John, Thanks for the update.

Good point... running v5 and worried about keeping up to date :)

I guess my reference was relative to the fact that we are finally trying to get up to date... and just didn't want to invest again in Vegas if it wasn't still the cats pajamas... as I thought it was when we bought v5.

When you bought v5, it was the feline's sleeping garment and it still is with v9

I thought the upgrade price was only if you had Vegas 7 or 8.

I'll look around, but you might want to verify this too.

Edit: Looks like 5 will be OK, it doesn't say anything about only 7 or 8 on the upgrade page:

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/upgrade/vegaspro9

All vegas version are ok (1 to 8):

From upgrade page:
"Upgrade to Vegas Pro 9 from Vegas"

The only place it's falling behind is adoption of hardware accleration - the functionality is one of the best by most accounts.

John--

Where did you find that $184.95 price? Got a link?

jazzmaster, that's the price for the download version after the $50 rebate.

Mike

The $50 discount is applied at checkout. It is not a rebate.

I bought it as soon as it was available - for $199; but a couple of days later I received an email from Sony saying it was a mistake and I'd be charged only $189.50 at the time it becomes available (they're just taking orders now - nothing is charged yet to the credit card).

Tell me a little about Vegas and 'hardware acceleration'

Is a 'hardware acclerator' an extra card you can buy... to speed up rendering... or speed up screen updates...

or is it a special video card that updates the screen faster

or is it extra hardware to speed up rendering?

And/or... what about 'hardware accleration' vs multi-processor ?

Thanks for a little tutorial here...

Here 'ya go . . .
Hardware Acceleration

There isn't any. Vegas does not make use of hardware acceleration other than it's efficiently written code and use of quad cores during rendering. Intel I7 processors look like the current way to go to kick the speed up.

"Here 'ya go . . .
Hardware Acceleration"

Thanks, musicvid, but in my opinion, that really doesn't answer much. Srode said, "The only place it's falling behind is adoption of hardware accleration." That implies competitors have the edge in some manner with regard to using hardware acceleration. So, specifically, what are competitors doing with hardware acceleration that Vegas is not doing, or at least falling behind on?

I've seen notes online of PowerDirector7 being able to use both ATI's "AVT" and nVidia's CUDA - but I don't know whether it's leveraged for time line playback, rendering, or both.

I just had a conversation with a Macolite buddy of mine who said FCP leverages the GPU, but I didn't get any details.

[Here's an interesting discussion]

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1001714

Although Vegas still uses Video For Windows (and regrettably so).... the weak playback abilities were apparently discussed at length at NAB. They did play around a bit with the slow play back so we MAY notice an improvement on Vegas 9.

This from Dvinfo.net:

"I've seen requests for preview improvements mentioned a number of times in this thread. And I certainly agree that's needed.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/1133356-post87.html

I've seen a quite impressive demo of what CUDA can offer.
On a fire breathing 8 core PC PS could zoom all the way into a 40K x 40K image at full qulaity so fast it didn't matter. Switch the same task to a low rent laptop and you could hardly notice any slowdown. WOW.

Except other tasks that could not be CUDA accelerated had a huge speed difference. My understanding is that for very specific tasks CUDA may offer huge benefits ... or none at all. I believe AVCHD is one that can benefit.

Regardless of what CUDA offers it sure would be nice if Vegas got with the flow and had an interface that 3rd party hardware vendors could use. vfw is so ancient it's a miracle M$ still offer any support for it at all. One has to wonder what's going to happen if they do pull the pin on it in some future version of Windows.

Bob.

Cuda in another NLE will provide AVCHD rendering in about 1/2 realtime - it definitely benefits from accelleration - AVCHD in Vegas 1920x1080 takes 4x realtime - and my PC is by no means slow. In the proffesional world that Vegas is catering to - going from and hour 20 minutes to render a 20 minute video to 10 minutes is something people doing this for living would most certainly benefit from - time is money.

That was my quote referenced above from the other forum. I also asked the SCS engineer about using CUDA support for Vegas 9, since I'd also heard good things about it.

He told me no, there are some things CUDA could speed up, but for what they were doing, using the CPU was better.

This is just like the CUDA support in TMPGEnc, where it can improve filter speed, but not the encoding.

It all depends how a particular application works.