OT: An Inconvenient Truth

Cliff Etzel wrote on 6/26/2006, 1:08 PM

Went to the local indie theater last night to watch Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" and have to say what an eye opener. While surfing about today, came across an interview with Director Davis Guggenheim and Editor Dan Swietlik. They discussed how they used virtually every format out there - from Super 8 to HDCAM. Needless to say, I was impressed with what was said in the article - http://www.studiodaily.com/filmandvideo/currentissue/6681.html

With all the hoopla over how these documentary shooters rant about AVID this and FCP that, why is it that VV6 still seems to be viewed as the black sheep and get's virtually no respect amongst the indie short and long form documentary shooters out there?

I myself am looking to begin shooting some short form docs and am debating VV6 for post production.

Any thoughts?

Cliff

Back to post

Comments

CVM wrote on 6/27/2006, 2:14 PM

---------------------------
Late in our 6-week recut, he started asking "what's this NLE again?" On one occasion he said, "You just did something in half a minute that it would take 15 minutes to do in Avid or Final Cut."
--------------------------

Amen to this statement. I work exclusively with Vegas at home, but at my 9-5 job, I sometimes hire an editor at a fancy post house using Avid Symphony (with lots of hardware and fancy multipin cables and DigiBeta decks...) and it literally takes him five times a long to do something in Avid that it takes me in Vegas. And it's not just because he's using uncompressed video... it's all the button pushing!!! Click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click... I ask him what he's doing, and he says, "oh, just trimming this video." What? Why are you clicking so much??????"

winrockpost wrote on 6/27/2006, 2:43 PM

you need to find another AVID editor,, vegas is fast, and I can do lots of stuff faster in Vegas than Avid, but a good avid editor will not make you think you are doing turn of the century editing, then of course you have the vegas render. But with the speed of the newer dual cpu , vegas is getting faster and faster at that render deal.

rmack350 wrote on 6/27/2006, 6:01 PM

I didn't have a part in the decision to move from Media100 and 844 to Axio/Premiere. The reasons I think we went that way are conjecture.

Some of it was historical. Media100 is a contemporary of Avid and a lot of people went the M100 route. It was/is a hardware based system for the Mac (although there were also versions for the PC, and there is currently a software-only version, I think.)

Users of Media100 were initially coming off of BetaSP or otherwise digitizing analog footage. A Media100 user will have invested in decks with SDI I/O, will have worked off RAID arrays, etc, etc.

Someone migrating from such a system is going to be looking for a system with hardware integration. It was pretty unthinkable around here that we would use a software only system. In fact, even though we now shoot on DV, and have done so for many years, everthing gets ingested over SDI. Why? Largely because the systems we've used were not built for DV, so things have evolved around SDI.

In addition, we are looking forward to the next documentary and thinking that it will be shot and edited in an HD format. HDV is not a candidate.

Axio seems to have the hardware power to do nearly what the 844 could do, and to be able to work in HD as well. Axio has a lot of compositing power. It also has warts, but everything has warts.

Why not FCP? First of all, there wasn't anything like the Axio for it. Second, after many years on Apple systems, the owner of the company (and principle editor) was absolutely sick of Apple. We've had issues over the years where Apple has made major hardware changes and left third party edit systems (ours) in a dead end. Given that Apple was just about to transition to an x86 platform, there was no way in hell we'd go through that again. We thought it better to be in a market where there was competition.

Why not Vegas? No hardware. No 10-bit. Without a fully fleshed out hardware package that Sony has fleshed out and stands behind, Vegas can't capture people with existing infrastructure.

However, for new businesses, Vegas is not a bad choice. It's cheap, in fact it's hard to make it very expensive. Certainly there are things you could do. You could install a BlackMagic card to get some level of SDI I/O, you could install a big RAID array and distribute the media on it via fiberchannel, you could put Vegas on the fastest dual-dual opteron you can get (which is what our Premiere/Axio systems are), you can get control surfaces, you can drive HD monitors, etc, etc.

Here where I work, I have Premiere and Vegas on my machine. It's a software only machine and I have the two NLE's because I need to access the media. I'm not editing it, though. I have to say that I've yet to warm up to Premiere. Sure, I'm used to Vegas, but Premiere really is a resource hog and some very basic things are clumsy compared to Vegas.

Don't get too caught up in agrandizing a "new wave" of people who can't work well with others. Seen it, done it, it's a dead end. You learn less and end up less skilled.

Rob Mack

DJPadre wrote on 6/27/2006, 11:42 PM

aside from all the technical differences which have been noted here, one of the biggest issues with any piece of software is....

ATTITUDE

As soon as people hear the word Sony, they immediately assume multinational monster. They also assume that its a kids program due o the name o teh application. Then theres the diehard fanbase which is VERY difficult to penetrate, no matter how much more efficient Vegas may be to (lets say) premire pro, the fact that thee premiere users have been using the program for almost 10 years and is integral to their work, means that Vegas MUST have something to hook them.
Now there are many MANY things Vegas has that these other apps do not, whether it be from format through to edit features, however people do not like change.
For many pros, change means time, time to learn and time to adapt. Many of these guys who carry alot of influence in the businss do not want to adapt simply because they would need to relearn what they already know. By then, they would be "newbies" and even though they dont see it this way, tehir experience level with the new application is next to zero. This doesnt bode well for ones ego...

rmack350 wrote on 6/28/2006, 7:57 AM

You could look at it that way, that it is unpleasant to have to learn a new application. That's one of the reasons I'm still using Vegas at work for my day to day mundane tasks. It's easier to get my job done than it would be to learn PPro. (however, there are actually some reasons for me to use Vegas. The fact that it'll loop a region and keep playing when Vegas loses system focus is a big deal for me. I can work on something outside of Vegas and use the video for reference).

We're talking about people with long experience with an NLE moving to a new NLE. I think these people developed their view of what an edit system should be at a time when a purely software system wasn't even possible. They've relied on hardware systems and are inclined to adopt new systems that are hardware based. Vegas is not a candidate for these people, which is too bad because they are influential.

One of our system integrator's installers had very good things to say about Vegas. He thought it was an excellent prosumer system, but it didn't have hardware support. They certainly didn't try to sell Vegas to us.

We've got several threads going here but the main thread is which NLE to choose if you plan on embarking on a self producing documentary path. In my opinion, if you're starting out, I'd go with a software-only system on Intel or AMD platform. Wait on Mac if that's what you want since it's moving to PC hardware anyway.

The good thing about Vegas is that it's very efficient within it's sphere, and it's cheap enough that you don't lose much if you decide to go to another NLE in two years. Your hardware should still be perfectly usable.

The down side is that Vegas still doesn't easily scale up to use any sort of hardware acceleration, nor can it yet handle 10-bit. If it doesn't make progress on this front then one might have to jump to a new NLE at some point. Given the difficulty of moving projects fram any NLE to any other NLE, there's a point to be made for picking a system that'll scale up later.

Rob Mack