad then there's surely one thing worse -- spending time responding to people lamenting $200 on a user forum.

Feel free to add me to your ignore list, cheesehole -- I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.

- jim

>You simply don't get the point, it's not the 200$, it's about the direction that should take some of us. Should we go for Premiere, for Liquid, for FCP?

You are right, I don't get the point.

>..if lamenting $200 on a user forum is bad then there's surely one thing worse -- spending time responding to people lamenting $200 on a user forum.

I'm here because I like Vegas 5 - I want to learn everything I can as fast as possible. I also get a kick out of posting screenshots of the new UI any time someone says it looks "unprofessional" and they'd be embarrassed to show it to a client. Shuts them up real fast!

I need a bumper sticker... I LIKE VEGAS 5 AND I SPENT MY $200.

I'm here because I like Vegas 5

Me too.

I also get a kick out of posting screenshots of the new UI any time someone says it looks "unprofessional"... Shuts them up real fast!

Say -- or screengrab -- what you will, saturation sliders and XP theme options don't make for less silly icons. Silly icons don't restrict workflow, but a lack of media management does.

- jim

Is anybody editing or just posting? LOL..Man this is all cracking me up! Ypou are all killing me!

Look, rememmber when windows came out with Millinium?

Man that thing crashed 30 times a day! Now how many of you no longer use windows? Vegas users need not reply, cause we are all on windows and XP if we want 5.0.

So Vegas has room to grow. Ok, I can live with that. But damn! for a program that has room to grow, it's pretty damn hot as is!

And has been for a long time. Ok, Sony didnt give us we all wanted, so what! Let them run with the ball for awhile before we drop the hammer.

Look at all of the comparisons on the net. Vegas has been impressing the experts for years already.

And for those whom have been around for awhile, please quit being so jaded and "close minded'...Nothing worse than a scientist who says something is impossible.

NLE will evolve well beyond anyrthing we could possibly imagine. That is the nature of computers and society as a whole.

One application for everything, one day you bet! DUH!

Vegas rocks and thats the Final Cut...HE HE

Can it get better? Business101 says..yes if you want to survive..DUH

Will it get better..Sony says yes..Media management? Perhaps...I dont really care, and neither did MTV, TLC, or the History channel..they just wanted their crap cut. Vegas got the job done.

Somebody should do a piece on the history of editing. A real comprehensive spot..I bet Vegas would come out shinning in the end...

Just my thoughts

Vmcdee

Be happy with your vegas5 and well spent dollars.

If we all wish to see vegas in the club of major NLE, (a club with 3 only members), we ALL should ask for a better media managment, the main lack now, instead of playing the Sony's lawyers.

And Vegas needs it NOW, not in a year, competition doesn't wait.

Vitamin_D,

I just read this whole thread hoping to learn exactly what kind of media management tools you want to see. I'm sure this would be completely obvious if I'd used the tools you're comparing Vegas to, but I have zero experience with Premiere or FCP.

I've never felt hindered by the media pool in Vegas, for projects including weddings, instructional videos, and FX heavy DVD featurettes. I'm sure I would appreciate an improvement though, but it's not clear to me exactly what you have in mind. Can you please describe what new media management tools might look like? How they would behave?

BTW, I am listed on IMDB if that helps me get a response. ;-)

Is anybody editing or just posting? LOL..Man this is all cracking me up! Ypou are all killing me!

LOL! Actually I am, and I'm only ALT+TABBING over to here while my clips render in background. The funny part is... I've made a more than $200 doing it! WOOHOO VEGAS ROCKS!

I understand it's hard to look at a product like Vegas and not imagine the potential... if only it had the Media Pool from FCP or Premiere... if only it had full MIDI support... if only we could put ACID projects on the time line... if only we could use it as a real time video sample playback utility (yes, I know someone who wants that too)...

But to wave your $200 around and demand Sony to tell us what they have in store for the future or we'll take our money elsewhere... seems pretty childish to me.

Hey Cheescake,
Can I borrow $200? LOL..I wanna check out the latest "half upgrade" from Premier..HE HE...

Now see, I have no problem what so ever with Vegas. FCP just didnt appeal to me at all. Adobe, well, it's reputation preceeded it!

I researched alot before going with Vegas. In that research I found Sonic Foundry did some amazing things in the software. Truly amazine. We do with our software what many are relying on hardware to do.

You put Vegas on a good system and it smokes. I have a friend who cuts MAD VIDEOS.... Aviddiva is the company for those of you in the know. He is very impressed with whaqt I have done in Vegas. He currently sits on top of a Avid total cost..OMG..TOO much for me!

I'd like a few features the other guys have, but they want a lot of what we already have....I think we have the leg up.

mere thoughts..
Vmcdee

Rextillian said: "Certainly you dont expect us to act like we are members of some kind of cult, blindly approving of absolutely everything Sony does."

I'll second that. As long as it's done with the respect the Sony team deserves (and they deserve much) constructive critisism of the still lacking features should be more valuable to them than all of the people saying how much they love the new release. Personally, I like to hear users honest opinions both good and bad and don't think the feature request e-mail is the only place for this type of discussion.

Calling us crybabies reminds me of the cheerleaders at the Canopus forums who always make excuses about needed improvements in the software. Personally attacking those who state their opinons is silly.

Marc

>Can I borrow $200? LOL..I wanna check out the latest "half upgrade" from Premier..HE HE...

ROTFLMAO

Hey monica,

Feel free to go spend $30,000 on an Avid, then. You'll get the wonderful clip management you so desperately want. But you'll also discover that Avid is lacking in many other areas much more cruicial.

Your point that media managment could use further improvements is well taken. But I'm highly suspicious that the media management tools that Vegas already provides are soooo bad as to make the software unusable, which is the impression you and vitamin_d would like to give.

I still want nested timelines for long format projects. I've submitted my feedback to Sony and this user group, and hope that 6.0 will include them. In the meantime, Vegas is far from unusable. I could switch to other apps that support nested timelines, but I've done my homework and I know the price of other lost features would be too high.

I think the others in the forum are just saying "fine, you've made your point; now get on with it." certainly if you just keep complaining, its not going to make anything happen sooner... and people will just be hitting the "ignore" button on your posts, probably even Sony.

complaining and making suggestions is one thing, but when it goes on so long, it usually turns out to just be a symptom of other problems not even related to the software. Zippy was a good case in point.... its clear that guy just had mental problems.

-nate

bakerbud : you're the man !

Reading this thread makes me wonder why there wasn't a big fight in the SONY booth at NAB. Or perhaps the individuals weren't there. Anyway, we could make a movie out of this. I see people taking sides, the plot thickens as we're slowly dividing into two groups. Should we call them east and west or north and south? The SONY directors biting their nails in the boardroom. The developers laughing or crying over the last posts whilst having a coffe break. The last scene brings everyone to a dark backyard in Tokyo for the final battle. Everything edited with Vegas of course. Or..?
:)
Best/Tommy

The reason this has escalated into more then it should have was because a couple of newbies from the Vegas Audio Forum stirred things up--then went back to the forum and bragged about it. This has always been an amazingly civil place where people treated even those who disagreed with the utmost respect. This troll: Rednroll, with posts like this directed at Vitamin D has really been the cause:

elevate* I'd like some answers..."

Answer: You're a big cry baby, stomping his feet like a little kid because he didn't get what he wants. People buy products because it meets their needs today. If it doesn't meet their needs they buy another product. I don't go out and buy an AM/FM clock radio in hope that it will turn into a 52" plasma HDTV down the road, and will only cost me 2 bucks to exchange them. That's exactly the same scenario you're asking for. Quit your crying for cripes sake. We don't care to hear in this forum, how much you think you spent, or that you think you deserve an answer, because you DON'T. I've spent many of thousands of dollars on Recording Studio equipment over the years, my needs change and some of that equipment has become obsolete. I don't start calling the company that originally sold me the equipment, crying that the magic lamp didn't turn into a genie when I rubbed it over the past 5 years of using it and it didn't evolve into everything I wished for.

Vitamin_D....whahhhah...wwahhh..wahhhh.....<SMACK> SHUT UP!!!!



I have always known Vitamin D to be a gentlemen. I suspect that most in here would agree with me.

Okay, i'm a newbie here so you may want to skip this (or rip into me since that's easy).

What if Vegas filled out the API for the media class properties? That is, they made public all the view data you see in the media pool? I suspect this would not be difficult to do architecturally--but it might open a can of worms for support. A user definable property or two would be cool.

Imagine some simple little scripts that could use this data (maybe to generate media) or simple applications to externally manage media through this interface.

More valuable would be an API on the capture tool where you can get to timestamps. To be useful this API would be "included" in the Vegas application (not sure how this would be structured). Maybe that's not so easy.

And maybe most of you have been through all this and don't think twice about the Vegas capture tool. Is Scenalyzer what most everybody uses for miniDV? I see BillyBoy uses an external media library/catalog tool.

These hooks for media management aren't really all that necessary for me. I'd like to write some scripts that generate titles strings of timestamps. No big deal but kinda cool. Also not having to use another tool or database is neat but not necessary. But I could see how a production house would want a Vegas API for a large media database.

All this said, I'm very happy with Vegas. I wouldn't even think of such things if the tool wasn't already this good.

Rory

It looks like some of the users are getting the drift on what viatim_d and others are trying to say. "Lets talk about a great product(vegas 5) and find out what ways we think it can improve." in no way should we not be able to discuss what we want in thefuture and get slammed for "dissing vegas".

Rory,

Thanks for the post -- that's enlightening. I wish you well with those timestamp scripts -- I'd help out but as things are my plate is full.

Can you please describe what new media management tools might look like? How they would behave?

Luxo -- thanks for this – finally someone is receptive and interested in talking rather than screaming at me :D
_________________________________________________________________________

For starters, take for example this post from an FCP thread recently, on subclips:

In FCP I can "log" my clips by annotating them with markers (which function as both Vegas markers and regions). These markers persist and are visible IN THE MEDIA POOL hierarchically under the clip. It's as if the clip were a bin. I can drop these markers in the timeline and they become "events" named after the marker. I can also "tear off" these markers to make subclips that live in the media pool but are no longer children of the original clip. However, it's always easy to:

That's subclips done right. Now, I'm not saying the developers of 5 don't deserve applause for their efforts -- but let's be honest and admit that subclips in 5 don't stack up to the workflow as described above. This gap alone wouldn't be such a big deal, but when thrown into the mix of other missing "features" media management becomes a potentially harrowing task when faced with a longform project. For instance:
___________________________________________________________________________

Media Capture, log and annotation tools – these are bearskin and stone knives in Vegas as of version 5 when compared to Scenalyzer. Go over to that site, or actually just read comments on this forum to more fully understand how improvements in this area could help our workflow. WRT Scenalyzer, a user here has written:

1. You can see a timeline representation of each clip, and can scrub and playback directly from these clips. (Press down on the wheel on your mouse to play from that position; press and hold the left mouse button and drag across the clip to scrub; hold the ALT key while scrubbing to only go a frame at a time). You can also use this facility to do explore the video clips in any folder.


I’m not saying all those things are necessary, but they combine to demonstrate how far the Vegas capture tool could go. As far as I can remember, it hasn’t changed much since 3. The one glaring problem with Scenalyzer is that it works with DV AVI’s only. Anything like Scenalyzer for Vegas would have to remain resolution agnostic and understandably that poses some problems.

___________________________________________________________________________

Nested timelines, storyboarding and other miscellanea

This is a more open discussion -- there's a lot of room to disagree about what, among several features, is necessary -- but it's indisputably clear that Vegas could learn from a lot of other apps in this area. So take what follows as large pool of suggested features from among which smaller groups of features could be culled and grafted onto Vegas over successive periods of time (and take note of the glaring omission of 100% from 5.0a as a potentially distressing sign of ambivelance on Sony's part...)

I’ve been heading off arguments on a lot of forums about Vegas’s lack in the area of media management for a while now. Most things I'm content to "work around," but many of them I'm genuinely envious of.

From an old thread, someone who writes of Pinnacle’s Edition “Purple” as opposed to Vegas:

2/ I can log (tapes) using a keyboard, not only can I log I can specify complete dialogue, camera takes (over the sholder, close-ups etc) I can specify where what goes on the timeline and in what sequence right from the logging window.

From an Edition review the same poster offered:

Also you can not only Storyboard multiple versions of your project, then select the best (If you have nothing else to do, you can in fact wrap your edit session right there play the clips back to the Deck ready for Broadcast - for a documentary style cut only edit), you can also instantly send the selected Storyboards (rough cut) right into the timeline with just a click.

As I’ve said – do I want to work in Edition, or in any other NLE but Vegas? Nope. But – when it comes time to cross the longform editing bridge, if Vegas can’t do, eh, 33% of the things outlined above, it’s going to get really trying.

If you've read this far, thanks!

- jim

>The reason this has escalated into more then it should have was because a couple of newbies from the Vegas Audio Forum stirred things up

They aren't newbies. They are our long lost audio brothers from before the forum split. :)Rednroll is an ass but he's a knowledgable one. I'll take his attitude over VitaminD's demands and escalations - "I want some answers"? Please.

Sony's participation here is WELCOME. I've been on other forums where you almost NEVER hear a peep from the company, never mind getting to talk with engineers and developers. Anyone who *demands* their attention here - threatening to edit on another NLE or just annoy us to death by bumping their rants - is just going to make the Vegas team less likely to participate freely and openly.

vitamin:Media Capture, log and annotation tools – these are bearskin and stone knives in Vegas as of version 5 when compared to Scenalyzer.

Can scenalyzer do manual batch capture like Vegas can? As in... you log the I/O points that you want and then have it capture your entire list automatically?

Nicely said, Jim. This is why there are a lot of tasks I leave to Premiere Pro. The media management is much, much better and, now that I have them, I don't know how I could live without nested sequences.

Don't get me wrong, there's a whole mess of things I prefer to do in Vegas 4, but even with a 13.5 minute piece I completed recently, initial scene construction and organizing my media is far easier in PPro. Since I use After Effects, PPro has other obvious advantages, too. I wasn't in a rush. I didn't have a deadline. It was just easier in one application than another.

I've been a Vegas user since 3.0 first appeared at the end of 2001. I had very high hopes for Vegas 5 and hoped they would have addressed these core issues. Sadly, they didn't. I'm going to get the upgrade on Premiere Pro, but I'm going to skip this particlar Vegas upgrade. Maybe 6 will get it right.

And, BTW, I don't think you'd like Edition. I don't. But I know old Fast Purple users who swear by it.

And Bakerbud, if Vegas blows away After Effects because it now has very basic masking ability... then you never had much of a need for After Effects. In another thread, somebody said Sony was going to kill Discreet. What a joke. Sadly, a Smoke seat is way out of my price range - but there is no comparing a Discreet product to Vegas, Premiere, FCP or any other sub-$1,000 NLE.

Just to remind Vitamin-D you're the one that said:

"At the moment I don't have a lot of free cash to play around with, so I think twice about spending $200"

And you're the one trying to wave the 'professional' card.

LOL!

Like I said, several wannbe Zippy types. If you can't afford $200, how professional can you be? Just wondering.

The way I see it is Vitamin-D saw some featues in FCP and like a little kid with his nose pressed up against the glass at a candy counter, is stamping his feet up and down, saying to his mommy I want it! I want it!

Like that little kid VD has yet to really explain WHY he needs it, only that he wants it. Worse there are at least 2 theads where the "discussion" is going on.