Yes, a quadroFX card might be a common denominator. But since this is a Vegas forum we can just gloat over crashomatic ppro2 systems.

Rob

Regarding a third tier Vegas, most of the consumer grade NLE developers realize that their core is in consumer grade production. That's DV and HDV. Third tier software is hard for them to rally around even if there are some advocates in the company.

Or like Volvo's new S80 with a V8 under the hood. It is still a Volvo, so it's a hard sell against BMW and Mercedes sedans, even though it is a really good car.

Better to have a really capable professional product at a high price, and then peel off features to get a Tier 2 product, while keeping some of the Top Tier panache.

That is a proven way to make money. It is also proven to make more money than putting a V8 under the hood of a Volvo.

I'm just amazed at how people put the heart on the line for the application itself, when really it's about the end result of the project (the art of it all). A mechanic is an artist of sorts as well imo...do you think the best of them only use one tool to do their job well?
What's with this clinging to your "team" of choice while overlooking the possibilities out there? I'd be willing to bet there are many users here who havn't even tried the other products - yet they make statements against them.

I think adobe has been and is putting out some top-notch products, AE7 is another in it's lineup that is quite impressive. Now Vegas is great but to make comment that other products "blows/sucks/etc" are kind of far fetched, it's more likely those people are talking from their rears. Make a valid attempt to try them first before deciding or commenting would be the smartest route.

If PP, PS, or AE6 or 7 is crashing on your system more often, I'm willing to bet you have system issues or have yet to set things up properly.
At this point with V7, one would think it's a godsend the adobes/avids of the world are putting out the full range of options to turn to.

I'm with jaydeeee.

I find it advantageous to use both Vegas and FCP for example, as well as AE and Combustion.

And AE7 is such a unique animal that for many pros it is the most effective tool for certain parts of their work, regardless of which NLE they use.

This means that it makes sense for non-Adobe NLEs to put in a little bit of extra effort towards looking for ways to make the roundtripping to AE easier.

And I hope nobody said AE was unstable, because it is not.

Curiously, I'm in AE7 all the time and it is stable. Premiere Pro v2 is not, of course, neither was PremPro v1.5 or any of the Prems that came before it. (Well, v6.5 wasn't too bad.)

As for not yet having my system set up properly... I am running an Intel Quad-core processor on a Intel motherboard with an Intel chipset and the latest BIOS, high-quality Corsair RAM and an nVidia 7950GT video card. The OS is Windows XP SP2 with all the current updates. A couple of months ago when I built the new PC, I installed Vegas and then the Adobe CS2 suite on what was a completely "virgin" machine. Vegas, as expected, has not even so much a hiccuped since then. Premiere Pro crashed the second time I used it by simply dropping an HDV file on the timeline. Go figure...

John

DGates 4/1/2007 9:27:28 PM
>>>"...Sony's an electronics manufacturer that only barely dabbles in software...If they never sold a single new copy of Vegas, it wouldn't even affect their bottom line."

John Cline: 4/5/2007 7:18:30 PM :
>>>"You [Ken] are making a whole bunch of unsubstantiated assumptions about what makes Sony tick...that Sony is more interested in hardware than software..."

Many posts point out that Vegas is a small part of Sony's bottom line. Sony is as capitalist a corporation as there is and when they bought Vegas/Madison they weren't doing it out of the goodness of their heart. Small part or big part, they will run this part of their empire to make as much money as possible and ASAP. Sure, that means they're balancing what they have now vs how much it will cost to make a better product. Every corporation does that. The argument is: is the corporation that controls Vegas well managed or badly managed?

kencalhoun: 4/6/2007 7:01:53 AM:
>>>"If you dust off the 3-year old Vegas 4 and compare Vegas 7 to it...it's still basically the same program..."

I think that is because they made it right in the first place.

Spot/DSE: 4/6/2007 8:52:02 AM:
>>>"I'm not sure that the market (or the elite users) are ready for a third level product [i.e., a greatly improved Vegas] at a premium price. "
Why a premium price? A Cadillac costs more to produce that a stripped Chevy. Not so with digital media: a stripped Vegas costs no more to make than a "premium" version once you've engineered it. The way to make the most profit is to sell as many copies as you can, to amateurs or pros. Problem: what is the price to charge to do that?

craftech 2007 10:06:29 AM :
>>>" Learning any new software WELL isn't an overnight thing..."

Amen. For the short time i tried Adobe Premiere, i couldnt even figure out how to make a simple dissolve transition. Plus there was no graphical representation of the audio. (Yeah, too much aluminum cookware.) The less time you have to spend on the basics of your editor, the more time you have to learn the exotic stuff. That's why Vegas is inherently superior.

kencalhoun 4/1/2007 8:20:42 PM :
>>"the very-basic Vegas titler is still the same as it was 3 years ago, it's positively ancient."

Further to my previous comment: Yes, but if you use 3D movement and the other features of Vegas, using keyframe control (the things you learn about as you go along), more video tracks, can't you do just about anything with titles? At least as much as you can do without special titling programs which would be necessary with any NLE.

Coursedesign 4/6/2007 11:36:47 AM:
>>>[Regarding the correlation between complexity and stability.] "Consumer Reports' New Car Guide [reports] that ... [the mechanically sophisticated Toyota Prius is] in the lowest repair frequency category...When you brake normally, the brake pads aren't even used. Electronic circuits just transfer an increasing load to a generator..."
This is replacing the mechanical complexity of hydraulic brakes with the simplicty of regenerative braking. I.e., it is replacing complexity with simplicity. I dispute that this analogy is applicable to a computer program. The basic reliability of mechanical devices make quantum improvements by becoming simpler (e.g., jet engine vs propeller; hydraulic brakes vs regenerative)--not by debugging. Not so with computer applications: they become better by being debugged (after becoming MORE complex.)

Jaydeee 4/6/2007 5:54:51 PM
>>>"A mechanic is an artist of sorts as well imo...do you think the best of them only use one tool to do their job well?" (i.e., Vegas is just another tool to use in producing the end product.)
But Vegas (or any NLE) isn't "a tool". It's a complete chest of tools. Would a mechanic change to another chest of tools if most of them were not familiar to him?

farss 4/1/2007 11:24:37 PM:
>>>"There's only one thing in PPro that I might desperately need, the floating point pipeline...[and] I don't have a clue why we're still stuck in 8 bit land..."
GlennChan 4/1/2007 11:49:59 PM:
>>>"The RGB 8-bit limitation is probably because Vegas is based on the Video for Windows architecture. .
"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"

"floating point pipeline," "quicktime wrapper," "2:3:3:2 pulldown (incl. flag detection)," "Rec. 601 vs Rec. 709 luma coefficients." Guess i'm still a newbie/amateur because i don't understand 90% of this. What does any of it mean to me making SD DVDs? You look at your AVI files and the Vegas timeline and when Vegas renders it, WYSawIWYGot. And it never fails to render. Conclusion: if you've learned Vegas, you're crazy to go to something else;. Lets keep bugging/cajoling/threatening/pleading for Sony to make the improvements Vegas needs. But Vegas is still the best there is.

Guess i'm still a newbie/amateur because i don't understand 90% of this.

The point of Glenn's list was the difficulty of dealing with all the different video formats that are out there. Vegas does a good job with lots of them. The fact that Vegas handles the technical details of the list, means it's easier to make your SD DVDs.

Nope. AE is pretty stable and a mainstay for many people, even if they aren't using PPro. Yes, it'd be well worthwhile for Vegas to send things out roundtrip to After Effects, just like when I send things out to Sound Forge they come back in as a take.

Photoshop? Love it and use it all day, every day. Totally stable and reliable except that sometimes it can't remember the last session's state.

As far as PPro2 goes, yep, maybe its a bad hardware config. I have no qualms about recommending the software to people as long as they aren't close friends. In fact, if it were someone I really disliked I'd heartily recommend it and even call them periodically to give them a little push.

Rob Mack

Actually it'd be nice if you could use Vegas to drive AE, even to get AE to do a cuts only conform...
In fact if there was a way to get Vegas to edit DV proxies and conform DPX or CF DIs with AE or Fusion I'm all ears.

Bob.

Most companies selling a mass market NLE aren't so eager to put their resources into a totally pro system.

I don't fault this. less than 1 out of 100 of their customers needs SDI, RAID storage, etc. Would those customers pay 100 times more for a top tier version? No. 10 times? Maybe. 5 times? Sure! But to get programming resources assigned to a third tier project the balance sheet needs to add up.

I really don't know if it'd be better to design a third tier Vegas from the top down or if it would be better to build up in a modular way from the current Vegas. You could make arguments either way. If I was a prospective new customer at a slightly higher end of the market I might prefer something "completely rewritten with the professional in mind" rather than a beefed up prosumer product. But since I'm already a Vegas user I'd prefer modules that would give me new features I might want.

BTW, maybe it's better to compare an edit suite to a woodshop instead of a car. Think "New Yankee Workshop". I've got a friend who bought a 16" tablesaw for his shop. He loves the thing. Cuts though wood like butter. I think of it whenever people talk about 10bit color for Vegas.

Rob Mack

You know, I don't think it's a question of ppro "killing" vegas. More a question of whether some people will just need to move on. And of course they will.

Users improve their skills and expand their ambitions over time. It wouldn't take much for Vegas to keep up with them, and I'm hoping that the interval between Vegas 6 and Vegas 8 has been spent doing this. I really think that Vista offered an excuse for some substantial rewrites in Vegas, and Vista's delay probably meant Vegas 7 came out as a stopgap while everyone tried to figure out where things like DirectX10 were going.

Rob Mack

Jaydeee 4/6/2007 5:54:51 PM
>>>"A mechanic is an artist of sorts as well imo...do you think the best of them only use one tool to do their job well?" (i.e., Vegas is just another tool to use in producing the end product.)

DSF>>>But Vegas (or any NLE) isn't "a tool". It's a complete chest of tools. Would a mechanic change to another chest of tools if most of them were not familiar to him?

Well, says you.

And a good mechanic will, they sometimes HAVE to.
Look, vegas is great, but I think parading the "we're #1" bs is a bit ridiculous.

Why the hard sell here anyways?...this is the vegas forum.

Sometimes Vegas reminds me more of a Shopsmith than a chest of fine tools.

http://www.shopsmith.com/

Rob Mack

Thanks for the link Rob.

My Dad had one of those (Shopsmith) when I was a kid. When he died we had to sell it. That was when I was in High School. Now that I'm a Dad I would love to have one of those -- maybe thats why I like Vegas too.

-TomE

I really like the woodshop analogy to prosumer video because the spending opportunities are pretty similar and people in both cases are trying to bring craftsmanship to the process.

My perception of the Shopsmith is that, while it combines a number of functions, it does none of them quite as well as more specialized tools. I view Vegas in the same way - although Vegas can do a really good job at a lot of things, sometimes you need a specialized tool for things like very advanced compositing, color grading, titles, animation, etc.

There's a big difference, of course. The shopsmith has a reputation for severing fingers. In this respect it's more like Premiere Pro in it's ability to create a disaster.

Rob Mack

Shopsmith Exactly!!!! i dont need no stinkin drill press or lathe,, i go to AE for that I just want to saw effectively and keep my fingers

do need a 10 bit

10-bit = 16" tablesaw blades in the woodshop analogy. :-)

-R

>>>>although Vegas can do a really good job at a lot of things, sometimes you need a specialized tool for things like very advanced compositing, color grading, titles, animation, etc<<<<,

Same goes for any other editor, FCP , AVID xpress and Premiere can do even less, without these specialized tools.

"Same goes for any other editor, FCP , AVID xpress and Premiere can do even less, without these specialized tools."

But with Premiere you dont have to render to another file just to use it in AE. Thats the big difference here.

...and as I was pointing out above (and many times before), that's a very common thing.

Now, it is possible that Adobe pulled a Microsoft here and hid the interface code here as best they could.

But if not, wouldn't it be great if the Vegas programmers could find a way to communicate with the After Effects APIs to minimize rendering?

"... you have no proof that Sony is more interested in hardware than software ..."

Sony Creative Software and Sony hardware divisions are SERPARATE COMPANIES each with their own business plans and goals and they happen to be owned by the same corporate parent. This is why Sony Computers sometimes come bundled with Adobe Premiere. No doubt that Sony Creative Software would like to be in that bundle, but it's a marketing decision made by Sony Computers.

"assuming that just because a program has more features it is therefore definitely going to be unstable? That doesn't make sense."

It makes perfect sense. Call it experience, call it Karma, call it a coincidince, but virtually every software package that I've seen that evolved over several feature additions has also added instability. The exception is rare.