Yes, Cat Edit is a traditional ENG cutter for new formats. As many understand the point of the Cat suite is more akin to Resolve rather than VegasPro. This is particularly important to grasp since the Resolve market and what SCS aims to do is far removed from the VegasPro platform which suffers ( a bad rap) from not being accepted in pro workflows.

Jamon defined much of what I love about Vegas. As an artist who works with 3D I like the video/audio looping and VST features of Vegas because, coming from an audio background, that's what I'm comfortable with and find it an incredibly versatile method of editing.

I've tried PPro and Hitflim, both of which are very capable but lack the flexibility of working with loops. I understand the need of those who want smooth 4k editing but isn't it possible to upgrade Vegas to make that possible? Right now Vegas does 90% of what I need. If NVidia GPU compatibility and smooth 4k editing existed then it would be 98% there (holding back 2% as a development incentive.)

Either keep developing Vegas or develop Catalyst Edit into a Vegas replacement but don't drop Vegas and leave us hanging with no alternative like the ACID fiasco.

As many understand the point of the Cat suite is more akin to Resolve rather than VegasPro.

edit is as far removed from resolve as it is from vegas.

Travis, what surprise me is that you defined for many for the first time what SCS thinks Catalyst is for and what we should use it for. And stating that we still need Vegas Pro? This isn't stated on the Catalyst documentation that I have seen. And if many of us have Resolve or another color grading option, why get Catalyst? Out of loyalty?

The paradigm to me, Travis, is that Sony is discontinuing Vegas Pro, so I am naturally thinking, well, I have to get Catalyst in some form to continue to edit with the new media coming. But as it turns out, Catalyst isn't what I and many others thought it was for. Well, what the heck is it for? If you expect long time, well respected, "old" users to just buck up and buy it, enduring a long, disappointing learning curve, SCS will be disappointed and embarrassed. I won't buy it. I will go looking elsewhere. I remember other EOL programs and I am now in that position again with my back against the wall and very little confidence in SCS. Well, at least Sony makes good cameras.

I would be careful reading into what we think is being said about the purpose of Edit. If it was a quick and dirty timeline edit we wouldn't see it expanding into plugins, etc. I think Travis is stating the present reality. Anyone who uses Vegas sees Catalyst Edit as very rudimentary at this point and any statement about what Catalyst may become is virtually meaningless until it actually exists and is accepted as an alternative by Vegas users.

My suggestion is to leverage the part of Catalyst that is useful to Vegas users: organization and grading. If you give Vegas users a reason to stay in the ecosystem you at least maintain potential future customers for what Catalyst will become.

-- tom

For most Vegas Pro customers, giving them reasons to deploy Catalyst Edit into their workflow would end up being irrelevant. Only a few can benefit from what Cat has to offer.

Offering Cat customers the option of using Vegas is more than a dead-end concern.
Most are already using higher forms of an NLE, and VegasPro does not fit their criteria.

Does Cat offer a useful feature that should be in Vegas? You bet , for the higher-end form of saving and transferring color grading settings. Unfortunately it is unlikely that this form of color grade settings will ever reach a maintenance Vegas release. Most Vegas customers again would not benefit if they are using other color-grade schema ( like New Blue FX Colorfast) within the plug-in and scripting offered to Vegas in its present form.

I spent a little time getting to know Catalyst Edit better. I think maybe I like the interface quite a bit more than Vegas. I'll need to see how it actually works in practice, but with some polish this could be good.

I sent a bunch of comments using the feedback form, and I have plenty more. I hope they continue to improve it, and don't screw up by losing the simplicity or making the interface too awkward once they cram a ton of features in there.

Catalyst Prepare crashed, and didn't restore the same state when reopened. I also hope they can focus on keeping the code organized and stable, so they don't end up in the situation they were with Vegas where they couldn't fix all the major bugs.

Prepare and Edit need better keyboarding, where almost everything can be accomplished using only the keyboard, and in efficient combinations of shortcuts.

For example in Prepare, if you press Ctrl+Right or Shift+I to go to the subclip's out-point, then press I to move the in-point to the location of the out-point, then press play it does not play because there is a gap between the in and out so it only plays for a couple frames. There should be no gap, so play will play from the new in-point, which was the previous out-point. It's common to want to quickly slice a video where the out of the previous subclip is the in of the next, so there should be a keyboard shortcut that jumps to the end point, and sets the in-point to that location, and starts playing so you can then quickly hit another key to mark the out and create the subclip. But actually, it's so much faster to do it in Edit by just hitting S as it plays, or using the Split Trim tool to click everywhere you want to cut.

I'm glad they made Catalyst. I was disappointed in the later versions of Vegas, and it's partially broken with modern hardware. Now that Edit has video effects, with keyframe animation, there's a lot more potential for creativity with it than the original release.

For audio, the built-in envelopes right now are useful for basic audio editing. Once they add audio effects it'll be more complete. But I'll also try using external programs to see how that works. It can render a .wav without video. Tracktion can open video files, to watch while scoring music. But it uses QuickTime and I haven't found a codec that works to render from Edit.

SoundForge is using the same kind of legacy interface as Vegas, so maybe they'll make Catalyst Audio to replace it, and there'll be more powerful features integrated into the Suite.

So right now my initial impressions are different than most of the vocal users in this forum. It might wear off, but in this moment I prefer Catalyst over Vegas, and am curious to see what I can do with it.

Regardless of what they say, I think this is the replacement for Vegas. At least, it might be for me, and I did pay them money this year for Catalyst but not a Vegas upgrade, so they already essentially got me to switch.

I don't think it's worth the full price yet though. They should run more discounts until it's a little more mature.

Catalyst Edit mostly chokes on browsing a folder with a couple hundred 11MB PNG files, and struggles to import them to the timeline. It's a whole lot of waiting and fighting against it trying to crash. I gave up and force-closed it before getting them all imported.

I opened up Vegas 12, selected the first one, it made a sequence, and there was no problem. It can't play the preview smoothly, but at least it works.

Opened Catalyst again, and it's having a real hard time even being able to generate the thumbnail previews in the Media Browser. The window doesn't respond to input while it struggles. Minutes go by. I give up again.