Oh and do I still have to conform to Avid's Archaic editing style.... YES.

I say a big NO THANK YOU to Avid.

Plus this is the SONY site so expect to be flamed :)

CH

Vooooosh!

I just heard somebody light their torch.

Yea, I kinda take issue with this blatent promotion of a competing NLE on the Vegas forum. (I've never had any experience with the Avid editing systems, but I've heard enough about them that I don't think it woudl be a good first few days/weeks of using it for editing.

if you love your avid stuff so much, then .... yea, so there =)

Even without the use of scripts Vegas works great for multicam edits... Depending on the project I use 2 methods.
I will either add all my camera angles as takes an switch between takes using the T key, that works great. Or for more complex projects I lay down all the tracks on the timeline and do some cutting.

I'll say it again--with a DV feature under my belt, there's no way I'm switching from a DVX100 to HDVs that have no true 24p (in my price range). I'll go for the greater color depth when 24p mates with HDV.

Forgive me, I am not endorsing Avid over Vegas whatsoever. But there are other people on the forum that use both NLE's. I can see why people felt I was doing so. However, one important thing to note is that Avid is providing the ability to work in HDV natively and is providing their HDV codec FREE to their customers. I hope Sony takes note and does the same thing for thier customers.

I hope Sony takes note and does the same thing for thier customers.

After Sony more than doubles the price of Vegas to match Avid Xpress HD ($700 for Vegas+DVDA vs. $1500 for Avid at Videoguys), I'm sure they'd more than glad to offer the HDV plugin for free :-)

Mike

", one important thing to note is that Avid is providing the ability to work in HDV natively and is providing their HDV codec FREE to their customers" - pmasters

Patrick - have you tried opening an m2t file in Vegas? Vegas plays the native m2t files, it's not necessary to buy the Cineform plugin, it just makes editing easier.

Dave

Dave, I know that Vegas can open native HDV files but its so slow when editing. From what I understand, this wont be the case with Avid HD.

Providing their codec to do so for free is a big deal to me. A poster above mentioned the price difference, shouldnt matter. Especially if one spends $3500-$5k for an HDV camera from Sony, one should expect to be able to edit with ease and capture without having to shell out extra money.

My original post wasnt championing Avid HD against Vegas at all, but merely to let other users on the forum who do use Avid as well know about the HD version.

I am not married to one NLE. Each of the major NLE (minus Liquid) do things I need better than the other ones and thats why I use them.

I have no problem whatsoever with an honest positive review of another product here. This is about editing is not about faith. (This shouldn't be like the new CIA, where we have to purge the non-believers.) There are certainly features that some other editors have, that I would like to see Vegas implement. If the Vegas community knows about them, then the Vegas engineering team is more likely to implement them. Also to me a review of a competing NLE by someone who already knows Vegas's strengths is more valuable that one from an FCP or Avid fanboy. pmasters is a regular poster here for years, he not a salesman from a competing company and should not be treated as just a mere shill.

I DO HAVE a problem with some one like that HDV-guy who is just cheerleading troll

I totally agree. As a Vegas user, I came and searched this forum for Xpress HD hoping to learn something about this new version, especially the multicamera stuff, as it comares to Vegas. I'm surprised so many fellow Vegheads feel threatened. It's just software, people, and competing products are relevant.

Thanks for the comparison pmasters. I'd be interested to hear more about the multicamera stuff. I've never used Avid software, so I'm also curious what VivaVegas means by archaic editing style.

I don't think you can just expect features to be implemented at will. Underlying every NLE is a certain design philosphy and that affects what can and cannot be done. For certain workflows the way Avid systems work is better than the way Vegas does things. Their main focus is not independant videographers, it's online production, typically to tight deadlines. In that scenario no one's going to be playing around with more than two tracks of video and two or three tracks of audio. If the job needs it all the audio gets sent somewhere else or was mixed live, same goes for a lot of multicamera stuff.
Just to add multicamera to their highend systems costs a bundle, you'd buy many Vegas systems and a few cameras just for the upgrade price.

Avid have many good systems and they cost big time but they're incredibly capable and they are pretty well the standard in that segment of the industry. But that's a very different segment to the one Vegas occupies. The main intention of their bargain basement systems like Express is for offline editing, you then upload everything to one of their higher end systems for finalising.

What I really don't like about Avid systems is they are very device specific, there's nothing generic about them. So many times our Avid using customers have hired some recently released VCR or camera and it will not work on their Avid system. They have to wait for Avid to release a driver for it, what a pain in the butt. By comparison my old, old copy of V4 talks to our J30s just like it does any other DV device.
Also as has been proven Vegas produces a better quality output, Avids looks better as they use chroma smoothing to knock a little of the DV edge off it however this adds to the generational loss.

Luxo,

"so I'm also curious what VivaVegas means by archaic editing style. "

Vegas is very visual when you edit - Drag a clip over another clip and POOF you have a fade. Vol & Vel Envolopes are updated in real time on screen. Vegas is one of the only programs that I have used that does this.

Its not just Avid that falls into this editing style - FCP falls into it as well.

Let me just say that I am by no means threatened by people reviewing and talking about other NLE's in here. I was simply making it known that HDV is able to be used in Vegas without cineform, because it sounded like he was saying that Avid was doing something that Vegas doesn't, as well as the fact that no-one seems to realize that fact so I decided to state it agian as people don't seem to be able to remember from one post to another that they don't need cineform.

Basically it was a clarification point more than anything.

Dave

Dave I have no problem with clariication. From what I have seen, Avid will be able to offer editing of HDV natively with better than 2-3fps that Vegas does. I find it mind boggling why a competitor's NLE would edit faster than 3fps than the manufacturer's own NLE. Somehow it just doesnt add up. Either Avid's PR machine is working overtime and exaggerating the results or Sony is trying to squeeze out another dime.

I would much rather key frame in Vegas before I would in Avid. And as someone else mentioned, digizting is a pain. But man, Bin organization is second to none. I hope Sony would implement sequences and bin structures from Avid. Maybe throw in multicam (group clip editing) and auto color correct tools and Id glady pay full price for Vegas all over again.

i'd really like to see how avid makes native hdv editing feasible with just software... and it's not just sony, no one else has been able to do it either, because decoding a heavy mpeg2 bitstream requires some serious hardware processing.

thanks for the heads-up pmasters.

No problem. Thats why I posted this thread because of the information I am getting that Avid can accomplish this. I thought it was a bit weird that they could but Sony couldnt., at least not quickly.

Either way, for current Avid owners, $50 isnt a bad price for a full version upgrade and unlike Premiere Pro that charges $99 for a dot five upgrade.

Looking at Avid's documentation for this, I don't see "full frame rate" anywhere. http://www.avid.com/products/datasheets/xpressprohd.pdf

I don't see anyway anybody could do full frame rate editing of MPEG-2 footage today. Got to transcode.

Also I'd challenge the assertion that SPDM is trying to squeeze a dollar out of us. They don't own Aspect HD, they've simply negotiated a better deal for us from Aspect, for the price it's being offered and given the amount of work they've put into it it's an excellent offer.
If you don't recover the cost of it 10 times over on your first HiDef job there's something seriously wrong with how you're billing your clients!
Compared to the cost of everything else I'll be buying to kit up for HDV and HiDef this is just petty cash.
Bob.

Heres how Avid does it.

http://www.avid.com/dnxhd/index.asp

Found this also on there web page.

Better HD. Native DVCPRO HD and HDV*editing means no time- and disk- consuming transcoding before you can begin working. Just plug in and go. Support for revolutionary Avid DNxHD encoded media ensures that graphics, titles, and composites stay razor-sharp, and lets you share projects with other Avid HD systems.

We use Avid a bit for some projects, they do offer some very powerful products. Plus I got to make some new friends calling tech support on a regular basis. Not that I havent called Sony, but not on a first name basis as of yet.