megabit

At the moment that seems to be true, at least until Cineform updates their Aspect HD accelerator for CS4. Currently it only works with CS3.

I got these rendering times using a 10-second Cineform HDV clip (High quality) with a heavy Magic Bullet Looks effect applied:

Sony Vegas 8/NEO HDV: 244 seconds
PPro CS3/NEO HDV: 220 seconds (about 10% faster than Vegas)
PPro CS3/Aspect HD: 187 seconds (about 23% faster than Vegas)

I still prefer the editing experience in Vegas compared to PPro. It's other things in CS4--Photoshop, AE and audio transcribe in PPro that I really like. Creating disc label and DVD jacket cover artwork using Photoshop's smart rescaling feels like a miracle to me.

I've got an Intel 1.8 Ghz Core 2 Duo, nVidia 8600 card, 2MB RAM, XP SP2, raid 0 video drives.

Mark

Someone asked me where I got the idea in another thread that the sales of CS4 products were weak. Here's a link about Adobe laying off 8% of it's workforce:

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10783&Itemid=1

As someone who uses both Vegas and Premiere CS3, I also agree that Vegas is much more intuitive and easier to use (at least for me). But the differences are really modest. The advantages to Adobe products are the integration of PP with After Effects and Photoshop, the availability of many more tutorials and 3rd party plug-ins and the cross-platform capabilities between PC & Mac.

all edit systems are harder for me to get around than Vegas,, cause I know vegas so much better,, cs4 is pretty slick in my opinion... no crashes but also no long edits,,prefer vegas you bet cause its quicker for me ..but one thing i like about premiere and any other program i use is the preview screen is Always clearer than vegas,, no matter what settings i have vegas on.. no comparison

It's other things in CS4--Photoshop, AE and audio transcribe in PPro that I really like

You actually like the audio transcribe? I found it to be next to useless.

Guys, the thing is that my opinion is not biased by the Premier GIU being something new to me.

To the contrary - I used PP 2.0 a lot before I actually switched to Vegas some 2 years ago.

I got the upgrade from CS3 to CS4 mostly using credit card rewards points that I had accumulated. If not, the cost would have been too great to justify the upgrade. I don't think CS4 has any real killer must haves compared with CS3. I think that due to cash flow, most folks are holding back for a while. I don't think it is just Adobe being effected, it is everybody. The amount of 50% off sales going on right now, is unbelievable. If you have the cash, now is the time to buy.

Guess it goes to show, something is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it.

Ditto, I have CS3 and cant see anything in CS4 that makes me want to upgrade. With regard to PP, I rarely use it as i dont find it intuitive.However the ability to port things between CS4 platform is very flexible. One thing I do like about PP is the ability to render directly to flash without having to make a conversion.

Derm

>>You actually like the audio transcribe? I found it to be next to useless.

I agree it's not very accurate, but for automating the logging and searching of clips for documentary projects I find it helpful.

I used Premiere & After Effects for a couple of years before going to Vegas. I've never looked back - I can really fly with Vegas - never with the Adobe packages (but I still use Illustrator and Photoshop regularly)

That's pretty much it for me too. Sitting down with a client to review an edit using Vegas is one quick way to loose a client.
The visually offensive look of the GUI gets you off on the wrong foot. When playback drops to well under 1 fps followed by the audio dropping out you're really in trouble. For certain the competition is more involved to use and takes more time to get to the actual edit. Once you're there though things are much smoother in any serious NLE other than Vegas.

I too switched years ago from Ppro to Vegas. Vegas certainly had major shortcomings but it showed serious promise and it lived up to that for a few years. Sadly of late the piecemeal attempts to keep up with the competition and be more appealing to the bottom end of the market have left me with an overall negative and very costly Vegas experience. Almost all of the serious players that were here when I first joined the Vegas experience have left out of frustration. Sad really, so much promise sacrificed to dogma and easy sales.

Bob.

Good points... interesting, Bob.. thx for that.. which of the higher end NLEs do you think are best, eg avid/pp etc? So far I'm still using Vegas because it's what I know so well, but the integration of PP with other parts of the adobe suite is a strong pull in that direction, and the lack of any serious updates for Vegas lately, (or ever, to be honest..V4 and V8 are very similar, a few updates these last 4 years but nothing earth shattering or competitive w/current nles), makes me think I'm missing out by not mastering the learning curve for higher-end NLEs.

-k

"The visually offensive look of the GUI gets you off on the wrong foot."

I COMPLETELY disagree with you on the "offensive look" of the GUI Bob... although something like that is more "eye of the beholder" based than anything else, but I will agree that frame rate playback NEEDS to be drastically improved. Hardware acceleration is not the PERFECT solution but it sure is a step in the right direction. Even Cyberlink's cheap consumer level Power director 7 is going forward with Hardware acceleration.

It USED to be that a pure software driven program was a good thing because you didn't need a lot of expensive hardware to make it all work. But today the hardware is cheap and plentiful and the codecs being used have gotten a lot more complicated. There is no reason in the world why Vegas should not be taking advantage of the more powerful GPU's and on-board video memory out there today

Having tried PP CS4 I can say it's a big improvement on CS3 when it comes to AVCHD, and SCS should actually look at it to take some tips when it comes to that format. While it's still not implemented perfectly, it's much better than Vegas. For example, in Vegas if you want to do a smart render of about one minute of the timeline with some events that have filters, some that have transitions, and areas that were not touched at all, if the source format is HDV and the prerender module is HDV, Vegas will do it as it's supposed to be done, only rendering the parts that are necessary. But if the source format is AVCHD Vegas will pre-render everything, regardless of whether you choose a pre-render module with AVC format, even Sony's own AVCHD.

If you are working an AVCHD project on PP CS4, when you pre-render a part of it, it only renders the parts that are necessary (transitions, effects) to MPEG-2, obviously not intended as a final format, but just for timeline previewing purposes. The result is flawless.

PP CS4 also has smooth playback of AVCHD on the source monitor and the timeline. Vegas, with a quad core CPU can be 29.97 at times but then decrease to half of that or worse for no apparent reason. Premiere stays always at 29.97, which makes previewing much easier.

With all these improvements, Adobe still hasn't implemented smart-rendering of AVCHD for the final render in the same way that bundled applications such as HD Writer (Panasonic) or Pixela ImageMixer (Canon) can, which to me, at this stage, is just pathetic. I would be more lenient in this matter if these bundled apps didn't have smart rendering, but they do, and they are bundled applications. Professional applications are always supposed to be far better than bundled ones. Still, at least Adobe CS4 provides a much more decent way of rendering back to AVC than Vegas does. In Vegas, if you want to end up with a BD5 or BD9 in AVC format, 1920x1080 60i at 20 mbps (about the highest bitrate a Blu-Ray player will be able to play consistently on DVD media), you would have to render your project to the Sony YUV codec, ending up with a humongous file that then you would have to import into DVDA 5 and set it to recompress to the final format, because Vegas 8.1 doesn't export to AVC higher than 1440x1080 at 15 Mbps, and Vegas 8.0c can't do better than 1920x1080 at 16 Mbps. Needless to mention, all this requires a colossal amount of time and hard drive space. So, all the time you saved by taking advantage of the excellent design of the Vegas timeline is wasted and then more by the post processing involved to put the edit into an HD disc.

In Premiere CS4, at least you can render to AVC format from the timeline, without any intermediate humongous file. They came up with a copy of Apple Compressor callled Adobe Media Encoder, so basically it's the same thing than with FCP, you send the render to the second app which communicates with the NLE.

Another advantage of Adobe CS4. In Encore CS4 I was able to import an HDV file and burn it to a BD-RE without recompression (except for the audio, which I set to PCM, so it didn't matter). In DVDA5, this just wasn't possible unless I wanted to recompress the file and wait for hours. The disc made with Encore played perfectly in my Blu-ray player, anamorphic 1440x1080 at 25 Mpbs originated in my old Canon HV20.

All this said, as far as editing in the timeline goes, Vegas is still the best. Premiere is good, as well as FCP, but with Vegas you can get more done in the timline in less time. It's a shame that it's so full of bugs and design flaws. One can only hope that Vegas 9 will be better, but who knows.

I use the audio transcribe daily. I'll do most of the edits in Vegas, export the audio file, extract the speech to text data, and finish work in Vegas.
For web, archive, datamanagement, and many, many other reasons, speech to text is priceless, IMO.

You're missing the point about the look. Personally I don't care, some of the programs I use to make a dollar look absolutely horrid. But what you and I think isn't the issue at all. It's what client who are paying by the hour think that matters.

Perhaps inadvertantly your "eye of the beholder" comment is right on the money. I'd suggest you read "Color Correction for Digital Video" By Steven Hullfish and Jaime Fowler. Our eyes and how we perceive color is strongly influence by the things in the surrounding environment. "Adaptive white point" is a term used many times in the discussion of this point. If you're trying to do color correction or even judge the brightness of your video your perception is shifted by the colors and brightness of everything around you, the brightest thing will have the strongest influence. It should not be the monitor(s) displaying your timeline etc. It's for this reason that a very dark muted color scheme is the standard. Serious clients know this, they've been in grading suites. They've been in editing suites. They know how things should look and they understandably react negatively when they see something that was clearly not designed by people who understand this.

As for playback rates, it'd take a complete rewrite of Vegas to fix this I suspect. The cost of hardware is irrelevant. If you need it and have the clients who'll pay enough to justify it then the investment is purely a business decision. At times I've had around $100K worth of VCR and monitor hung of one of my Vegas systems. Another $5K is kind of neither here nor there. Not having the option to use it is kind of important.

Bob.

I think both PPro and FCP get that framerate by forcing (or at least encouraging) you to render things. In PPro's case it'll show a red mark above things it deems to need a render.

SCS could be much smarter about this.

As it stands, anything on the timeline has more overhead and risks slower playback than it would in the trimmer, so there's a computation tax going on there. Conceivably, if Vegas actually maintained a rendered version of the timeline then it could reduce most of this computation down to, at least, a less frequent check to see if the render matches what's in the tracks. So for example, Vegas could maintain a red/green-lined track internally that wouldn't be visible to the user as anything more than a red/green line. Where it's green, Vegas just does difference checking and otherwise plays the track.

To do this, Vegas projects probably need to have an output format specified in the project, a location for render data, and a means of profiling the system and the render disk to help Vegas decide just what format the prerenders can be written in. For instance, if your prerender destination has enough real throughput to play an uncompressed HD stream then Vegas could offer that as a prerender format choice, if it only has enough thoughput for a 4:1:1 HD stream (a custom format) then it should offer just that. The goal should be for Vegas to be able to write prerenders to disk in a way that ensures the best playback your system can deliver. If that leads users to install specialized storage then so be it.

Vegas already has the bones of a decent strategy for writing prerenders to disk. Currently, Vegas caches frames into RAM as it plays. If Vegas can only play a 30FPS timeline at 1 FPS then it can probably cache at a rate of about 1FPS, If it's playing at full framerate then it doesn't need to cache at all.

Rather than or maybe in addition to caching to RAM, Vegas could use a custom prerender file format that allows it to dump those cached frames from RAM to the file. It'd maintain a file or group of files for the entire project with data in those files only at the frames that it has data. The rest would be 100% transparent alpha and as Vegas reads more frames it'd write them into the prerender files. I think this is basically what Vegas does now in RAM so the scheme is to transfer the frames from RAM to disk.

The format probably needs to accept data in a 8 or 10 bit RLE compressed format and probably needs to support reduced sampling and frame sizes. For example, it might be saving cached data at half HD resolution and 4:1:1 sampling because that's what the disk profiling determined was a reliable rate.

That's one option but it kind of ignores Vegas' no-recompress features. So to take that into account maybe the key is to allow a choice of prerender methods-you either choose a Vegas RLE method or you choose to match your planned output format in which case Vegas has to write blocks of the timeline to files of that format.

In either case, Vegas should be able to skip prerenders if it's not needed.

As far as the interface goes, Vegas is very plain and sometimes that works against it when first impression matter. The cheapest course would be to leave it alone, next might be to redesign the interface (remember that we're talking about the entire SCS product line), and probably the most expensive course would be to make the product line skinable with savable themes.

Rob

"Our eyes and how we perceive color is strongly influence by the things in the surrounding environment. "
If you're complaining about the color... then that can be changed quite easily. I run Vegas in a gray shade as opposed to it's default lighter, whiter color.

As for re-writing Vegas, I could call that a bit of overkill. Rob has a valid point about pre rendering. All you need to do is take it to the next level. Avid Liquid has a rather unique feature called BACKGROUND rendering. It works similar to PP where the gpu effects on the timeline are rendered by the video card but in addition, the timeline pre rendering is done as a background task while you do other things. The background rendering automatically kicks in when a 3D or more complicated effect is used and renders that part of the timeline. You go one to insert another effect ahead of the one you just inserted and by the time you're finished that... the render is done on the one you inserted before. As a result you get pretty much 100% frame rate on playback of the time line without waiting long periods of time for prerenders to complete. It's a pretty unique way of accomplishing the task..... one that MC doesn't even have.

Sad really, so much promise sacrificed to dogma and easy sales.Right conclusion, wrong reason. The correct reason? The good people (at SF/Sony) either physically or mentally checked out several years ago. Whoever is left, just doesn't care, or simply doesn't "get it." I still can't believe that we never see any posts from a product manager in these forums.

There are many things I can forgive when it comes to people who work in marketing and engineering, but not caring is simply not forgivable.

The only reason I am still using Vegas is that I am too old to learn anything else at this point.

I find that structuring software on speed is not a great idea. In other words to say that PP is 23% faster makes no difference to me.

Eventually POWERFUL cpus will be strong enough to handle anything Vegas throws at it in moments and render times like 223 seconds becomes more like 10 seconds due to the massice cpu ability.

speed will catch up in time as technology moves on. Simply because vegas does not use a vid gpu does not matter to me.

Its sort of like the 3d games these days. My vid card is 100.00 7600gt on a 6600quad and my games which I was (2 years ago) buy a 500.00 video card no run beautifally. so I'm saying vegas is fast enough and as these chips grow more in power the speed issue will not be an issue. However, marketing is EVERYTHING!

Sony would own (I believe) if they would market the software better.

I agree with the OP that Vegas is a AWSOME program to use. I used liquid and even pinnacle users didn't like it because they had a hard time switching to the high end liquid 7 (at the time it was version 7).

just another plug for sony : )

Aug

........ I still can't believe that we never see any posts from a product manager in these forums.......
come on John remember a few months ago someone graced the forum and had a beta of some sorts,, then let the thread get to a gazillion posts with no one being able to find the beta,,, not caring... come on ,,, sony is on top of it ,,,,geeze.. Ooh bama just scored !!

Ooh bama just scored !!24-20, Florida ahead, and with the ball.

[edit] Any re-broadcast, re-transmission, or re-use without the express written permission ... I guess I violated another rule ...

P.S. to my last post.

Number of posts in this forum (Vegas Pro), for each year:

2004 9.175
2005 7,913
2006 6,113
2007 5,553
2008 5,029 (ratio'd up to the end of the year)

I'll let you draw your own conclusions ...