I enjoy the discussion of vegas studio vs vegas 6 and the future of both. I use most of the features of V6 as an intense hobbyist. When I compared the two programs the only things that would keep me from buying the studio version if I were a first time buyer are the unlimited tracks, AC3, nesting and a little bit the scripting. Other than that there isn't a large difference from what I see on the comparison page.

Edit - I imagine the studio version doesn't include things like bezier tools. Its not mentioned on the comparison page though.

"...and the interface should be updated to something a bit more professional-looking."

I like the Vegas UI, it is completely functional and well thought out. I wouldn't want them to "pretty it up" at the cost of functionality.

John

>>>>http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/profiles/?profiles/apple_fcs_profile-fincher_h640

Seductive!
After viewing I'm more tempted than ever before to make the jump to a Mac.
Somebody,----stop me!"<<<<

Stop!

Absolutely nothing they are doing that anybody else couldn't do with Vegas + Fusion +XSI on a 10 time smaller budget. Probably could do more than those two guys being interviewed.

Now , I know somebody is going to say, but they are doing this or that and Vegas doesn't do that. The point is one could arrive at the same final result ( even quicker perhaps ) without going through those same steps, and that is all that counts.

And one of those guys directed Madona's movies which disqualifies him from any serious discussion for life.

"I like the Vegas UI, it is completely functional and well thought out. I wouldn't want them to "pretty it up" at the cost of functionality."

Nor would I, and I said that above. But a cosmetic change need not affect one iota of functionality.

Now , I know somebody is going to say, but they are doing this or that and Vegas doesn't do that. The point is one could arrive at the same final result ( even quicker perhaps ) without going through those same steps, and that is all that counts.

Sigh.

Ignorance is bliss, I guess.

Vegas's lack of high bit support (more than 8 bits per channel) makes it impossible to get the same results as FCP or PP 2.0 or any of a number of other professional NLEs.

Impossible.

And that's a word I don't use very often.

What you can do is shuffle your video over to After Effects, Combustion, or Fusion, and do all your work there in 10-bit, 16-bit or even 32-bit linear float, then shuffle the result back to Vegas and say, "I did it in Vegas."

But it wouldn't really be true.

The choice of NLE isn't a religious issue, where there is only one true God and one true prophet and one true church, and all the other people also created by the Creator are factory rejects.

If Vegas does everything you need, more power to you, because it is very very nice to work with!

If on the other hand you need capabilities that Vegas simply doesn't have:
run, don't walk to FCP or PP 2.0 (in this league). And live with their weaknesses, because as compensation you get what you needed for your work but couldn't get in Vegas.

Continuously beating your head against the wall isn't good for the soul.

This has been discussed before, but in my opinion I don't think more than 8-bits is a big deal. i.e. The 10-bit implementation in FCP has been buggy for a while... and you don't really hear users complaining about it.

Even Sony Xpri (high-end, aimed at Avid) only outputs 8-bit.

In 99% of cases, you're going to have difficulty telling the difference between 8-bit and 10-bit/32-bit processing.
Linear light processing (implies 32-bit float) makes a very noticeable difference, but neither Premiere or FCP does that (as far as I know anyways). Well actually the film-style dissolves involve a form of linear light processing... Vegas does this too.

2- In Fincher's case, FCP's processing bit depth is totally irrelevant. They are just using FCP as an offline tool... I believe Assimilate Scratch (or some other DI product) is going to do the finishing/online/grading/DI.

There are various reasons why FCP would be a better choice than Vegas.
On the technical side, FCP supports a good codec for offline (DVCPRO HD) whereas Vegas doesn't. It also has better timecode and EDL support presumably.
On the non-program side, FCP has a better reputation, has ties with more of the highest-end work, has better third-party support (i.e. among integrators), etc.
Sony Media would have to work to do those things.

In my opinion, it's not really necessary for them to do that work. It might give Vegas a marketing edge, but doing that work doesn't help 99.9% of users (who is not editing a multimillion dollar feature film).

Anyways, this is almost turning into a religious debate here. ;)

As someone who is jumping into the foray of video having come from a still shooters world, it is very difficult NOT to be tempted by the marketing machine that is Apple.

The tough part is having enough presence of mind to see that it is about the user of the tool, not the tool itself. That was a valuable lesson I learned from my days as a photojournalist.

Apple gets the reputation it does because they know how to market themselves - I TRULY wish SONY would do the same with it's Production Suite. It really is a much more user friendly experience as compared to PPro or AVID (BLECH!).

I did like how in one of the Apple clips the production company was uploading footage to iPods - which is really the bulk of Apples biz right now. And Vegas handles that job just as well as FCP does.

Gimme a generic Intel box that I know works with SONY Vegas and Acid Pro and let me at em...

Editing is just plain fun with these two apps at my disposal.

Now bring on Cinescore....

There are lots of bugs in FCP (as in Vegas and every other NLE), but I have talked to several people who successfully use 10-bit in FCP every day.

Good answers are hard to come by sometimes. If somebody were to say "the Media Manager in Vegas has been really buggy for a while, but you don't really hear users complain about it," that could mean a) that it is so bad nobody uses it, or b) that most people are able to use it successfully anyway, so they don't complain.

Sony XPRI isn't exactly taking the world by storm. I have heard many many people check out XPRI at events here in L.A., and when they hear it's 8-bit only, they say "well, we use 10-bit DigiBeta" or "OK, I'm not paying $90K for an 8-bit NLE station, no matter how nice it is to work with."

I agree with you about the 99% of cases (for most people on average), but I usually don't like to be in the bottom 99%. :O)

10-bit gives me more latitude to do nice post work.

PP 2.0 does 32-bit linear float, this is a popular demo on the Adobe tour, with real life footage.

Motion is 32-bit, and interestingly, FCP stores all audio in 32-bit float.

Good points about the offline codecs, and that it would take better EDL and timecode handling to make Vegas useable for offline work.

It seems to me the quickest ways to boost Vegas' capabilities for both pros, prosumers, and hobbyists would be to include a Motion-like capability (working with behaviors instead of keyframes), and an After Effects API.

FCP, PP, Combustion, and many more allow the use of AE plug-ins, which can be a major timesaver.

"In my opinion, it's not really necessary for them to do that work. It might give Vegas a marketing edge, but doing that work doesn't help 99.9% of users (who is not editing a multimillion dollar feature film)."

But that's the question, isn't it? Where's Vegas going? Is it going to remain a niche product and never break past the "pro-sumer" barrier?

If so, and all you're worried about is what "99.9%" of users are CURRENTLY doing with it, then there's a whole lot which can be stripped from it, don't you think? Why maintain a pro-level app when a few beefings-up to Movie Studio will cover that same crowd? Just add 5.1 surround and beef up the track motion and call it quits.

I'd hope for more with Vegas, because it does have the potential to leave everything else eating its dust.

(I mean, if nothing else, Glenn, you've got a Vegas training DVD out -- wouldn't you like an increasing audience ands lots more to teach for future editions?)

I think you can tell where things are going from the current situation. There is movie studio for anyone, vegas for prosumers and xpri for big production. I hope it stays that way. Vegas will nip at the heals of xpri, but there will always be a difference and that will be mostly hardwear. MHO

But Glenn, will FCP come with those clips of that half naked model strutting down the catwalk? I might buy HDXchange just for that. hehehe.

It was good to see how Sony had included Vegas as an intregal part of it's asset management systems. The video search tool has some potential if it actually works in a real world environment.

Most of NAB was focused on IPTV, along with integration and workflow, were the big buzzwords of every major company there. Sony,Avid, Apple, Adobe and the dozens of hardware/software vendors were pushing that. Even Sun was promoting asset management and broacast scheduling using Java and the free open source db PostgreSQL.

I just wished Sony had a big sign somewhere in the booths giving detailed info about the Vegas classes being conducted. I didn't find out when and where until Wed evening and missed the Media Manager class. When I got there shortly after 5, the woman taking info had already gone home.

I really think the HDXchange software has some great potential if you're going to use Vegas, Acid and others in a small production company or tv station. Too bad more people didn't take the time to check it out. I'm glad I did.

btw I have to agree with one of the above posts. Eyeon Fusion is very cool indeed.

BTW, the thing that got the most promotion at NAB was BattleStar Galactica. Who'd have thought?

One last thing, the reason those products looked so hot is because most of them were running on souped up, expensive, BOXX PCs. The AE demo system showing 2K editing was on a BOXX with 2 dual core opterons. How many of us can afford that type of hardware? Same goes for the maxed out MAC Dual G5 boxes.

Joe C.

The AE demo system showing 2K editing was on a BOXX with 2 dual core opterons. How many of us can afford that type of hardware? Same goes for the maxed out MAC Dual G5 boxes.

FCPUG demoed 2K editing on a MacBook Pro notebook.

Must have been the Intel processor! :O)

Seriously, several benchmarks have shown MacBook Pro notebooks to beat Dual G5s for video work performance.

FCP has GPU acceleration even on MacBook Pros....

As does Motion.

On another note, I visited Digital Domain a few months ago, where one artist showed his compositing work on one scene from Battlestar Galactica.

600 layers!

Couldn't work on that without node-based compositing...

Just got this from a fellow MacBook Pro owner:

...realtime playback in Motion, even with a particle system, text animations with blurs, and chroma keying

Pretty nice to be able to get this on a notebook computer, couldn't do it without GPU acceleration.

Let's hope Vegas 7 already has this implemented.

I suspect there's a very good chance of this, as they're last to the party.

I want to see GUP utilzation too, I just want it to be optional, not necessary. Ya dig :)

And I want them to make sure they get it as accessible as possible, Make it available with most of the Graphics cards. Anyway - That's my take on the whole GPU thing.

Dave

As you know fusion can do 8 bit, 10 bit, 32 bit, more bits than anybody needs all floating in points all over the space.

I haven't noticed any problems when using footage edited in Vegas.
I'm not shooting anything on film, so it really is not a big deal ( or at all ). By the time I get to that point ( if ever ) Vegas will probably handle floating 32 bits anyway.

The question is ( again ) Can I do everything I need in Vegas faster than FCP or Premiere or whatever. The answer is yes. Will their end product look or sound better. The answer is, probably not if I know what I'm doing, even if I use 8 bits to their 10 bits.

And in the end what good is HD and floating point precision when the end result ( like those two guys from FCP ad ) is a Madonna movie or the next Britney video? It's like owning a space shuttle, and just driving it around the block.

Deusx,

He-he, you certainly have a point about crappy content.

But there is some great stuff too.

I know the $5K version of Fusion can do high-bit (as I indicated above). That's just a bit rich for me, I'd rather spend that money on other things (like Shake or Nuke if I had to do really deep compositing).

All the other numerous applications that offer GPU support allow rendering and preview without it.

There are cases when the end product will look and sound better in other (more expensive) pro apps, this has been covered here many times, and it's not all about 8-bit video either.

Vegas does what it can do really well. If it serves your needs, be very happy!

I am not keen on having the software get tied to any piece of hardware, even if such a dependence is optional. Therefore I am lukewarm about GPU support.

I really wonder if a properly written application can't be just as fast on a multi-core CPU as it would be with GPU support. In the old days, Intel CPUs were completely different from DSPs that were dedicated to processing audio, video, etc. Thus, specialized hardware often provided huge performance gains over what the CPU could do on its own.

However, as the processors have evolved, they now have portions of their architecture that perform many DSP-like functions and therefore, if properly written, applications can run almost as fast as those that require dedicated hardware. Thus, I'd rather see the engineering go into making Vegas take even more advantage of multiple cores or multiple CPUs. My guess is that the resulting performance my could very well be close (or better) than what you'd get with GPU support.

Remember, when you ask for a feature, you should format your request in terms of the benefit you want, and try to stay away from suggesting how the feature should be implemented. One thing I tell all my engineering teams is to NEVER design what the customer asks for, because the customer doesn't have a clue how to design or build something. Instead, listen to what the customer is really asking for, and design something that satisfies that itch.

No one here really wants GPU support. What they are really asking for is faster performance. If that performance can be achieved by taking better advantage of the main CPU, that would be, in my opinion, a far better way to achieve that goal. Of course, the Sony engineers may have even a better way to improve performance.

John,

Tied to any piece of hardware? Even if it is just 98% of all STANDARD graphics cards, available at any Best Buy, CompUSA, or found in most PCs sold today? Even many new notebooks?

That tie seems pretty cheap to me.

Processors have evolved quite a bit. Unfortunately all the crap that is necessary to maintain compatibility with the original 1979 IBM PC design hasn't.

Heck, MS even had to give up on using Intel's modern EFI to replace the ancient BIOS we are all suffering from.

A modern PC is PACKED with bottlenecks inserted to maintain this compatibility.

The GPU, in the meantime, hasn't even heard of any of those problems, and it roams free on a card with ultra high throughput memory busses and specialized instruction sets, etc. that the main PC CPU can only dream about.

The second core in a dual core main CPU has already been milked in most cases, if not by the NLE, at least by the OS.

If it hasn't been milked fully, and you focus the entire engineering department on squeezing the last drop of performance out of it (using increased multi-threading that unfortunately also increases bugs substantially, and those bugs are harder to find), you will find the day after the first release a letter in your mailbox saying "thanks for the increased performance, but when are you going to take advantage of the GPU also, so we can do XXX faster?"

GPU acceleration is very widely used, very well tested, and offers a safe, isolated way to boost performance using the standard graphics cards that are already in common PCs.

Every month, performance goes up, and prices come down, without Sony having to lift a finger. It's all about massive sales colume of these graphics cards.

One really unique thing that could boost performance by 30-40%, would be for Microsoft to make an AMD-only version of Windows, using the advanced and very intelligent ADDITIONAL instruction set that AMD has but Intel doesn't.

That is not likely to happen, unless AMD pays for it of course.

Except I don't think MS has any Windows engineers to spare to work on XP, because Vista is so deep in bug muck that I don't think those guys will be able to come up for air until fall of 2008 at best.

Coursedesign, I think you sum up the problem about not using the GPU well. The current design of the CPUs and memory management has serious design flaws when compared to the GPUs. Most DSPs are very well design and perform well.
Just look at the performance of NLEs that use GPUs.

If in a magical world, we could run vegas on a IBM "x" 8-way box using a form of "linux"
with no internet software overhead, GPU wouldn't be needed. But with MS and current MB designs for users, GPU processing power is needed. Just look at gaming, wether on PCs or gameconsoles, the GPUs is where the bulk of the work is done.

Tied to any piece of hardware? Even if it is just 98% of all STANDARD graphics cards, available at any Best Buy, CompUSA, or found in most PCs sold today? Even many new notebooks?

May be true, but is there any standardization of the instruction set amongst these "standard" graphic cards? My experience with graphic cards is that there is NOTHING standard from one manufacturer to the next, once you get beyond the basic VGA instruction set. Also, video drivers are buggier than any other class of software. This leads to situations such as this:

Adobe Premiere GPU compatibility

This is a pretty small list compared to the universe of video cards. Thus, while I realize that 98% of all computers may ship with a card that claims GPU compatibility, I don't think this list from Adobe represents anything close to that percentage, and in fact may be only a tiny fraction of the cards being sold today. Not a huge deal, because obviously most of us will buy what it takes, but it does mean that we'll need to get the right card.

However, even if I am lucky enough to get the right card, I am still troubled by Sony taking this route (if indeed they do) because ATI, who made my Radeon card that I use today, has the worst support of any company I have ever dealt with. Blame Canada! The only way to get support on their products is through the Rage3D site (and thank goodness for that site!). What's more, I've gone through almost a dozen drivers in the past three years, and the darn thing still doesn't do most of what was claimed in the literature, especially with regards to video capture.

So, bottom line, I do not get a warm fuzzy feeling with the thought that I may have to include NVidia and ATI in my future support chain. While you can find lots of people that like to bad-mouth Microsoft, Intel, and even AMD, these companies are nirvana compare to the video card companies.

1- I'll chip in on the GPU discussion:
Following what John Meyer is saying, I think everyone on this forum would like to see greater performance. However, what we don't want are hardware incompatibilities related to particular hardware.
i.e. MBE2 (GPU accelerated) only works on *particular* graphics cards.
With some other GPU accelerated systems, the GPU acceleration will break with OS or driver updates.
And then there's the hardware acceleration systems out there that are quite picky+troublesome.

2- More Vegas users:
I'd definitely like to see that. :)
I suppose it comes down to marketing... hopefully Sony continue to flex its marketing muscle and promote integration with its other products. And I believe they're doing that already.
If you look at Adobe, a lot of people like the Premiere/Photoshop/AE integration.

Other companies like Apple certainly are good at marketing... but if Sony Media were to clone its marketing strategy, it would at best achieve parity with Apple. It wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing (Vegas could take over on the strength of the product), but at the same time why limit your thinking?

3- Sony should sell a turnkey 16-core system just for the marketing value. 8 CPU dual core dual Opterons are available right now, so this shouldn't be hard???
No other NLE out there supports 16 cores as far as I know... except for Nucoda (which doesn't really apply). I think 16 cores would make a splash.

4- Feature-wise, Vegas is pretty good. The main areas Vegas is lacking:
Mid-high-end professional level:
Hardware capture devices support.

Timecode support? (Haven't looked into this myself, so could be wrong here.) Needs
RS-232 and RS-422 for making broadcast masters.

EDL, XML, interchange support. i.e. Read the Avid/?op-atom? MXF.

Less button pushing for editing. i.e. overwrite edit, ability to delete without ripple via backspace. Crtl+Shift+f to ripple all is a little too much (it should've been f to begin with).

Intuitive to get into. / Professional users using the program. A lot of the editing shortcuts are hard to find... i.e. split and slip editing. For FCP editors, searching "blade" should bring up a reference to split edit.

Better media manager + logging. Ideally, the logging tool should be able to capture the tape in one shot without having to start + stop (shuttling during log and capture wastes time). Use the frame chasing feature from HDXchange, and this would be possible. Frame chasing lets you scrub through footage as you're capturing.
Optical scene detection and the ability to add log notes on the fly would also be necessary.
Log notes should carry over into Vegas and be easily searchable. You should be able to create regions and markers and search them.
IMO (and don't take this the wrong way), the media manager tagging system is way too tedious. The most logging I'd do is to write one-liner descriptions of what happens in a scene, and search for particular words into those one-liners. I'd add more one-liners in regions to break up interviews into subjects. And asterisks to rate clips for golden moments (more asterisks the higher the rating). So just search for asterisks to get the good moments. I'd just add the asterisks to the clip description or name... tagging the clip or putting asterisks into another field wastes time.

10-bit support may be necessary because people ask for it.

Everyone else... i.e. 99.9%
I think the best improvement would be to make the program easier to get into.
i.e. the way iMovie is laid out, it's pretty intuitive and logical. I don't think I ever looked in the manual for it.

Better logging and media management would also help.

5- I think for professional use, Vegas could seriously take over news editing. A good XDCAM workflow will shorten the time needed to edit, and maybe it will finally kill off linear editing.
I'm not sure if this would expand Vegas' user base though... because most of us aren't doing news editing.

John, I believe why ATI is so shoddy is because they have interns/students writing the drivers for the video cards. (OTOH, this may be hearsay.)

And, um, don't blame Canada. I live there! Blame the interns, not the country.