Bummer ! Thanks DJP

Don't forget that hardware rendering costs extra $$$. The Matrox RT X2 for HD costs ~$1400. I could build a whole new quad-core rig for that proce & then wouldn't even need to WORRY about rendering as I could have 2 production machines going at once, and network rendering in vegas.

ahh Friar, but heres the thing..

Vegas vs RT2...

The RT2 allows for "realtime" rendering.. Vegas can theoretically render faster than this.. and does quite easily with a basic quadcore system.
But whats the catch? The RT2, allows for full res full frame rate (almost) preview while Vegas struggles to do this..

Wih CS3, you can combine, CPU GPU and Matrox effects to your advantage. With Vegas, all this requires additional extensive processing.

Vegas is NOT codec agnostic.. while RTx2 is.. much like any HW device, it requries its own codec to get the most out of the hardware. This usually makes it difficult to throw porjects around, but then again tehre are afew registry tricks which allow u to install teh Matrox codec into a non matrox PC

Another thing with RT2, is that its ALWAYS had issues with 720p and prolly as many issues with 1080p. In fact upon launch, the RT2 didnt even support 720p, which really RELLY shocke aot of people who were hankering for this upgrade who had already sold their SD units and jumped to teh JVC's
This issue has been "resolved' with a firmware upgrade apparently but there are stil quite afew people bitching abotu it ebcause there was no mention of it on the Matrox site.
it will not capture analaogue Component uncompressed into 720p Only HDV though firewire.. those semi pro wedding/corporate guys jumping to HDV and the RT2 "upgrade" have been sorely pissed at this

In any case, theyre support forum is ehre if you need alot of info.. in fact their forum kicks ass compared to this..
http://forum.matrox.com/rtx2/index.php?sid=da56c6c11b5a8f8bd4a1722f523968d1

Oh one thing i did forget to mention was that you CAN use GPU effects to realtime output.. but only wiht Magic Bullet Plugin.. so.. teh question is.. if MB2 can do it for a plugin, why cant Vegas do it within the ENTIRE engine??

DJ, Is Blackmagic a hardware gadget or software? Did you mean that it can only be used for previewing ?
AND, a lot has been said about it, but is the final veredict that Vegas Pro8b will not fully use 8 cores ?

Vegas *IS* codec agnostic, but not hardware dependent. Load the Matrox codec on your Vegas machine, it'll read those files. What Vegas won't do, is offer you a HAL so that you can use the hardware-assisted features of the Matrox card.
While this might be a nice feature, the question isn't to the Vegas team as to why they haven't developed code to support a specific hardware partner, the correct question is for the hardware vendor as to why they haven't written support for Vegas.
Adobe, Canopus, Grass Valley have all suffered the eventual consequences of having your boat tied to someone else' dock.

Spot I was of the understandaing that Vegas wasnt tied into any Codec which may be installed on the system..
in turn allowing it to use almost any codec available to it... in essence once can use Matrox or any other codec thrown at it.
Maybe i didnt write it correctly.. lol

Now your question regarding the HW vendor writing code for vegas... I have to totally agree with ur thoughts on this as ive seen canopus struggle when the Storm2 card (theoretically much more powerful than the RTx100) fall on its face when Adobe couldnt be stuffed dealng with drivers when PremPro was released.. I turn most Premiere Storm2 users were left in the dark while a very select few could get some activity our of the card..
It was at that time I believe that Canopus really started the push for edius... in any case, Having the option of using a hardware based editing system, much like the way Storm worked with Edius and Premiere, not only worked better for Harware sales, but also allowed users to work with different NLEs and take advantage of said hardware..

the comment regarding to tying the boat to someone elses dock rings true, and sadly, Axio and RT2 being as powerful as they are, are still sorely hamstrung by the NLE
Put it this way, i know MANY users who would love to have HW options from Matrox available to them... but they flat out refuse to go back to Premiere, Whether it be stability issues, or basic GUI issues where the user wants a faster edit flow (as opposed to beign menu driven) is beside the point.

These are users who have alot of financial flexibility to not only afford it, but advocate any other future users. In fact weve got one Avid client who spent about 40k on his setup. If anyone asks us about Avid, we actually organise a time for them to go to this one particular studio to see it in action before they make the investment. It works a treat and as editors are very visual and hands on, they can see for themselves how it can improve their work in the real world..

Im thinking if one could combine Axio with Vegas, then IMO it would be the perfect NLE setup.

Maybe its time vegas and matrox looked outside their own lil squares

I've got to say, living in a shop with three axio systems, they have a lot of potential and a lot of problems. Not all of Matrox's problems are caused by PPro, but the combination of the two is probably the best reason to want it all to be 64-bit so you can install 16 GB of RAM to work with.

Most likely, Sony should have bought Media100 right after Sonic Foundry. There was a lot of good to mine out of that company, including hardware.

What I'd really like to see is for Windows to have a HAL that would allow programs to use the graphics card as a generic processor. Both ATI and NVIDIA have programs going to use the GPU for non-graphics tasks, but each is going to have it's own API. There needs to be one way for programs like Vegas to access a GPU for number crunching.

Rob Mack

irrespective of how its done, it REALLY needs to be done quick....

I think what needs to be decided is where Vegas fits in the marketplace. There's no one perfect way to build a NLE just as there's no one perfect camera. That said there does seem to be plenty of scope for improving Vegas before even thinking about extending its reach, whatever that may be. Over the last few years Vegas seems to be jumping all over the place, exciting new features appear, get 90% done and then left to wither. At the moment I'd be somewhat concerned if they tried to add a HAL into Vegas, it should have been done back around V5 days.

And I still don't see how going to a 64bit OS addresses the problems, if you can't get it to work in 3GB, there's got to be something wrong with the fundamentals. Many of the arguments you can put up against using hardware acceleration apply equally to using more RAM. In the end at some point you have to hit a wall and it's always seemed to me that relying on just the CPU to do all the audio and video processing has got to bring it on quicker. Using hardware you also hit a wall, there's only so many channels / tracks that you can feed into any hardware accelerator before it chokes.

And yet much of the time our Vegas systems are siting there doing zip while we contemplate what to do next. And yet recently I see more and more applications smart enough to put that idling CPU to good use, be it scanning for viruses, defragging disks or looking for E.T. Why can't Vegas be doing something useful?

Bob.

Farss, "At the moment I'd be somewhat concerned if they tried to add a HAL into Vegas,"--------------------------------------- Why?

Farss, I would like Sony to offer a dual cell on a PCI Ie16 card or +3G connector to the ps3 for Vegas pro+.

I'm no more privy to how the innards of Vegas works than anyone else however software is a bit like building a house. You start off with a certain architecture, it's always a compromise and there's always certain assumptions made. Just like when you build a house you can keep adding more floors but eventually you have to address the issue of your assumptions and compromises you made when you first built the house. You simply have to go back and rebuild the foundations to take the load. Sure you can prop things up but even that only takes you so far.
From what I can glean Vegas still uses very old interfaces, vfw for video, directx for audio. That was probably fine when Vegas was a DAW that had video bolted onto it. Keep in mind back then the focus was on streaming content, that was SFs big push and it very nearly sent them to the wall, a bit before their time really.

To add a HAL I suspect the entire way the code works has to be changed. In the process we would very likely loose some of the functionality we've come to love. I've used the HAL in PPro but not to run hardware, I use it to run Cineform's Prospect 2K and it's damn impressive but it pretty much rips the insides out of PPro. What you can do today with PPro, AE and Prospect 2K for under $10K is pretty dang impressive, a few years back it would have set you back $100Ks. You could add another $5Ks worth of 3rd party plugs for AE into that as well I guess. Sure it coughs, you gotta be nice to it and learn to live with it and I'll sure not be ditching Vegas any time soon.

So the question I always ask is do we want Vegas to grow into another moster like CS3? Adobe have got a heck of a lot more resources than SCS and they're clearly struggling and that's after a complete code rewrite.

Bob.

Very unlikely it'll be done quick, if at all.

Here's what we did a few years ago with Media100. Ours were Mac-based systems and we needed to make lots and lots of WMV files. It wasn't directly possible on the Mac and would have been slower than realtime if we could have done it.

What we did was set up another box with Digital Rapids hardware and then we piped the SDI output from the Mac to the encoding box. Then we could at least do realtime encodes.

It seems from what I've been reading that not even the Xena cards actually work with Vegas, so there's no SDI output. This is probably not what you want anyway. If you have a hardware encoder that can take an uncompressed AVI file then maybe the best thing to do is feed the encoder from Satish's frameserver. This is actually not hard, once you've done it once it's a piece of cake..

Rob Mack

Generally, Bob, I agree with what you're saying. I'm not arguing that Vegas needs to go 64-bit (maybe it does, maybe it doesn't) but I was just making the argument that the PPro/Axio combo sucks down memory like there's no tomorrow and really could benefit from either having more memory available or using the memory it has more efficiently. Some of this memory usage comes about precisely because both Premiere Pro and the Axio software components are both trying to keep everything rendered (using up that idle time too).

I agree that Vegas development seems like it's jumped around. Many things that were present in version 3 (the first version I used) were half baked and are still half baked at Version 8. The word I'd like to use to describe Vegas is "elegant". I'd like to see a lot of existing features become elegant, but that would require money and resources just to create a new releases of the entire product line that might not actually have new features.

As far as a HAL (hardware abstraction layer) goes, I rather think that Windows will have to do it to reconcile the nvidia and ATI GPU coprocessing approaches. This way high powered financial applications can make use of either card (and so could Vegas).

Rob Mack

I know it doesn't really mean much, but nVidia are technology partners to Sony.

I think a big part of the problemo is how Vegas is sold. Sure you can throw anything onto the one timeline and Vegas says nothing, it just keeps struggling on. Even mixing 44.1 and 48KHz audio on a 48KHz T/L causes a serious CPU load and one that happens everytime you Play.

Last week I mixed 2K 24fps and 2K 23.976fps video on a 24fps T/L in PPro. I got a nice warning message along the lines of "Hey buddy that's really going to make me work very hard, I'll do it but...". With Vegas you have to do the thinking yourself.

Bob.