interesting that they are offering a bundle of HitFilm4 + Sony Catalyst Suite but no bundle including Vegas.
Particularly interesting as it integrates with Vegas (you can pass a Vegas event into full HitFilm, compisite, then retur to Vegas) but such a facility does not exist with Catalyst.
One might think this is further evidence of end of life for Vegas.


Yet the latest issue of PC Pro magazine (long established major player UK magazine) carries a full inside back page advert for Sony Vegas Pro (and I've been receiving the magazine since 1995 and don't think 've ever seen this before) -so it's clearly still being marketed

Please don't start the "doom and downfall of Vegas" preaching again here Tim!

mocha is included with Hitfilm Pro as are the Boris 3D object plug-ins new to HF4. The free Express version is the one that does not have mocha.

Will you be upgrading? How about people with Hitfilm 3 - anyone planning to upgrade? Thanks.

Just looking at HitFilm's website, and the plugins with HF4 - Ignite - does include Vegas Pro 12/13. Interestingly, it's a different icon - it's a blue/purple RH pointing triangle, and is the far right icon where they show all the compatible NLE icons. And Vegas Pro is listed in the text under the heading 'All Major Hosts'. So that is good news I think.

@Steve_Roden LOL Merely a couple of conflicting observations. Hardly preaching one way of the other.

I'm kind of up in the air. Since I own HitFilm 2, I can upgrade to 4 for around $169. A pretty fair price. However, since I have Vegas 11 Pro, I would have to upgrade to 13 to get any real convenience advantage and that would be around $199. That adds up to $368 ... Keep in mind I already own Mocha Pro 4.1 and HitFilm 2 Ultimate. Currently I just render a clip to Cinform and take it to Mocha for roto or tracking and then export shape and tracking data to Fusion, which plays very well with Mocha. I'm not sure it's worth it to me, since most of my usage for these tools involves tracking and roto mask, rarely special effects.

If Sony was to have a sale, I think I would take advantage of an upgrade to 13 for $100. Personally, I wish sony would work with Mocha to develop a plug in for shape mask and tracking. And in dreams do something like spine warp.

I no longer own HitFilm and I do all my 3D compositing in After Effect with the Element 3D plugin because it produces higher quality output. However, it is a bit of a bother to export my footage from Vegas Pro, do my compositing, render it, then bring it back into Vegas. So every time there is a new HitFilm release I take a good long look at it to see if it has gotten better in its realism because it would be a lot more convenient to have an integrated tool and not go through the whole round-trip process.

In looking at this latest HitFilm release, I am still disappointed unfortunately in the lack of realism of how it displays 3D objects. I don't understand why the images created with HitFilm4 (shown here: HitFilm4) are all so "cartoonish", while the images created with Element 3D in After Effects (shown here: Element3D) are so much better? If HitFilm is able to get to the point where their 3D objects look real (without masking them with a ton of lens flares and/or smoke), then I would eagerly switch back in a heartbeat (assuming Vegas still exists).

Peter

How about people with Hitfilm 3 - anyone planning to upgrade?

I already have.

There are some on the HF forum reporting loss of integration with VP13. Has anyone here tested that? I enjoy that feature with HF3 and VP13 and would be a showstopper for me on HF4.....

As an owner of Vegas Pro 13 Suite which includes Hitfilm 2 and NB Titler 3, I'd prefer to upgrade Hitfilm and NB Titler as part of a Vegas Pro 14 Suite if there is one (the operative word here is 'if' with the question of the future of Vegas being well expressed in another thread in this forum). An upgrade of the Vegas Suite should be cheaper than piecemeal updating of the plug ins. I'm optimistic that Sony will see the advantages of the different target markets for Vegas and Catalyst and am willing to wait to find out prior to updating Hitfilm (which I find useful and interesting). Anyway, with Hitfilm seemingly producing two new versions a year, Hitfilm 5 is likely by April 2016.

If there is a Vegas Suite 14, I'd like to see Boris Continuum Complete for Vegas added to the package at least as an option. BCC is a great toolbox. I note that on the Boris fx site, there is not yet a Sony Vegas version of the new BCC 10 but I can see Boris working on the BCC 10 for Avid product first.

The most important thing for a new Sony Pro 14 (now essentially a mature product) is full compatibility with the most current video cards from AMD and Nvidia; that means the ability to preview and render using GPU acceleration plus support plugs in such as Hitfilm. There are excellent threads on video cards in this forum too and a summary would be that Vegas is out of date in terms of fully supporting newer (after 2011?) cards for all functions.

An exciting week coming up with Black Friday!!

"Anyway, with Hitfilm seemingly producing two new versions a year, Hitfilm 5 is likely by April 2016"

Hitfilm Pro 3 came out a year ago. If they repeat that cycle the Pro 5 would be out in November '16. Maybe you are confusing the free Hitfilm 3 Express version which came out not too long ago. If FxHome does a Express 4, then that might be out in 6-9 months. It is just a stripped down version of Pro.

I'm interested in upgrading to Hitfilm Pro 4 because of Alembic support but there is only basic animation and rigging in HF and I'm not too keen on the quality of its rendered models. I much prefer to render using Octane or IRAY and then compositing the animation in Vegas. HF does allow integration between imported models and particle FX which is great but again, the 3D render quality is not great. While I like the direction HF is developing it's still not capable of rendering with the quality that even the free DAZ Studio can achieve. I can't see the point of exporting animations via Alembic to Hitfilm if the render quality will be lower than what DS can render. Until HF integrates better 3D tools it seems an unnecessary and time consuming compositing step. What it's useful for is as a way to test out how 2D film and 3D models might be composited but then that's possible in v3.

This is exactly what I've been saying all along: HitFilm 3D renders are vastly inferior to many other 3D products. Just take a look at the images at the links in my earlier post. Unless more people start complaining to the HitFilm developers about their cartoonish output, they won't do anything about it.

Peter