IMO nothing special about Liquid at all, more so, not really an Avid product considering it used to be Pinnacle. Avid's Xpress Pro HD on the other hand is an excellent editor with a large learning curve. What makes it professional? Good question but seeing how every major film that has won any type of award has been cut on it pretty much makes it a professional tool. Is it better than Vegas? Some areas it is. It has a more robust media management system and its color matching tools are pretty sweet.

Avid is more professional because it's task specific, they make editing systems. You typically get less features with more way more speed.
Editors don't do graphics or text, or color correction traditionaly or touch audio, they just snip, snip, snip.

[quote=]not really an Avid product considering it used to be Pinnacle. Avid's Xpress Pro HD on the other hand is an excellent editor with a large learning curve.[/quote]

I actually had a little trouble discerning which was Avids 'flagship' product....To me, the whole term 'Xpress' implies an entry level version, but are you suggesting it's their top o the line?

No. Avid systems can go for hundreds of thousands to millions. They run on dedicated hardware designed especially for the software. Xpress Pro HD is the equivalent to Vegas for editing on a PC that isnt tied to a dedicated system. In the terms of thier product offerings, Xpress Pro HD could be seen as the entry level (not including Xpress DV free)

The beautiful thing about Avid is you can cut using Xpress Pro HD and then you can take it and finish it on Nitris or Composer. Dont get me wrong, I am not saying Avid the holy grail but a heck of lot more has been cut on Avid and seen by the masses then most of the other NLE's combined, certainly more than Vegas. Vegas does some things quicker and easier than Avid but when it comes to project management, Vegas certainly cannot come even close to Avid.

>>>when it comes to project management, Vegas certainly cannot come even close to Avid.<<<

That depends on what you're used to. I've found that I can finish editing 1/2 a project on Vegas by the time I get around this supposed great project management in avid and am ready to start any real work.

In other words, with Vegas how I manage my project is up to me, with Avid, it's their way or no way. ( just like with their hardware requirements )

Avid is an editing system. They don't really go for frills in other areas with the NLE software. If you want to do finishing, you need another Avid system. If you want to edit a higher end high def project, you need another Avid system. If you want to run on your existing computer, you can't, you need an Avid approved system.

I went through this myself. And I found that while Vegas has its limitations (that MUST get fixed at some point if it is to stay in the running) such as 10-bit colour etc, at the end of the day it was still far, far, far, far more versatile than any other NLE out there.

Sure, like the higher colour space, Vegas could do with better media management for long form projects (Media Manager doesn't count). But no other NLE is quite as scalable, efficient in computer requirements, as user friendly as Vegas. I'm not a gigantic fan of Avid Xpress's titler either.

Premiere Pro 2 looks good. But have you seen the PC requirements for a minimum setup? Avid is very similar.

Also look at the price. Avid has some better features in SOME areas, just as Vegas also has better features than Avid in other areas. But at the end of the day look at what you get for the price of Vegas compared with what you get for the price of Avid Xpress. Both have very similar feature sets at the end of the day, but one costs one hell of a lot more!

It really is a case of the grass always been greener on the other side. I like some of Avids cutting tools and other stuff. But you need to look at the overall picture rather than focussing on any one particular feature set.

Regarding upgrading, what is it that you need from Avid or another NLE that you think you are missing? At the end of the day a good edit is down to basic cutting and splicing tools. Anything else above that is either a bell and whistle, or something to help recover poorly shot footage!

That saidm Avids ability to associate an edit with a script is a great idea! ;))

Avid's high end editing packages have the best media management for when several people have to work together on each project. Nobody can beat that, and that simply can't be overlooked or worked around easily.

Avid in general has really good don't-get-too-close-to-my-elbows-right-now editing. This is more than just JKL.

(Don't forget Discreet Smoke, which is an Editor's dream come true and also integrates really well with Flame, etc. It's also $135K.)

Avid Express in its various incarnations is still ridiculously sensitive about the hardware it's running on, unacceptably so imho.

If you don't get a wedgie from Vegas' limitations such as 8-bit only support or ye olde BMD drivers (to be cured in V7), then Vegas is a MUCH better choice than the rest, because it really is much faster to work with.

I'll take one Smoke please :)

So why is AVID so great??

Why is Kleenex greater than other tissues?
Why is Lear the best private jet?
Why is Chris Craft the best yacht?

They're not - it's simply that they were first on the scene and for a time became a generic statement of a product or process.

I wanted to put "Google" on the list, but they are so new, they still haven't gotten any real competition - sort of like AVID was in the early '90s.

I bought my first AVID in '89 or '90 for $25K (not including the three BetaSP decks at $40k each, or the engineer to wire it all together, or the month "checkups", etc.) . It was strictly off-line, had a tiny picture, awful resolution, but it generated an EDL which you could import directly in an on-line tape-to-tape facility and save dozens if not hundreds of man and machine hours - at the then going rate of $350/ hr. It paid for itself the first year.

So any editor who saw the end of the Moviola coming, learned the AVID. It was basically the only game in town for non-linear editing until the late '90s. Especially in professional circles.

In those days (and probably today as well) the ad agency would send over a small crew of creatives to supervise the edit. Real time was what it was all about. In '93 I upgraded my new AVID 1000 (about $40k) with an Aladdin Genie (another $32K) and we had two track Real Time editing. Change a dissolve - watch it play. Standard stuff today on Vegas (like $400 bucks??) but MAGIC in 1993.
At the time the only other contenders for real-time on-line editing were "The Cube" and "Media On-line" systems. Cost about the same. But all your big houses had AVID's.

So what were you going to learn? AVID stupid. Don't get me wrong - it's a great system.

As time passed they created all machinations of upgrades - grand video FX, networked editng and rendering - all kinds of goodies - and baiscally in real-time - and all in the high five figure entry points going up to a quarter of a million. For an editing suite setup with for or five editors in NYC - at $250 to $700 an hour it makes perfect sense.

But the END PRODUCT ain't a whole lot better than what you can get with your Vegas. Now don't beat me up on super high-end FX, etc., just the reality of cutting video to make beautiful movies. Vegas (and probably a lot of the rest of the pro-sumer systems) can do more in ten minutes today than a whole million dollar suite accomplished in hours in the late '90s.

A lot of the AVID's strength was based on Analog Acquisition - either 35mm film transferred to 1" video or BetaSP video cameras and decks (and 1" C decks, as well). All that changed with DV - instantly.

Digital acquisition is way easier, way cheaper (by a magnitude) and doesn't need a full time engineer to "tweak the machines". When I got into DV, I gave up my BetaSP decks, my Abacus controller/switcher, my Adobe After Effects PRO suite, and I bought VEGAS 3 and ran it on a Sony laptop - and did jobs for Allied Signal and American Express and others - and made money!

So if you DON'T have a hundred K to invest in a rapidly depreciating asset, and if you DON'T have clients watching you cut, and you DON'T want to head out into the ranks of high-end professional full-time freelance editing - well, there's No Reason to learn or buy AVID.

Remember, in movie production it's concept that rules - my last AVID - a fully decked out AVID MC-4000 with Aladdin realtime rendering (about $120k with all the drives, upgrades and add-ons) - sits out on a shelf in the garage - it paid for itself many times over, but I wish I could get a thousand bucks for it today - fer sure.

Today, in my life, Vegas rules.

History lesson over -
v

Even down in the lowly world of DV Avid / Sony do some neat tricks.
Took me a while to get my brain around this, you want to edit DV25 and I bet all of us here ingest via firewire. Avid suggests that's not the best way to work if your output is SP or Digibeta for broadcast. Got meself in a sceaming match over this and in the end had to eat humble pie, those Avid guys know their stuff.

No, with Mojo ingest via component from say a DSR 45. You'd think that's not as good as using fireiwre and in many ways you're right. Except if your aim is simply to cut the material and output as 4:2:2 for broadcast Avids approach produces a better looking result and very quickly too. You see the Sony decks with component output do chroma smoothing and also it seems the analogue outputs have less problems with dropouts than the firewire outputs, I know hard to believe but trust me, been there, done that and that's how it is.

You can get the same result in Vegas, use chroma smoothing but that takes render time, with Mojo it's realtime. Of course with the Mojo approach you do get gereational loss if you're not careful but that's not really an issue if you're just cutting.

Bob.

Thanks for everyone's opinions...
The more i thought about it, the more i realised that a switch would cause me to lose more than just Vegas, as i have (and use a lot) the Ultimate S2 with a few extras, the whole Pixelan CreativEase and SpiceFilter Package, along with Sound Forge and NR. It's all of these extras (plus more) that are Vegas specific plugs that you take for granted and jumping ship would mean losing these (or at least re purchasing most of them).
Not worth the trouble IMO...................

Bob:
With Vegas 7, couldn't you ingest the DV via SDI (or component??)..?

In terms of chroma smoothing, the Vegas DV codec could do slightly better in that regard. You can actually get really good titles with DV if the decoder is good (unfortunately not all decoders are). "Really good" in this case would be relative to what we normally get with DV.

That being said, apple's DV codec is worse than Vegas' in that it doesn't do chroma filtering.

Some detailed information can be found in an article I wrote (hopefully it makes sense!!):
http://www.glennchan.info/articles/technical/chromata/chromata.html
There is a major error in that the chromaticity of black problem usually doesn't apply, and the "bumping the blacks" workaround I describe is unnecessary. So basically, the chromata interpolation technique I describe does work without the problems I suggest it will have.

Anyways, it sort of shows you different ways in which color subsampling can work. See Marco Solario's site for pictures of the Apple DV codec, it does something cheesy (it doesn't apply filtering at all, so the red lines in the upper right corner disappear).

Glenn,
Do you have a link to Marc Solario's site. I would be quite interested to see what the Apple DV codec does.

I have had great aggravation over the last couple of weeks on a freelance editing job that I did. Since the post house was Mac based they had Digi Beta shot footage in a 10 bit codec. For me to be able to edit it on my laptop (with Vegas of course) I needed them to convert it to DV , since alas Vegas won't work in 10 bit.

The editing of the footage was fine , but unfortunately there was a lot of chromakey work shoot against a badly lit bluescreen of all things!

Since I had a lot of trouble pulling a good key in AE (using DV matte pro) I am now wondering if it was the apple conversion to dv that made the footage so problematic. If I had converted the original 10 bit fooatge on my pc (using AE or PPro2) would the chroma filtering have been better?

Any info would be appreciated!

Avid has a lot of great features in Express HD, IMO. I'm not a fan of Liquid; it's beautiful to look at, and unstable as a 3 legged chair on a hilside.
Express Pro is fast, works with HD in all flavors except JVC's 24P and Canon's 24p very, very well. But it's a cutting tool. Not a finishing tool. It does have a few nice compositing features built in, finally. Has a great titling tool. Has a steep learning curve. And isn't compatible with much. But...it's also still a standard around the world. If you are Avid certified, you've almost always got a job. FCP is coming up behind very strong though, and that leaves Premiere and Vegas to take up the rest of the world.
Vegas is simply more versatile, faster, intuitive, and overall intelligent, but it's missing a few key "editor" oriented features that hard core, day to day cutters want/need/are accustomed to.
Scripting fixes most of those missing features, but some folks want it embedded in the application.

Marco Solario's site:
http://www.onerivermedia.com/codecs/

Since I had a lot of trouble pulling a good key in AE (using DV matte pro) I am now wondering if it was the apple conversion to dv that made the footage so problematic. If I had converted the original 10 bit fooatge on my pc (using AE or PPro2) would the chroma filtering have been better?

DV is inherently 4:1:1 color sampling, which is not good for keying. Capturing the dbeta 'uncompressed' would help. In FCP, you would apply the chroma smoothing filter before keying (because the Apple Uncompressed codecs don't do it). Or Nattress' G nicer (nattress.com).

If you're keying on a PC, then I'd try to get them to capture into a codec that you can get on PC. I can't remember if there's apple 10-bit uncompressed on PC... blackmagic is definitely on PC.

from DSE : Vegas is simply more versatile, faster, intuitive, and overall intelligent, but it's missing a few key "editor" oriented features that hard core, day to day cutters want/need/are accustomed to.

Nothing to add, very good analysis.