Rendering in the alpha version was blazing fast.

Finally, an actual benefit statement. Thank you!!

Now, the question is, HOW much faster? And compared to what? Since we have created all sorts of Vegas benchmarks, I'd like to see someone benchmark this prototype system and compare to the identical computer, running current implementations of Vegas that we can purchase and use today, and then publish the rendering numbers.

Also, I have seen multiple streams of video at the same time, and they make wonderful demos, but don't necessarily mean a darn thing. What am I talking about? Well, I was closely involved with a company called Be Labs over a decade ago, and that was exactly what they demonstrated. It wowed everyone that saw it. As part of my decision whether to get involved, I set up a meeting with a guy named Bill Loesch, VP at Pinnacle, and asked him if his company was planning to develop for the Be O/S. He said there was no point, because none of the advantages inherent in the architecture, and none of the things in the flashy demo had any real practical value to someone trying to edit and render video.

That was 1994 or '95 (can't remember exactly right now). Perhaps this is different. However, I've seen so many of these movies before (like when Java first came out and was supposedly going to be a threat to Windows because you could write once and it would immediately run on all platforms), that little red flags go up when I see them again.

I've also been involved in LOTS of software development where the engineering department finally convinces management to re-write the code from scratch so we "can do it right this time." Five years later, after promising to be finished in two years, they finally launch a product that runs at half the speed of the old program, is twice the size of the original predicted code footprint, and now has a whole NEW set of problems and mistakes built-in.

It's not that one should never start over again, but it says that the goals need to be extremely clear and the benefits from the technical changes need to be explicit. Let's remember that CP/M was the O/S created in the late 1970s, and the core of that code (DOS was basically pirated from CP/M) was still running in the Win98 SE and WinME system thirty years later. Win2000/XP was the complete re-write and was certainly an improvement, and none of us would go back to 98, but we should also remember that these new O/S programs were hardly a revolutionary step forward and definitely did not provide the performance improvements that they could have if, for instance, they had included preemptive multi-tasking just to name one major item that was mentioned in an earlier post about IBM's OS2.

So, I will patiently wait to hear about the real benefits.