<<I did find two very nice (white shirt) "junior" Sony ladies...>>

I was there Monday as well. Didn't see any signage for editing software so I asked if any editing software was shown... And was led to a station running Adobe Premiere. It took 20+ minutes to finally find someone who could get me to a station showing Sony software. The station was manned by an INTERN from Baylor who was demoing Catalyst and hadn't seen the software before the show. "I edit with Premiere...". She went on to tell me that everyone else wearing a light color shirt was an intern.

I only had a day at the show so there was a lot I couldn't see, but I did camp out at the Adobe booth long enough to talk with a product manager who was able to walk me through a couple of tricks that will help mitigate some of the workflow issues that make cutting with Premiere slower than Vegas.

It seems to me that Adobe's long term push to improve Premiere is making it the app to beat. VR was a big thing this year and I saw a beta feature that lets Premiere edit VR footage. I'm not going to need this feature in my foreseeable future, it merely demonstrates that Adobe is on the cutting edge and will likely remain there. Of more practical benefit was Sony SLOG support and the integration of Lumetri color grading within Premiere - significantly better than last year.

If Vegas were to be sold, I'd vote for GoPro. They have the resources to develop the product. They bought Cineform, and that CODEC is alive and well, so why not some nice editing software to go along with it?

Just for reference, I was at NAB last year. There was an effort to introduce Catalyst and demos were scheduled at different times. Gary Rebholz did the demo and there were at least two or three others from SCS including one of the overlords. I don't remember his name or position but he was there talking up Catalyst. It was made clear to me that Catalyst was the future and Vegas would be "maintained," but I was lead to believe there would be no new major releases.

It looks to me at best that SCS is on auto-pilot. From indications on the Catalyst forum it has generated minimal interest and there is little industry buzz from what I can see. Too little, too late. It's incomprehensible that SCS would drop a new version of Catalyst at the time of NAB and have no interest in pushing it. It seems the writing is on the wall for SCS.

I would be surprised if Sony has NOT tried to peddle SCS. Evidently, the interest is not there, at least for what they may want. A complication could be the variety of products. Is someone like GoPro really interested in sound software?

-- tom

AT the NAB 2015 - SCS was prepared to try ( is that TEST?) the marketplace for which Catalyst was designed. Nothing to do with VegasPro line or Vegas previous customers. This was taken as a gamble to see what with minimal effort made, would stick to the wall in the identified market.
Most of us knew at the time that the market was virtually small in size, and actually fairly antagonistic to anything coming from SONY! It was going to be an uphill battle at best. Seems like the climb was entirely too steep!

I think we will soon see another "moving on" thread... this time it will be the users that move on.

I have see similarities to Ulead that went out of business, bought by Intervideo and eventually Corel and disappeared.

At least let licensed users download final versions of products that do not have to connect to any web server to validate.

I still run v8.0c and v12, 8 just chugs along on 4 day renders still. 12 is quirky with scripts/rendering.

I'm hoping Catalyst is ready for prime time and is formidable by the next NAB. If not, then I guess we will know who accurately predicted the outcome in this thread.

It's always sad when an application you have a "connection" with fades away.

I remember a long hard beta for Ulead's DVD Workshop 2.0. And it was productive. We added features and got tons of bugs fixed. The engineers were amazingly responsive. I even had e-mail access to them. When I suggested a "package project" button it appeared in the software on the next build a few days later. I wrote a VASST book for that software, did a training DVD, wrote a training book for Ulead, and worked the Ulead booth at NAB for a week demonstrating the project. It was an amazing time. I got to know a lot of people at Ulead who were all amazing. Every time I use my Ulead backpack I think about those times. And then it just stopped. Sad but that's the harsh reality of business. While WS 2.0 was a great product DVD authoring apps just don't have "legs."

Vegas on the other hand is an amazing piece of engineering with "legs." Video will always need to be edited and rendered. It deserves a new engine under the hood. But someone or some company has to see a payoff for it to happen.

I once worked for an IT company that was bought off by a much larger corporation.

After 2 years, the management team (from the old company) decided to get together with some employees and buy back a section of the IT division. Today, after 7 years, the company is growing strong with sales hitting a million dollars.

The division that they sold was being phased out by headquarters...laying off people monthly, pressuring work loads, and we all saw the writing on the wall. It was the best move they made to buy it out.

Perhaps the same can be done here. I don't think Vegas code can be anymore difficult than the million lines of code we had to re-write with our software.

I wonder if we can ever setup a serious committee like this. There are a lot of intelligent people on this forum and I can't image using anything else than Vegas.

That's a thought Julius. At the time Sonic Foundry sold Vegas etc to Sony, they still existed as a company - maybe they still do and, with the help of some crowd funding/share sales they could buy it back?

http://www.sonicfoundry.com/

Just as an aside...a month or so ago I was wandering around Google Maps and saw the original street view location for Vegas folks. Beautiful location with water views. Then they apparently moved about a year ago to a nondescript cubicle farm on a highway.

If I had been with the company for years I would be really bummed. In reality, they probably did a massive layoff and were just consolidating various Sony-related businesses.

Still, I would have loved to have worked in the old location on the old software. I am very happy with V9c and wish Sony would reissue it. Clean, robust, efficient, flexible.

How much would you suppose Sony sell Vegas to another company for?

> How much would you suppose Sony sell Vegas to another company for?

They won't sell it, they'll make them subscribe monthly.

Selling price is determined by the perceived value in the marketplace. For example, can you say how many legitimate licensed copies of the software have been sold worldwide to date? How many pirated copies of the software thru the latest version exist worldwide?

Generally legacy software can quickly degenerate to a value of $0 because of the perception and reality of necessarily hooking into the latest upcoming hardware, OS platforms, and third-party ancillary support software like scripts and plug-ins.

Many of us maintain hardware and OS back to Windows95, followed by the many OS iterations thru now Windows 10 to support different legacy softwares. BUT, this kind of retro marketplace in which to utilize legacy apps is so very very small.

Legacy software has a niche in history, but not much perceived value going forward.

Probably not as much as they would like! Maybe not even as much as they paid for it.

If you look back over the past few years you can perhaps see a pattern of lack of investment in new products and a secrecy that in my opinion undermines their market position in a serious way. Couple this with a near total lack of integration with other Sony business units and you have to wonder if they have been trying to sell it for years.

I say, let's make a pitch for it without putting down an offer. Setup a meeting with one of the ceo's and see if he's willing to sell. Explain that V13 is on the decline, technology is moving fast, bla bla bla...and the faster you sell now, the less the price will deteriorate.

Because we don't know how many licensed copies, you have to do your won due diligence. How many copies of V14 do you expect to sell? At what price point?

Just a really fast fast guess: 1,000 copies @ $400 = $400,000...that would be a starting sell point. get a few R&D guys,a nice online app to handle requests and prioritize -and we are in business! Who's in? :)

I'm guessing that the only serious downside to Sony Vegas Pro is it's ancient Video For Windows architecture. The ONLY way to move it forward to compete with other NLE's would be to gut all that programming and replace it.

I'm no programmer but that appears to me to be a MASSIVE undertaking. To re write, test and work out the bugs in an updated engine? I dont know but is it fair to say that it's easier to start a whole new NLE from scratch? Could this be the reason why they are stopping any future development of Vegas Pro?

So,...even if a new company were to purchase the rights to Vegas Pro, wouldn't this new company be faced with the exact problem? (VFW dead end)

Is it fair to say that Vegas Pro's dependence on Microsoft's legacy Video for Windows architecture just makes it too costly and too time consuming to rebuild a major part of the program?....no matter what company is running Vegas Pro in the future?

It's kinda like being damned if you do and damned if you dont.

I dont know. Does anybody really know ho much it would take to remove VFW and replace it in Vegas Pro?

CT

I have often read about this Vegas Pro dependence on Video for Windows. Some questions. For this argument lets assume files other than AVI. e.g. XDCAM MXF/MP4, DSLR type MOV, GoPro/similar MP4.

What is it that Video for Windows is doing for Vegas, or how is Vegas using Video for Windows?

I noticed they had moved to another community in the area. It would have been interesting to see where they could have gone apart from Sony. I think we all knew things could go downhill after the Sony purchase. Hitching your wagon to a behemoth probably wasn't the best move about the time everything changed economically across the world.

-- tom

I'm way out of my element here...but I "believe" that Video For Windows (VFW) is the core playout "engine" that Vegas is calling when editing. QuickTime is another playout "engine" too.

The problem is that VFW is a VERY old system that Microsoft has abandoned quiet a while ago. It started off as 16bit. I dont know if it ever got updated to 32bit. (I'm guessing it made it that far) It's definitely not 64bit, I'm pretty sure.

I'd love for some VFW experts to chime in on this. Again, it's my assumption that the death of VFW has have that worst impact in Vegas Pro as an NLE from a programmer's point of view. Lookup "Microsoft VFW". You will prolly see that Vegas should have replaced it more than 10 years ago?

Anybody wanting to buy SCS from Sony will need to invest allot of time, money and effort to do the surgery needed to remove VFW and modernize the Vegas playback engine. I'm also guessing that ALL of the plugins will need to be rebuilt too? If so,....that is a HUGE task.

Again, I'm no authority on this in any way so I could be very wrong.

CT

The comments on glassdoor reflect what has been obvious for several years. The newer rumors of a Vegas 14 are interesting, but probably will not pan out. I'd be surprised if we see anything worth while from SCS in the future. That goes for both the newer and their old product line. At this point in time i would be willing to bet that the thing engineers are busy doing at SCS is polishing their resumes.

If I was an adviser on the other side of such a deal I would look at the following aspects:

1/ How long do I expect I can be able to sell the current version of the SW
2/ Is there any way I can squeeze more money out of existing customers without upgrading the SW
3/ What will be the cost of letting all developers go and moving the support and marketing folks into my existing office location

The sad truth is the following:
1/ Probably not long, most people are not THAT stupid, I could probably sell the Studio products for a little while though
2/ Probably not, if the software already was designed in such a way that I could make it check licenses every month, I could perhaps squeeze some subscription dollars out of a few of them, but probably not
3/ Probably not that high

Summing this up my advice to ANY potential buyer would be "not worth it". Adding more features and fixing bugs is going to be exorbitantly expensive, with little possibility of getting the investment back. There is no real possibility of getting any revenue from existing customers without a major investment in development. It would be easier, faster and less costly to write a new version from scratch, using the current version as a "design document". As I said, I'd vote, not worth it, not at any price. Would probably become a liability in any and all possible scenarios.

To a user I would say: "Just walk away. If your career is dependent on this product, your career is now in jeopardy. Fix it. Any way you can".

I would love to be wrong, but would be hugely surprised if I was. IF someone has had the guts to re-design Catalyst to become Vegas, well, that would be miraculous and nice. I stopped believing in miracles when I figured out Santa though.

FWIW, Final Cut Pro 7 was discontinued in 2011. I work in the broadcast industry in Los Angeles and I don't know one Final Cut editor who edits in the "new" (2011!!)version. I know there must be some of them out there, I like the new version better myself, but then again, I only use it when I have to. My point is... the old version of Final Cut does just about anything you need to do in a video editing program. So does Sony Vegas, sheesh, how many people on this forum are still using (and loving) version 8 or 9? Of course, the camera file formats change and need to be converted for older programs to support them, but there seems to be no shortage of free programs out there that do that. I remember back several years ago when Avid was really on the ropes, many people thought they would go out of business and I thought how little that would change anything, people would continue using Avid because it does what they need it to do, it edits TV shows and Movies. Nothing at the time came close, and still, all these years later, nothing still comes close to the avid workflow in the broadcast environment. I enjoy editing in Vegas and while I'd like to see it flourish financially and improve etc I can't envision a project that I might take on that couldn't be done in the present version, might have to jump thru a loop or two, but what else is new?