100 posts in 3 days..... SCS must be feeling the love!

Grazie

I would like to see a user of Catalyst Suite coming on here and share their experience and workflow.

What ever it is, fact or so, remains that VP is not being further developed and Catalyst Edit isn't a replacement for VP.

If you search this forum for "Catalyst" you will get a lot of hits which will explain what the purpose of the Catalyst product line is, who the market is targeted to. And learn that it is not and is not intended to be a competitor for VegasPro.

Note that the users forum for Catalyst is not in this PLACE : SCS suite of products forum... and that is on purpose. Undoubtedly the suite of Catalyst is in its infancy and the direction it moves is not completely predicted.

BUT, I repeat it is not VegasPro level II , but rather a whole different target market.

What is the future of Moviestudio? Does that die along with Vegas?

[I]And learn that it is not and is not intended to be a competitor for VegasPro.[/I]

All good but where is the further developed Vegas Pro? If Catalyst Edit is not a competing product than VP should be further developed, isn't it?

> "What is the future of Moviestudio? Does that die along with Vegas?"

No one knows but we can look at Acid Music Studio and extrapolate from that data point. Acid Pro is stuck at version 7.0 updated on Jan. 6, 2011. Acid Music Studio, by contrast, is now on version 10 and last updated on Apr. 28, 2014. The Studio series had been doing well for Sony and they have been maintaining it.

BTW, For those of who who are gamers and use Valve Steam... there is a Movie Studio 13 Platinum - Steam Powered! You buy it and download it with your Steam client just like your other Steam games. Lots of gamers love to record their game play and post it on YouTube. Sony seems to be tuned into this with offering Movie Studio on the same platform. Great idea!

I found out because a VASST customer asked if our Fasst App plug-ins worked with the Steam Edition of Movie Studio and I had never heard of it before. When I found out that the plug-ins did not work, I contacted Sony and together we figured out what was wrong and got it working. So, Sony developers are working on supporting Movie Studio it seems. Who know where that will lead. Movie Studio has always been a bargain when you think of how much you can do with it.

~jr

@JohnnyRoy,

Good info. MovieStudio might be "workable" for me if and when the day comes to say goodbye to Vegas.

Have to review it's limitations compared to Vegas...

Pretty sure the dev team is sitting back and laughing at their user base trying to decipher the road map that they are privileged to.

The passion of all these posts does show the fanatism of a product that has been around for along time. I believe in 2015 new cameras systems are not enough to just develop, those new cameras should have available at release the ability to fully edit that footage. Even at a consumer level, because that is new world we all live in.

I have done the trail on both Prepare and Edit. Edit appears to be a replacement for Movie studio level of editing. The current version of MS competes to much with the Pro product. The capabilities of Prepare, and Edit combined seems to be comparable in features to where Resolve is, but no where near the Apple, AVID, or Adobe products are professionally. Granted Resolve has much more advanced grading features and control surfaces than Prepare. A white paper, or god forbid a video should be created that illuminates the user base and potential user base as to the productivity advantages of the new line up when used in a professional environment.

The odd thing I found in my trial use of Cataylst products is the lack of cross product integration. For example, switching between CC, Edit, and render in BM Resolve is as easy at icons at the bottom of the timeline. In Cat Edit I found no abilty to pop over to the Prepare product, or apply Prepare changes to the media in the Edit timeline. Edit also lacked the ability to change the order of the timelines, making the task of adding a title track 4x the amount of clicks as in Vegas. Then my 2000 era 14 day trail ran out, with no apparent way to renew and continue testing. Sure I could reload the test machine in attempt to continue evaluating, but what I have seen so far is not compelling enough. Purchasing Edit suite is a bit much to be a beta tester.

As a user of Vegas 1.0 thru 4.0, and then picking up again at Vegas at 8-13. Cat Edit seems does not even compare to the core functionality of Vegas 1.

Even AVID knew better than to dramatically change their UI. A play button is a play button no matter what code is handling the CODEC or screen draws. Vegas has been rewritten over the years. Vegas 1 did not support a 4096x4096 image format, or HDCAM. The Vegas code was re-written, and upgrades added to support newer formats. These new formats do not use the same code that WinXP used to display DV inside an AVI. Rewrite the engine all they want, but the new UI is not compelling enough to make such sweeping changes to the Vegas UI. Catalyst UI seems more like video editing by Fisher Price than Sony Broadcast systems.

Given how small the user base is of Vegas, all of our time spent on trying to preserve it would be better spent re-learning how to get from A to B in a different product. Use the current power drill until the battery dies, then move on people.

"Acid Pro is stuck at version 7.0 updated on Jan. 6, 2011."

JohnnyRoy,

The last update I see for Acid Pro is from 2/16/2010 4:22:00 PM.
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/showmessage.asp?messageid=696790

Where did you see the date Jan. 6, 2011?

Edit: Ah I see on the download page: http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/download/updates/acidpro

VMP

[I]Catalyst UI seems more like video editing by Fisher Price than Sony Broadcast systems.

LOL!!!

+1 to Dgates

LOL! Amazing.

@dgates - unfortunately that's exactly how i perceive the ui of catalyst. for some reason scs seems to think serious editors are going to use touch screens and those that don't are probably of an age where they need glasses and suffer from parkinsons so they too need oversize buttons!

frankly i find the cat suite as it stands NO substitute for vegas, in fact it is just about hovering in between any one of a bunch of entry level nle's and the less 'pro' featured ones offered by some higher end developers - i mean it doesn't even come close to scs's own studio version...

But remember, it is not supposed to be a replacement for Vegas.....what it is I have no idea....but I am not that smart to see the future of where they are going, maybe they are..and it will develop, hell I don't have any idea...but the writing has been on the wall and I could kick myself for not learning the other tools I have better. Man I have a comfort zone with Vegas...but I have a project now , which is not on a strict time limit, so I am editing it with another edit system, no fun and way longer.
adios.

18 years ago I searched the internet for every audio and video editor I could get my hands on. I finally settled on Ulead's MediaStudio Pro and Vegas Audio.

I rode the Ulead train until the end. I beta tested MediaStudio and DVD Workshop and even worked the Ulead booth at NAB in 2004. I actually met DSE during the DVD Workshop beta. He turned me on to Vegas video. I moved to Vegas at version 4 and never looked back.

I have no desire to get on another "train" and start this cycle once again.

just to reinforce some opinions expressed hereabouts:

a. i shoot hd and edit all formats below. i am highly unlikely to do anything in the near future with 4k, and if i should it will be more than likely for reframing purposes only - so 13 is still my editor of choice and i can't see any reason for that to change

b. i have used / played with nearly all the current nle's (exclude mac) and none come close to vegas for speed and ease of use, and NONE offer scripting, or homegrown plugins like vasst.

c. 13 has proved very stable and robust for MY purposes. i can't see any reason to stop using it even if scs does retire it.

d. i can live without gpu - even though i have been very vocal about it's poor implementation it IS NOT a deal breaker.

e. i'm eagerly watching cat's development, but at the moment hold no hope for it as, as scs like to term it, a 'craft' editor. in fact i hold very little hope for it in general judging from the trial versions i've payed with.

f. from all my years on various forums there has been none as supportive and informative as this one. i sincerely hope it lives well beyond it's namesakes life ;-)

For what it's worth I have found Vegas to be quite stable when using the integrated GPU built into my Haswell 4770k compared to using a discrete GPU.

Yes, the integrated GPU is nowhere near as fast as a discrete solution but it is much better than no GPU acceleration at all. I am curious to know how the Broadwell based 5775c processor with it's Iris based iGPU would do with Vegas. Unfortunately this CPU is as rare as hen's teeth these days.

In an interview with Michael Bryant of Sony, he stated Sony's customers asked for this. Reading all these posts, I haven't seen anyone that wants it. Does anyone ever remember asking for this Catalyst software? He goes on to say that we need this, infers that we must have it. I was really put off by his words........anytime someone tells me how I have to be, I just wanna kick the you know what, out of them!
I hope SCS is reading all of these posts!

robert

I think the biggest problem with Vegas is VFW (Video for Windows). A long time ago not long after DirectShow came out I talked with someone (can't remember the specifics) about whether Vegas would adopt the new DirectShow codecs and basically they said Vegas would need a complete rewrite to support that.

Catalyst Edit v1.0 really looks like a proof of concept experiment to me. They should probably have an early adopter upgrade offer for Vegas Pro 13 users (at around $150).

But regardless, Catalyst Edit appears to have the fundamental interface concepts from Vegas Pro. Considering the new features talked about in Catalyst Edit 2015.1 it seems like Sony is really aiming to build most, if not all, of the main features from Vegas Pro into Catalyst Edit. I would bet in a couple years Catalyst Edit will be a full replacement.

>> No, it's not Ulead Media Studio all over again

Yes, it is.

>> Ulead went out of business

They dropped product after product before going out of business. DVD creation, 3D stuff, NLE then bang.

>> Sony Creative Software is NOT going out of business

They quite probably are. It seems extremely unlikely their new products are going to survive in competition with what is out there now, and the fact that SCS is now dropping product after product after product (Cinescore, Acid, DVD...) means they will have a credibility problem. You'd have to be insane to bet your business on SCS going forward.

>> That rewrite is Catalyst Edit

Not yet, not even close. With a dwindling revenue stream from a lack of loyal customers, quite probably never.

>> So you are saying that Adobe "Ransom-ware"

Sigh, that again?

>> is better than owning your own software from Sony?

Yes, I prefer renting software from a company that release updates several times a year than owning software from a company that went out of business three years ago.

>> I assume that you have purchased every version of Vegas Pro since you started
>> using it and didn't miss any versions in between

Yes I have. Partly in desperate attempts at finding a version that was not irrevocably broken (10-11-12 area). For the past few years Premiere has been my main editing system. I'd love for it to be Vegas since I much prefer the Vegas work flow, but that hasn't been possible. Premiere has its issues, but compared to Vegas it has been a beacon of stability and support.

>> This is not a big deal

Yes, it is a HUGE deal. It saves me a bit of money though.

>> Vegas Pro 13.0's current capabilities will probably last at least several years into
>> the future with full support from Sony

SCS's ability to release desired bug fixes is not particularly legendary. There are issues in Vegas that are years and years old, but that have never been attended to. Just about anything that has to do with Panasonic GH3 and GH4 footage, as an example. The fix is probably trivial, but nobody has bothered to try.

Prediction: After 2016 SCS is not going to maintain Vegas Pro any more. They'll say they will, then they'll say they may, finally they will not respond.

>> We should be happy that Sony (after 4 release with GPU support never
>> quite working as expected) has made the hard choice to start over and architect
>> an NLE

No, we should not. We should be dismayed that there is not enough talent at SCS to fix a problem that has been an issue for years and years. CPU acceleration during encoding/decoding is NOT deeply ingrained into the base NLE since just about any rendering software is licensed and therefore runs basically "outside" of the NLE.

Now, I don't think the developers at SCS is particularly terrible developers, there is probably fewer of them than there should be, and the ones that are there have probably been busy the past few years on the Catalyst software, so the number of people working on Vegas has probably been the bare minimum.

>> they are continuing to service their customers by imagining the future and creating
>> a new editing experience with the Catalyst Series

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=hail+mary+pass

I am not a Sony hater, quite the opposite. I would love for Vegas to continue to work and develop, but it's been clear for several years now that this has not been an SCS priority.

>> they made the hard decision that Unix was a better way forward into the future and they took it.

They did that, but they did it in a way that SCS is not. If SCS did the same as Apple, there would be a Vegas 14 (should have happened at 10) it would basically look like a slightly more modern Vegas 13, it would operate almost exactly like Vegas (except for new features), it would work with old Vegas projects, and everybody would be happy.

Using the Apple analogy, what SCS is doing is as if Apple had taken OS9 and replaced it with DOS.

>>>Yes, I prefer renting software from a company that release updates several times a year than owning software from a company that went out of business three years ago<<<<

Useless updates. They are just laughing at you, just like Autodesk who kills off Softimage and keeps charging $1000 per year in maintenance for Maya and Max which are basically exactly the same programs they were back in 1999.

Adobe has done almost nothing with 1/2 of their programs for years. They just add some minor $hit feature and keep charging your credit cards.

At their speed Premiere pro will catch up to Vegas 11 by 2017.