>>>While I know every NLE has its woes, we're looking for power, integration and stability. We produce documentaries for television, DVD and limited theatrical release.<<<

Saying this up front based on what you said - if you need EDL support or matchback support Vegas does not offer it. Also there is no form of hardware support, vegas is software only.

Having said that - Vegas has a very strong audio side. As you are used to Avid and Premiere it will take somewhat of a learning curve to use VV. Many people say it is a lot easier than other NLE's however for me, coming form a long background of editing, many of the "easy" tasks were/are actually harder because of the methods that VV uses. Stability is good, but I also have found Premiere 6.5 extremely stable (And I have come to the conclusion that most complaints come from the pinnacle/premiere side of things. I have not seen too many "I am using a SDI/HD Blue Fish card and Premiere sucks!" posts) I would do a search in these forums for a lot more detalis on what people like, and dislike, about VV. I would suggest a good starting point is almost any thread with "Suggestions for next version" or "Suggestions for Vegas 5" or what have you. Beond that do searches for items such as "Vegas and long form" , "feature film" , "Edl", "matchback" and, of course, "Avid" and "Premiere." Make a list of what you need and compare it to what VV can do.

P.S - that damn Spot is stalking me...or he just types faster than I can. LOL!!

Vegas Rocks!!


Hope that helps.

Personaly: I make music/highlight videos. I haven't gotten any cash for doing these (they are for a local school) but I do get some compensation: computer parts (hard drives, new CPU, MB, etc).

Profesionaly: A guy i do some work for has an editor do his TV show with a media 100 system. Well, the media 100 system had a bad accident, and since he spent all the $$$ on a RT system and very little on CPU horse power, I get to do what he can't. Mostly right now that is placing scrolling adds on the bottom of the screen and some minor editing/cropping. But, I can render the entire 30 minute show in 3 hours while the guy with the media 100 takes an estimated 60. it's an estimated gues because they let it go for 15 hours, then stopped the render at 25%.

I've been making a reasonable living for 10 years making a variety of programmes - educational, training, corporate, music - even did a couple of weddings back when things were quiet - thankfully I now turn them down.

I Used Adobe Premiere till I heard about Vegas two years ago. Since making the change - took 2 or 3 weeks to get into the new work flow - my work has increased in quality and quanitity.

It's fully featured, fluent, fast and fun to work with.

We've only been using Vegas for about 4 months, coming from another NLE system. I've done a "wedding week" -- 9 hours of tape shot over 4 days -- which included shooting 18 holes of golf and two large parties, edited down to 2 hours, plus two full length theatre pieces of a couple of hours each. The wedding week material required a considerable amount of color correction and some fairly complex audio montages. Vegas handled both demands extremely well.

We also do "down and dirty" editing for the consumer video market, as well as for corporate clients. Nothing that will be broadcast: in-house training, promotional materials, contractor's "as built" studies, etc., along with still photo capture and adding motion to these montages.

I've found the program to be extremely flexible, allowing me to work with multiple versions of the theatre shoots and with numerous audio sources. The documentation is excellent, as is on-line support via forums such as this. Color correction works beautifully, and the audio tools are very good. Rendering times are fast, and we often encode to mpg in Vegas and export these files to DVD Workshop for burning DVDs.

Jack

I used several low-end applications before I came across Vegas. Although I felt it was great, I heard such good things about Premier that I wanted to give it a try. I was VERY disappointed. It took me a week to become proficient enough to actually do anything, compared to the day it took to start cranking with Vegas. Premier was precise, but it was not FUN to use. It would also take 3-4 times longer than Vegas, would crash (Vegas has only froze one time in over 2 years--and it was because I had a corrupt video file) to create a similar video piece. I was also very disappointed with the limited import and export capabilities of Premier.

I switched back to Vegas after about a month and realized immediate speed increase. As a result, I could spend more time being creative, than fighting with the program. I also appreciated having my powerful sound tools back--Premier was elementary in comparison--athough they have improved. I was also impressed with how scrappy and aggresive Sonic Foundry, now Sony, was in adding new "high-end" features with susequent releases.

One of the most powerful advantages of Vegas is "this" forum. Tech support may be good, but I've never had to call them--everything I needed (including comments from support) was found in this forum. This groupd has also come together over the years and the peer support is incredible.

Unless Sony screws it up, I don't see any reason to switch.

Regarding projects, I've created 69 videos in just the last 2 years with Vegas (while still working as a VP of Marketing at GE during the day). I've created over 15 high-end corporate videos (product launches, demos, conference invitation videos, customer testimonials), 4 corporate videos for a defense contractor, two videos for an interior design firm for custom airplanes (one of my videos was shown to the King of Saudi Arabia, another to the Sultan of Bernie (sp)), a 911 video (including live footage from New York), a 4th of July video for our city shown to thousands of people on a big screen, multiple sports videos, family videos (of course--until we ran out of content), a high-tech startup video (used to sell the company to Microsoft), a streaming video for our piano teacher--used to build his business (www.coolpianoteacher.com), a music video for a popular country western singer, a parody video for the book, "In Search of Stupidity" (www.insearchofstupidity.com), videos for the Catholic church and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, plus I'm just finishing a video, "How to Finance a High-Tech Startup" with comments from successfull CEO's and VC's, and am also working on a Christmas video production, plus editing a previously filmed golf instruction video for the former golf instructor for Tiger Wood's coach (not his dad).

All in all, I would say Vegas is able to do anything I need--it is an incredible application. I have done a lot of gratis work, but have also made tens of thousands of dollars so far--even though it is just a serious hobby/obsession (it definately self-pays for all the video and computer equipment).

If you want to know more about how Vegas compares to AVID, do a search for Victor Milt. He has two AVID systems and has switched almost entirely to VEGAS. He is also probably the most successful professional within this forum, having done professional movies and national commericials for over 20 years (with multiple CLEO's - remember Juan Valedez w/Columbian coffie, Irish Spring, etc. - This is all his work).

Good luck.

Ted aka Chanimal (www.chanimal.com)
www.TheVideomaker.com

I have a friend who actually runs a p0rn business and uses Vegas to cut all their video. Not my cup of tea but it seems to produce pretty good results.

Producing DVD's for a hardcore rap group named Onyx :)

Slam! Bacdafucup!

I use Vegas strictly as a hobby. I take old slides and put maybe 550 on the timeline at 10 sec duration with pans and zooms. The slides are scanned in at 1200 dpi to enable close zooms. I also take old home movies from the family and create a sound track from nothing using old voice recordings and Sound Forge to change old voices into kid voices. This also reqires adding background noises, wind noise, trucks, cars, airplanes, crowds, whistles, and lip reading to figure out what people are saying. The old film days had no sound tracks. Sometimes will spend two hours on two words. Very time consuming but Vegas sound tracks are so flexible you can add bass tracks and drum tracks one note at a time. Its tough to match the timing to the local musicians because they are all over the place in timing. Very subjective. I get the best results by capturing directly from the source and I really don't know why. I had Adobe Prenier 6.0c before I switched to Vegas and the reason I switched was because I loved the way Sound Forge performed. And believe me to make the switch when you are forking out $600.00 a throw is not easy. The Adobe Preimier I used came with Pinnacle DC2000 which is all in the junkyard now. $2500.00 down the drain. As soon as I openned up the Vegas 3.0a application I fell in love with it. There are some anomalies, but they all get straightened out eventually. You can also save your whole project from nuts to bolts over the network to another computer. The scripting will make you holler with joy. You can open one, two three Vegas's at the same time on the same machine. The thing is more flexiible than a
truck full of monkeys playing with rubberbands.

JJK

I use Vegas either at work and at home. In the company I work for (www.csi.it) we produce mainly government and political short movies, and distribute them in streaming over the Internet, while at home I just produced a videoclip for the band I play in (you can see it at www.swampop.it/video.htm, in italian, sorry), and a DVD with many extras/bloopers/backstaging, a collection of photos, all of our songs and a reel of animations made entirely with the Vegas media generators, which we use to show during our concerts.

Well, for all those music stuff, we used A LOT of audio/video formats, from DV to WMV, to DivX, to Mpeg2, WMA, Mp3, WAV, Real, still images as JPG, and, believe me, Vegas had NO problem at all managing all of them !! I sincerely don't think there exists another NLE with such capabilities of handling tons of different formats like it.

I love the way Vegas works, its ease of use and, at the same time, its capability to produce professional products. I think even a child could use it. And I think it is one of the most under-estimated product on the market, ignored from many users and professionals without any valid reason, other but prejudices. It really deserve more and more success.

So I hope Sony has the intention to go further with the developing and improvement ot such a good product, adding features such as 3D z-depth compositing, 3D motion track (like debugmode.com's ones), nested/hierarchical timelines and track transformations, a more powerful and precise chroma keyer, and so on. This would really put together the NLE and compositing worlds in one single product which would really rock.

Bye everyone.

I've used Vegas for TV commercials, documentaries, safety and training programs and building source files for family videos. I mainly use it and Sound Forge for audio editing. People moan about rendering times; with real time Preview, who cares? Render overnight, during lunch or whenever the PC is idle long enough. The only shortcomings are lack of harware support and a weak titling tool. I solved the titling issue by using Premiere 6.5 to lay the titles on finished video. However, at work we are still stuck with our AVIDs for cutting BetaSX footage (if BetaSX decks had 1394 I/O this would not be the case har har har)

Peter

I've gone from hobby to producing and editing a one-hour special on a volunteer fire department spanning 1881-2004. Gonna be previewing at a local theater and airing on local grassroots TV, with interest from PBS! Imagine my surprise. Vegas+DVDA with a little Cool3D thrown in. DGrob

I got into video about a year and a half ago when I discovered there was not much of a market in my area for a small recording studio I owned. I bought a couple of cameras (XL1s') and Vegas and I now have plenty of work doing commercials, corporate, and a weekly TV magazine for a local network and PBS called "A Closer Look". The switch from the audio software I was using (Sonar) to Vegas was relatively painless. Another benefit to using Vegas is this forum, if you do have a problem (always user error in my case), you'll find these guys are like family and will bend over backwards to help you. Come join our family!
Randy

Right now, I'm producting mainly "How-To" videos for my magic company. They range between 20 min and a nearly 2 hour video on how to make your own flea circus. I've also done industrial videos on flight simulators and helicopters and performance magic.
I came from a Speed Razor (in-sync) background and found the transition to Vegas extremely easy. I'm not real happy with media management, but that may be largely due to my prior experience where media was extremely well placed in SR. I'm also not fond of how Vegas handles 3rd party aps like Boris, but at least it does handle them.
I know Vegas CAN handle other formats, but I'll be most happy once I can get past the 4:1:1 workspace of DV (I personally prefer 4:2:2 of BetaSP or better). In the mean time, I'm quite happy that i was introduced to Vegas. I'll not likely go back. -mjr

I have used a variety of systems in the past...including Avid Symphony. I have a friend who has made a great living supplying portable Avid Symphonies and Composers in an easy to use "fold-out" encased rental systems with all the trimings. So they can be very portable for travel...but you are correct in stating you must have a budget... these typically rent for $1300 to $1600 for a "10"-day week. I have several systems within my company imcluding FCP and Premier -not used much; Discreet Edit 6-used more often; Avid Xpress- crashes and audio deprived....so I use Vegas heavily to produce broadcast and corporate videos and trade show reels. I have even used Vegas to "fix" animation projects for companies- I really wish you could create garbage mattes or roto-splines...a power user is currently working on such a plug-in! Vegas has never let me down and has generated more $$ than any of the other systems I have---even with it's software only platform! I had to get used to rendering ...but even Avid had to render complex transitions and 3D transforms... I just built a computer arround the Vegas system- fast CPU, plenty or ram, fast buss speed and some may not agree...but fast tru put utilizing raids.... my rendering is faster than real time (unless I have major effects like blurs, rays and heavy color correction). I miss having EDL's... but I save the veg files and back up data to clients dedicated firewire drives (they are cheap these days). The Mpeg encoding is better than avids and seems to be faster... but I use CCE SP for my encoding and even tho I have DVDA... I have not used it yet... I use Sonic Scenarist. Someday, I hope it will be up to speed for the simpler projects we do. I have to say...Vegas was very east to convert to after using Avid for so long...should be easy for you. The major drawback is capturing anything other than DV within the system. If you are shooting DVCAM- your set...if your shooting Beta or Digi Beta... you need to capture else where...we use FCP and bring in Uncompressed QT to work with (or finish it in FCP). We are looking into some PC SDI capture cards by Blackmagic Decklink for under $1K...okay I'm rambling here...Vegas has been a great tool despite it capture problems....

Hmmm, Filmy,

Seems like you only mentioned the negatives. We know you want to see certain things improved, but I think you are managing to do real work with Vegas. Otherwise, why are you so prevelant in this forum (which is a good thing.)

If you are doing real work with Vegas, you might say something about why you chose to do that, in addition to what you have found that wants improvement.

I'm an engineer by training, and started a company a few years ago to promote a few patents I've managed to get over the years.

In the spring of 2001 my daughter was in a kid's choir about to travel through Italy, and the director asked if any dads wanted to shoot video. No one else raised their hand, and I had just bought a nice little Sony miniDV camera, so I said "Sure!" After recording 20 hours of video, I bought a copy of Studio7, and discovered the joys of creating an entertaining movie. The limitations of that fine product became evident pretty early on, and I eventually migrated over to Vegas, and over the past year or two I've also learned the ins and outs of authoring DVDs (audio, motion menus, commentary tracks, what looks professional and what doesn't).

I just recently finished a 3.5 hour DVD (2 disks) following the travels of this organization's high school choir through Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic last summer. We shot 62 hours of miniDV with three cameras, and my PC was expanded to hold 800GB of video. We burned about 100 DVD sets (200 disks). Man, am I looking forward to 8X burning.

Anyway, it's all just a hobby at this point, although my $3500 travelling expenses were paid for last summer's trip. It would be a fun career, but I don't know the first thing about making a living with this.

One other thing--I've concluded from the four major projects I've done to date that it takes about a solid month of evenings to crank out one-hour's-worth of video. Maybe I'm just a slow learner.

I've been involved with the Arts all my life. During the '90s I was an Arts & Education manager for a London Public Authority. I found that the work being produced was astounding and my job was to raise money for these and future projects. A terrific job indeed. I've used all types of ways to communicate our message.

Now, and in the last part of the 20th Century, I found the power of using video to get my message across. I've used it in management projects and I'm now using it to "capture" events for those organisations that'll have me. Just finished, for me, a very important commission that covered an Asian festival. As a result of delivering this project I'm sure other work will flow.

Oh yes, sometimes I just like filming and editing for my own joy!

Vegas? I can't speak for other NLEs as I haven't had to use them. However I've seen many demos and sat in on "pros" using Premmi and the like, but, Vegas is just pure fun and ease.

If I have a complaint about V4 - it is just too demanding of my own creativity! - Now THAT isn't a bad thing at all . . .

So: me + CanonXM2 + S-V4 = Pure Fun! . . oh yes, without wanting to make too many people throw-up here . . all you Guys 'n Gals here on my favourite Forum website . .

Happy New Year ! Here's to a spanking new 2004!

Grazie

I edit Hollywood red carpet interviews which are then sent by satelite to major networks in Europe. Also material for ET and such shows. We used to use betacam crews, but now shoot in DV because the quality is just so much better (broadcast colors are a must though!). Also cutting news segments for a Telemundo.

V4 is great when you have to beat the clock.