@rock-c

Hahaa! You just may have already answered my question.

You should go to VegasPro reddit to investigate, where your comments will not be deleted or your account will not be blocked. You can hear the real voice more.

The only question is: if that would be true, why are you still allowed to post here?? Face this music.

During Sony's tenure, a strategic decision was made to channel substantial resources into the development of Catalyst. Despite the uncertainty of its success, the small company faced challenges, leading to the sale of most products to Magix. This acquisition by Magix was a boon for the user community, as it secured the presence of Vegas in the fiercely competitive NLE market, which might have otherwise disappeared.

Following Sony's divestment, Vegas has seen significant updates. The revitalization has been slow, constrained by resources, yet there is an ongoing, dedicated effort to modernize the software, a task made challenging by the extensive coding it requires.

The development team, while still small, now has greater resources at its disposal, tackling substantial bugs and issues. Progress is steady, reflecting the team's size and the scale of the work involved.

The sale of Vegas by Sony has thus ensured its survival and facilitated its current renewal. The assessment of this result varies, being inherently subjective and dependent on individual viewpoints.

During Sony's tenure, a strategic decision was made to channel substantial resources into the development of Catalyst.

More like "all resources". For the final 24 months at SCS, everyone was working on Catalyst, with the exception of 2 months before the sale of VEGAS, a couple guys worked on a VP 14 (as a potential last ditch effort to generate some revenue for the group before most of the team was laid off and SCS was basically disbanded). Before SCS could release VP 14, Magix bought the SCS portfolio. With VP 14 in an rather incomplete state, our team of 4 engineers went in and performed a miracle by rebranding the application, adding HEVC support, stabilizing the rest of the work that had been done at Sony and getting the release out the door all in about 2 months.

I'm missing an important question. What was the point of the Catalyst software? Was it supposed to be a full-fledged replacement for Vegas? Did you find that Vegas is full of bugs and wanted to create new software from the ground up?

If this was the reason, why didn't Magix buy Catalyst and continue to finish it? I do not understand much. Why would one publisher create multiple software that do the same thing?

I'm missing an important question. What was the point of the Catalyst software? Was it supposed to be a full-fledged replacement for Vegas?

I am in interested in response to this same question.

Sony kept Catalyst apparently: https://creatorscloud.sony.net/catalog/en-us/catalyst/index.html

It doesn't seem to have worked out very well for them.

My 2 cents:

Sony is a multi-billion dollar multi-media giant... they easily had the resources to compete against Adobe and eventually even BlackMagic. Being a camera manufacturer themselves, they could have easily gone toe-to-toe with Resolve once it came into its own and gave away a free version of it with every camera they sold...

They didn't. Instead, they left VEGAS to die for years while the competition ran circles around it.

By the time Magix got ahold of it, there was so much catching up to do, that it became very difficult to go back and fix the many bugs that VEGAS had while still modernizing a (by then) very outdated NLE.

Yet, a team of people small enough to fit into a small car managed to do this... slowly, but surely, and they took it from being a back-burner product that Magix themselves overlooked while releasing competing NLEs of their own under the same company (Video Pro X, etc) to, in a few short years, being the core product that all of Magix is centered around.

Magix is nowhere near as big of a company as Sony is, so they don't have the resources Sony has and as such, development progress has been slower than many of us would like... but here we are with the team embarking on the journey of a complete ground-up rewrite of VEGAS' video processing engine. It has been and will continue to be a bumpy road with the rollout, due to limited resources they don't have the engineer and QA resources that a larger company would have, but they've made fantastic progress and continue to do so.

I started using VEGAS back in the Sonic Foundry days... back then it was revolutionary. Nothing else on the market was like it. I was using Adobe Premiere 6 at the time, and it was rough... If I applied a fade, or added a color correction effect, I had to render some or all of the video on the timeline just to see the change I made. There was no real-time anything. VEGAS came along and changed all of that. I switched over and never looked back.

It's always had its annoying bugs... such as the "VEGAS speed limit" that even back in those days would make VEGAS crash if you started making changes to a project that was currently playing, or making edits too fast... but that has significantly improved in recent years.

There's a lot I'd like to see happen with VEGAS, and some of it likely won't be done for a good while due to lack of development resources (such as a new titler), but I can say this... VEGAS has, through all of its various owners, worked well enough for me to run my company off of for the past 21 years. Now there isn't anything any other NLE can do that I can't pull off in VEGAS. It may take a bit longer to do certain tasks, but I can do anything with it. Some things I can do even faster/better than competing products.

I'm missing an important question. What was the point of the Catalyst software? Was it supposed to be a full-fledged replacement for Vegas? Did you find that Vegas is full of bugs and wanted to create new software from the ground up?

At that time, I was a beta tester for Vegas and later for Catalyst. My understanding, albeit limited, was that several factors initiated Catalyst's development. One factor was the Vegas codebase and the aspiration to innovate. Another was Sony's intention to enhance software integration with their professional-grade cameras—Catalyst now serves as a tool for stabilizing footage from Sony cameras. Additionally, the early indicators that color grading would gain importance, and the emergence of log formats for professional cameras, made support for S-Log crucial. Vegas wasn't riddled with bugs, but maintaining its codebase was increasingly challenging. Sony divested, realizing the substantial resources required to future-proof Vegas, and instead redirected its focus towards cameras.

If this was the reason, why didn't Magix buy Catalyst and continue to finish it? I do not understand much. Why would one publisher create multiple software that do the same thing?

The Catalyst was not up for sale as Sony chose to retain this software, while the rest of the SCS portfolio was available. Magix's ingenious move was to acquire not just the software rights but also to attract key developers to join their team. This was a significant advantage, although it appears that the funding to future-proof the software may have been limited. It's possible that Magix missed the opportunity to streamline its software portfolio at the optimal time. Perhaps the critical question of whether it was feasible to maintain all products in the future went unasked. In my view, this strategic approach was problematic, potentially hindering the long-term development of the entire software suite. Currently, Magix is undergoing a turnaround and seeking investors, as is common in today's market. Vegas stands out strategically, with its superior GUI that enables intuitive video editing. Presently, investments are being made, despite the turnaround, to update the video engine in Vegas. The key focus for users in the future will be these developments.

Another logical question follows. It is certain that Vegas has very intuitive controls and the editing in it is logical. You simply grant what you want. You don't need to study dozens of books. Why haven't competitors like Adobe and Resolve innovated their workflows and still stick to their dinosaur clumsy procedures?

The only one with an equally pleasant user environment is the Audio editor Reaper. I love that one as much as Vegas.

At a time when vegas wasn't as stable and fast as it is today, I occasionally tried competing software and didn't have the nerve to do it. Their editing style pissed me off. Why such a complicated procedure for a simple task.

I went back to Vegas.

Why haven't competitors like Adobe and Resolve innovated their workflows and still stick to their dinosaur clumsy procedures?

That is a matter you should inquire about with Adobe and Blackmagic.

I know. It's a rhetorical question.

I'm missing an important question. What was the point of the Catalyst software? Was it supposed to be a full-fledged replacement for Vegas? Did you find that Vegas is full of bugs and wanted to create new software from the ground up?

The simple answer to this is Yes. Catalyst Edit was supposed to be a brand new, fully functional NLE to replace VEGAS. The team said it would take 3 years to do this. We were given 18 months, and on top of that, in order to get funding, we had to also deliver Browse and Prepare to be tailored to the needs of Sony Professional and be bundled with Sony cameras, which took resources away from the efforts to create the new NLE. For SCS, the engineers and management had a large desire to create a cross platform (Mac and Windows) NLE, something that was not possible with the VEGAS code base. And many of the engineers wanted to start from scratch and write an app with new, modern development tools.

As we began facing some financial stress, we decided we had to release Catalyst Edit (Prepare and Browse were out already and actually fairly useful products) and since it was missing many key features needed in a modern NLE, we tried to market it as a quick edit tool which could create projects that you could then import into VEGAS to do the more complex work. Of course, no one wanted to pay $300 for a quick edit tool (and then they decided to go over to a subscription model, which made things even worse).

Why didn't Magix buy Catalyst? Because Sony still wanted it (at the time), and VEGAS was, quite frankly, already "done", a known name, and very profitable. At the time of the sale of VEGAS, those of us on the new Magix VEGAS team were actually wondering about the possibility of buying Catalyst with the the idea of trying to "finish it" or put some key components in that product suite into VEGAS.

In the end, the Catalyst code base is likely more out of date now than the VEGAS code base. SCS does not exist anymore and Catalyst is now part of the Sony's Creators Cloud group.

Another logical question follows. It is certain that Vegas has very intuitive controls and the editing in it is logical. You simply grant what you want. You don't need to study dozens of books. Why haven't competitors like Adobe and Resolve innovated their workflows and still stick to their dinosaur clumsy procedures?

The only one with an equally pleasant user environment is the Audio editor Reaper. I love that one as much as Vegas.

 

I too love Reaper, it is VERY heavily inspired by VEGAS, and honestly, I wish Magix would buy them out, re-release it under their umbrella, and then integrate it into VEGAS. It's everything I wish VEGAS' audio end of things could be... and I also LOVE how customizable it is... like the ability to create (and share) your own skins, and add custom images to identify tracks... like a drum set for drum tracks, a guitar for guitar tracks, mic for vocals, etc... (on the right in the image below, you can upload your own custom icons to use)

I really wish VEGAS had this kind of customization.

Right now I always use the free Catalyst Browse to copy my Sony Camera records to my drive, and that's just it.

Another logical question follows. It is certain that Vegas has very intuitive controls and the editing in it is logical.

@pierre-k Because you are stating a subjective feeling rather than an objective fact.

Premiere users will not think that you are right when you say "Vegas is more intuitive and logical than Premiere", so no Premiere user asked Premiere Team to move closer to Vegas operation style, unless you are a Premiere user switching from Vegas.

I occasionally tried competing software and didn't have the nerve to do it. Their editing style pissed me off.

This is because the operating habit you have formed in Vegas for decades resulting that you can't adapt to Premiere or Resolve swiftly. Imagine that if you had chosen Premiere at first and stuck to it for decades, then you wouldn't have these problems now. So the point is why you didn't choose a more promising editor in the first place.

I think from the start Magix lacked a solid corporate strategy with too many competing products and too little integration among them. While Vegas seems to have a boost in development resources recently, with big audio and video engine upgrades to show for it, I wonder if that was forced by their increasing financial difficulties maintaining all their products.

Marketing and engineering seem divorced from one another, we were promised and got continuous development but still have to purchase the program in yearly versions that seem to have little relation to development milestones (big updates to 20 and 21 partway through the year!)

I hope the team gets the resources they need to excel and the marketing to let the world know about it.

The "big developments partway through the year" thing is VEGAS trying to move towards a new purchase model where you buy one year of updates, vs. buying one version that has every feature front-loaded and ready to go on launch day. In the long run, this method works much better for both consumers and developers, as the developers don't have to cram to try to squeeze as many features into launch day as they can... if a feature is still too buggy or incomplete at launch, they can delay it until one of the next feature updates to further refine it vs. having to wait an entire year to include it into the next version. That also helps us consumers, as we don't have to pay extra to get that feature that got put on the back burner until the next major version release because it wasn't ready on launch day for the previous version.

As for marketing, it has been terrible in the past, but I am noticing some improvements lately.

Having bought VV2 from Sonic Foundry in 2001, I have seen the market focus change again and again through three brands, without fully addressing the core issues of stability, preview performance, and broad-based I/O format compatibility that have compromised an otherwise excellent initial product vision. Call me a fool, but my heart is still in Madison. Beyond that, I reserve further comment.

My thoughts... I started with the Amiga/Video Toaster doing a/b roll with Panasonic AG decks and cameras. It was fun, scripting with ARexx, etc., pulling off, for the time, amazing event video work. The Amiga died, and I had to go to the "dark side", Windows and PC. My first step was with DPS Editbay and building a state of the art PC. I've had editing software from Premiere 6, Avid Liquid Pro 7, Pinnacle Studio (in it's various forms), Powerdirector, Videostudio Pro, Resolve Studio, Magix Movie Edit Pro/Video Pro X, and Vegas Pro. While Vegas has its "hiccups", it was a natural transition for me that took place with a Humble Bundle VP14 Edit. Once I got over the "ugly" interface, I was amazed at the speed of the timeline editing. I've upgraded every year since then, and don't regret it.

As for my "subjective" feeling about Vegas, I've used a lot of different editing software. All they did was prepare me for the joy of using Vegas, in appreciating the simplicity of a lot of the features that I now take for granted. I do own Resolve Studio, and can edit in it. But the nodes keep me away from it. Sorry, I'm still a layered based type person. Again, timeline editing with Vegas is so easy compared to Resolve. And that is where I spend most of my time.

We all have different needs and look at things through our own "rose colored glasses". Use what works for you. If I am not happy with the software I am using, I just move on.

@fr0sty, I bought Reaper several years ago. I've never used a DAW before. I know people who do studio work and they gave me their commendations. But I found them overly complicated. Reaper was easy to use, and the cost of using it was inexpensive. The tutorials are always coming out, and they keep adding features.

Another thing I love about reaper, it has a perpetual demo like WinRAR... they don't lock you out of it, you just have to wait on a timer to count down as they remind you to buy it. It's such a great app it's worth buying anyway, but I've always found that to be very cool of them to do.