It still provides the best bang for the buck, IMO.
You can edit an image in PShop from Vegas, been able to do that for 2 versions now. It's easier than the Adobe Bridge as well. I do wish the Vegas titler and compositor would "grow up" and wish we had other things, but I'll take the overall speed of Vegas over the Premiere package any day. Premiere has gotten *much* better, as it has started to copy many Vegas features, but it's still nowhere as stable or easy to work with.

I like Vegas.

I like it because it does not try to do everything I need half-a$$ed or impeded with bloat-ware.

Every "all-in-one" suite I have seen has failed in the long run.

I can't compare to PP, but I can compare to dozens of other video, photo, sound, and other media apps. Here's my take:

Vegas (except for the horridly bolted-on bloated Media Manager) is trim, fast, stable, and extremely cleverly designed.

Unfortunately, the last three releases have failed to enhance dozens of basic features that have gotten long in the tooth, but I'm sure this has happened because of the need to adapt to HDV. These oversights cannot continue indefinitely or else your predictions WILL come true.

To quote that famous line from "Ben Hur:" the race goes on ....

Put another way, the next release of Vegas is going to have to be a LOT more oriented towards workflow and editing enhancements or Sony will then leave themselves open to the defections you describe.

I have said in other threads regarding CS3, i will be moving to that but will still be using Vegas.

For quick cuts, color correction and multicamming, Ill be in Vegas. For anything else, CS3.

While most all in one "x" software tries to do everything, I commend those companies that try to give their customer everything they need to do the job. Sometimes it fails horribly (see Nero 7) but Adobe and MSFT are a bit different. MSFT adds smaller tasks with far less control (CD Burning etc...) in Windows so customers dont have to go out and buy high priced packages geared for power users. Adobe went out and integrated the very components needed to produce everything one could need for a feature film/commerical/web ad/DVD/BD etc... and integrated it for it all to work together nicely.

To fault companies like Adobe for trying to offer a one stop shop for anyone who cant afford a multi million dollar studio is absurd while championing programs like Vegas that seem to offer improvements and features at a much slower pace and far less integration with its programs much less with other programs.

Is Vegas' future doomed? Not at all. But for someone looking to do serious compositing, editing, etc....those people will buy a package that offers more. Vegas will still appeal to some editors looking for an NLE. Vegas is just another tool in a tool box.

The best analogy I can come up with is having a trust rachet that has always done the job for you. Then you get a new rachet set that is powered and doesnt require you to have to work as hard to get the job done. You dont throw the old rachet away but you end up using the new set a lot more. That is what I expect is going to happen to Vegas.

The puppet tool in AE sounded stupid at first ntil i saw the demo. Thats innovation. Sony used to be very innovative. But how innovative can Sony be if one of their competitors beats them to market with next gen authoring of a format that they invented themselves? Thats what I call asleep at the wheel.

Just remember that Sony's an electronics manufacturer that only barely dabbles in software. I wouldn't expect them to compete on the same level as Adobe. If they never sold a single new copy of Vegas, it wouldn't even affect their bottom line. So given all that, I don't see them worrying about keeping up with PP/CS3.

theoretically - for someone who kows vegas but has bever touched Premiere ..
what will the learning curve be like?

Mac vs PC
WordPerfect vs Word
Vegas vs Premiere

I'll use whichever allows me to get the job done in the quickest time, with the best results, at least cost (£), and with the lowest learning curve.

I used to use a Mac. It didn't adequately multi task, the range of applications was limited, it was slow, it was phenomenally expensive to repair. Now I have a PC that gives me far fewer problems. Yeas, technology has moved on and Macs are much better, but there are still time and financial costs that are prohibitive.

I used to use Word, but now use WordPerfect. It creates great looking documents with minimal effort, and at very low cost. When things go wrong, I can easily correct them, unlike with Word. If I need cross-platform compatibility, then I use OpenOffice which runs happily from a USB flash drive, so no need to install it.

I have the previous Adobe Production Suite Premium. All the applications integrate pretty tightly, and it is impressive how you can edit a PP project in AE without having to render. Learning curve for me is steep, and a lot of things feel counter intuitive. For now, I am sticking with Vegas, but will dabble with the Adobe apps just to get used to the "quirks".

I don't think PP will kill Premiere. Only Sony can do that by ignoring customer feedback.

Worley.

IMO, the philosophy behind PPro3 and its overall design is very annoying.

In the pre-Pro days, Premiere was always bug-ridden and frustrating to use.
Premiere Pro is less buggy. However, when they re-did everything with a clean slate, the re-design doesn't make much sense from a video editor's perspective. There's a lot of unnecessary button pushing and the interface just isn't geared that well towards video editing.

It also has a unnecessarily steep learning curve... you are inundated with project settings when you create a new project.

There's only one thing in PPro that I might desperately need, the floating point pipeline. Everything else that Vegas lacks I can live with, workaround or use another tool to do.
I don't have a clue why we're still stuck in 8 bit land, can it be that hard? You might well ask how many would buy Vegas because of this and the honest answer would be very few, that's never the issue, it's how many would buy Vegas because they bought it, that's the issue. That's why FCP sells, that's why Avid sells.
I sometime have to wonder if Vegas has a bad case of vertigo, "let's not aim too high or we might fall too far", onto what I just don't understand and it's very frustrating not being able to see any technical reason why the product is held back.
Probably the whole interface could be opened up too, the lack of 3rd party developement isn't because Vegas isn't popular, there's plenty of 3rd parties who would love to be able to offer more but they're hamstrung.

Bob.

The RGB 8-bit limitation is probably because Vegas is based on the Video for Windows architecture. The plug-ins are also based off VfW, with some Sofo extensions.

1b- Perhaps a different reason why 10-bit support isn't implemented is because there are limited development resources. It's ridiculous how many formats are out there! And each format variation requires some development time.
MXF, AVI, quicktime wrapper. And BWF, still image formats, etc.
MPEG2 / HDV needs particular support for RT performance.
Cineform
SDI ingest
firewire
3:2 pulldown, 2:3:3:2 pulldown (incl. flag detection)
studio RGB vs computer RGB
square pixels vs non-square
field order (this affects filter processing; Vegas does the correct thing and can process fields individually)
Rec. 601 vs Rec. 709 luma coefficients (ok, vegas doesn't handle this)
XDCAM

The list goes on.

1c- Another explanation is that feature lists are sometimes determined by marketing people, or what the developers think is a good idea. i.e. media manager, 3d compositing IMO weren't very good uses of development time.

2- Having a 32-bit float pipeline and support for linear light processing (i.e. like linear blending in AE) would be nice to have. However, that stuff as implemented in AE does come with a performance penalty!!

That's why FCP sells, that's why Avid sells.
I don't think FCP and Avid sell because of their technical quality. If you look at things like codec quality, neither FCP nor Avid conform to ITU-R BT. Rec. 601 / Rec. 709 (which has certain filter performance requirements, and at the very least call for co-siting).

I wasn't for a moment suggesting that they sell because of their technical quality, if only the world were so it'd be a very different place.
I'm suggesting they sell a lot of copies because that's what a few high profile users use.

I agree about the HUGE number of formats out there however surely all the video / DI formats can be decoded into the one fat pipeline and then encoded to the requested output format?

I'm really getting out of my depth but I'd assume once you have that pipeline in place other developers can plug into that pipeline, at least that's what PPro seems to be offering. I agree this could be a big CPU muncher but every app is going to be in the same boat, at least having it on offer would seem like a good thing, in say Vegas Extreme :)

The other thing we seem to be missing is support for 24fps, I mean 24fps not 23.976fps.

Bob.

I'm suggesting they sell a lot of copies because that's what a few high profile users use.
Ah, ok. But IMO, Vegas doesn't necessarily need to be a follower and follow other NLE's marketing shtick. It can be marketed with its own shtick... i.e. ease of use, reliability, swiss army knife-ness (what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas), simplicity, or something else.

If you look at Combustion, it doesn't dominate even though it's based off the higher-end stuff (or at least similar).

I agree about the HUGE number of formats out there however surely all the video / DI formats can be decoded into the one fat pipeline and then encoded to the requested output format?
When you do field processing (or have to deal with non-square pixels), you can't push footage into the same pipeline unless you're ok with effects (i.e. blurs) being too tall/short.

Although in every other situation, you'd probably be ok converting everything into 32-bit R'G'B' or 32-bit RGB (linear light), with a standard range. But then you have to make sure your plug-ins are designed to handle that input + output (i.e. including negative values, which allow for wide gamut).

I guess the original point is that there is a cost to every feature. In terms of filters, changing the pipeline will force developers to write new plug-ins, unless you offer an adapter for backwards compatibility (which is what AE kind of does).

Never really used PP... Downloaded the PP2 trial one day and played with it... and that was enough for me. I'll have to check out the new PP.

But I used to use Liquid and I can say that I enjoy the Vegas interface MUCH more. It's clean, and highly efficient in comparison. Vegas is also pretty rock solid... the present version of liquid can sure go off on some neat, and highly unexpected tangents!

But there are some pretty basic things that Vegas is missing... and it's a pretty hard pill to swallow. SMARTRENDER for example is now a pretty basic item, which can even be found in cheap Ulead products. With smartrender, under ideal conditions, I can render a 50 minute time line in about 15 or 20 minutes. That same timeline in Vegas takes 2.5 hours, maybe more. Not only do you save time, but because only the parts to be render actually DO get rendered, there is less quality loss at the end.

This 'almost' non compatibility with other products is a tough pill to swallow as well. Sometimes you just want to use another product in conjunction with Vegas to make the job stand out a little more.... well... it's kind of a tough thing to do. Liquid on the other hand has gone out of its way to include an "XSEND TO" button, which will work on lot of different products.

I do have my fingers crossed though... I looked at Vegas 6 a while back and was not too impressed, but Vegas 7 is what turned my head. I am HOPING that Vegas 8 makes the same kind of leaps and bounds that 7 did.

XDCAM support has probably been the big feature in V7.

I would say the speed of M2t editing and...

the WONDERFUL "drag and snap" function.

Unheralded but Amazingly Effective.

v

premiere has always been "seamless" with AE and photoshop, so what, adobe would be idiots if it wasn't. no Vegas killer, no edius killer , vegas is kind of like a little annoying pest to premiere , not a real margin killer...otherwise they would buy it, then kill it
imho

Premiere is still around because of its family. (AE, Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator) This is no longer about just one app versus another single application. But, you can buy all that stuff (Master Collection) and still benefit greatly from using Vegas for your primary NLE. Then for certain projects take advantage of the integration with the Adobe stuff.


The only real Vegas killer we have to worry about is SONY.

(What are you prepared to do Mr Ness? --Malone Untouchables)

-TomE

Ken, I may have taken your comments seriously, but, upon closer examination I saw the date on your post.

Guys, i learn a lot from reading threads like this. But i wish you would take the trouble of identifying for the first reference what all those capitalized initials mean.

WTF? lol. jk..

imho, fyi's = tmi.


kc

I have never been fond of the Bridge approach, but I can see where it would be useful. Personally, PP CS3 can not kill Vegas. Too many of us need Vegas' advantages. It is lightweight but powerful. If I need heavier stuff I pop out to Boris RED. I still need an NLE that can ride lightly on a laptop or other machine and still keep up. In short I like it clean and that is what I get with Vegas.

Other systems have advantages for certain work. Sometimes you need a blade screw driver and sometimes you need a Phillips head. Most of the time I need a Vegas.

I am also very pleased at the value for the price that I get with Vegas. In short, Vegas has a market.

Be serious. Many of the users of this forum gripe about buying a studio monitor. Are they going to spring for an adobe suite? How many times do people write that they don't use photoshop, or flash, or aefx?

Could this new suite starve vegas of new users? Maybe, but the cost of entry is quite high. Still, sometimes people buy things based on desire, and maybe they'd like to imagine themselves using the whole suite. An unused option is still an option, after all.

I use Photoshop every day for most of my workday. I'd still use Vegas over PPro. I just don't need that integration.

Rob Mack