"It's VERY rare that an AC3 needs to be ripped in a legit environment, IMO"

We get at least 1 job a week in which we are required to rip content off of a DVD that a client had produced. I think it would be a VERY worthwile feature. It normally comes in through our consumer department where someone has made a DVD and wants to edit it, and of course they didn't save the source footage. Normally we just do a analog capture of the DVD, but it would be nice to just drag and drop the VOB and AC3 files on the timeline and work with them IMO.

It is true that it can lead to people using the software for illegal purposes, but there are legitimate reasons to have the feature.

4 channel cap is a good marketing bullet, but I'm opposed to it in general only because it drags the quality of the audio down and at that point people blame Vegas instead of the crappy way they recorded their audio.

While the quality may be less, 4-channel DOES have some uses. We frequently use 4-channel when taping "talking heads". We get the wireless mic on the second stereo channel and ambient noise on the first stereo channel. If Vegas could capture 4-channel audio, I'd have no need to use Scenalyzer at all. To capture our few 4-channel tapes is the ONLY reason I use Scenalyzer.


I'd also like to see velocity envelopes on the audio tracks. What would be even better would be the ability to apply the SAME velocity to both the audio and video in ONE step (i.e. affect one optionallly also affects the other).


Another cool feature would be the ability for scripts to see the "volume" level at any given frame (i.e. the master meter level if the clip were playing)

I have much more basic audio needs (I still work in mono!):

- A sync/unsync function for audio and video that is completely separate from "grouping." It's far too easy to inadvertently slide audio or video out of sync. It should be a conscious decision to link or unlink synced video, rather than a by-product of ungrouping events on the timeline. Maybe some kind of hierarchical grouping?

- Real-Time, interactive preview of DirectX effects (like Sound Forge does), so I can change a parameter, hear the results, change again, instead of having to render to hear the difference. Better integration with Noise Reduction, as has been mentioned previously, would be a huge timesaver.

- 4-channel capture has always intrigued me, but doesn't strike me as terribly useful unless you happen to own one of the two or three DV cameras that can actually record 4 channels at a time. I could see more applcations for OUTPUTTING to 4 DV channels, however.

- Improve the behavior of ASIO support, so you don't lose sync with video previews when playing from the timeline. I use Windows Classic Drivers instead of ASIO because I can't stand watching my video previews with out-of-sync audio. (Actually, it's always puzzled me that Vegas outputs timeline audio through the soundcard instead of through firewire, as other NLEs do. I'm sure there's a reason for this, but I don't know what it is.)

That's about all I can think of right now.

I need a button you can click on and someone comes over to my house to do the audio.

The audio features are so far ahead of my learning curve, I wouldn't presume to dictate further improvements, though I do like the "detect clipping" feature in SF7 which would be helpful in Vegas.

Or better yet: A thorough tutorial on what sequence of steps to take when doing the dialog and music tracks on a DV film project. You know-remove noise first, then equalize, then normalize.

This nle's audio is light years ahead of other nle's. Why not channel the effort into other wants/needs - expressed in this forum or polish whats there.

BStanding wrote:

- A sync/unsync function for audio and video that is completely separate from "grouping." It's far too easy to inadvertently slide audio or video out of sync. It should be a conscious decision to link or unlink synced video, rather than a by-product of ungrouping events on the timeline. Maybe some kind of hierarchical grouping?

Why are you ungrouping the audio and video if you must have them linked? Sounds illogical to me.

- Real-Time, interactive preview of DirectX effects (like Sound Forge does), so I can change a parameter, hear the results, change again, instead of having to render to hear the difference.

I think you are the second person that has mentioned this today. I really don't see why you just don't add the effect to the audio track (or a bus), you'll get all the realtime preview you'll ever want.

1) 7.1 or 10.2 support
2) ACID integration
3) More of a Patchbay design for effects routing and chaining

AES31 import/export please.

Velocity Envelopes and a better scrubbing facility just like JKL going down to slower speeds as it actually does right now.

Marco

I was pleasantly surprised to see that anyone from Sony was asking this forum for features. In fact, this forum is a gold mind of information and I have been disappointed that Sony hasn't opened up a forum/database previously where they systematically request and categorize input from this group.

Unfortunately, I was equally surprised that one of the "Engineers" (no offense) was asking the question, instead of product marketing management. Product Marketing Management is responsible for defining "what" goes into a product, and product engineering management is responsible for defining "how" it is implemented (while still satisfiying the architectural product roadmap requirements).

As such, product marketing management (PMM) should use a much more systematic approach to gathering product requirements than was evident within the questions posed. There is good feedback here, but it is not structured, so it will be harder to compile and implement later.

PMM should gather requirements from internal groups that are talking to customers such as sales, support, and engineering (especially field engineering). They should also gather requirements from external groups (both secondary and primary data) such as prospects (for existing market segments or future segments they wish to penetrate (this is one of the more difficult groups to get feedback from), press & analyst, and existing users (within this forum).

Once they identify "all" of the requested features, they need to prioritize them according to what "most" of the target market (or multiple market segments (i.e., Screen Blaster, Vegas, Vegas PRO or whaterver) is willing to "pay" for. This would be done empiracly (sp) via surveys and the most requested features would then be implemented first (the next full release).

So, while it is nice to hear from engineering, it would be even better to hear from product marketing management--this will give us greater assurance that our feedback will even get into the next release (since the PMM is supposed to write the product requirements document).

Any product marketing managers out there listening? Or are they blind to the market (of which we in this forum are part of)?

Chanimal

One thing, if it hasn't been already mentioned. Better mechanisms for keeping audio and video in sync. Its way too easy to get them out of sync. That should be something you CAN do not something you should always be having to watch out for. Relying on grouping to hold sync is clearly inadequate.

Why are you ungrouping the audio and video if you must have them linked?

That one is elementary. If you group things together and then ungroup the bunch it also breaks the audio to video grouping. I've often said that there should be some better grouping functions and that A/V groupings should be harder to break.

As for adding effects to the track instead of the event? why not just make it impossible to apply effects to individual audio events? and then maybe if the maximum number of tracks were raised to about 65,000...

Kidding, of course. I guess the gripe is that since you can apply effects at the event level it would be nice to preview them without a render. However I think a related issue here is that Vegas can't do prerenders at the event level. If it could then a) the prerenders would be more robust because they could be moved on the timeline and b) prerenders could be done automatically and in the background.

Rob Mack

Audio velocity would be excellent, especially if it could be linked with the video velocity envelope!

I second AC3 support. I've would like to import non-copyright DVD and AC3 without having to use an external application to convert them first.

"Real-Time, interactive preview of DirectX effects (like Sound Forge does), so I can change a parameter, hear the results, change again, instead of having to render to hear the difference. I think you are the second person that has mentioned this today. I really don't see why you just don't add the effect to the audio track (or a bus), you'll get all the realtime preview you'll ever want. "

If I need to use different effects on different parts of the audio, then I have to split the audio and put different portions on different tracks. This gets "old" fast. Being able to have audio fX applied per event, rather than just on the track (just like video events) would make a huge difference to me.

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AC-3 support isn't needed, and is mostly for pirates.

I'm afraid I cannot agree with this. The broadcast pros on the forum sometimes miss the fact that those of us in event videography (and further down the food chain) often get DVD versions of source material that we are asked to incorporate into a new project. [Please note: The copyright issues are the same regardless of what media holds the content (Beta, VHS, DVD, DV, etc.)].

If you look at the other poll Sony started a few days ago, you will find that the one, almost universal, constant is that EVERYONE is delivering on DVD. To have a program (Vegas) that cannot easily accept video (VOB) and audio (AC-3) from the one media that has become the universal method of storing and delivering content is crazy.

I know that some of you who know their front porch from their back porch tend to turn your nose up at the quality of video on DVD, because it is degraded in the encoding process. You are correct, of course, but it ignores the very real fact that in many cases -- and this is about to become the norm rather than the exception -- the only source of some of the video clips needed for a project is going to be DVD.

I'd like to see event level audio effects with realtime preview so that I can stay in Vegas more and not go out to Sound Forge so much.

Richard Hunter

Why does the piracy thing have to keep rearing its ugly head? Surely there are other places for it to get bounced around in. As I see it its mostly an irrelevant topic in this forum. Yes it happens, yes its a big problem and yes we shouldn't encourage it or be seen to encourage it. But to suggest that anyone would see it as a negative just because Vegas COULD be used for piracy seems to me to be plain silly. Sony sell PCs and I'd bet a few of them get used for piracy and I'd bet those little MD recorders are a bootleggers dream come true. To me the argument makes about as much sense as suggesting I boycot pet shops that sell parrots.

<end of rant>

What i think would be very useful is being able to bring an ac3 audio track into Vegas solely for the purpose of monitoring it. At the moment we have to encode to ac3, burn to DVD and play it out on a DVD player and if we don't like it go back through the process. That's fair enough but its hardly a scientific way to do a pre / post comparison.

It would be nice to be able to put the encoded stream back on the T/L so one could easily do pre / post comparisons, hopefully with a decent surround metering as well. Having expessed the wish I do seem to recall that this had been looked into before and building an ac3 decoder into Vegas was no mean feat and Dolby were in no hurry to assist either. Perhaps this could be better accomplished with a hardware decoder, I haven't thought the implications of that through, just throwing it into the mix.

Bob.

ac3 audio import and playback in real time, contrary to opinion, is not a "pirate" thing --- in fact, pirates could care less about this in vegas.
But i need to (quite often) use a ac3 file or dts file and have to convert them back to wav just for vegas is a pain .. SF used to have this feature in softencode, so i know they can do it...

other than that ...

"Broadcast wave, AAF, OMF, VSO(velocity audio) a better implementation of plugs, specifically considering the Noise Reduction plug so the workflow is less kludgy on that. "

4 channel cap = NOT needed.

"spectrum analyze (FFT) , would love to see some method, if possible of cleaner waveforms when zoomed in deeply, would love to see some sub-bass management tools available ala surround sound or Dies Bassum kind of thing as part of the LFE."

" direct VST support? More optimized verbs, even MORE optimized input monitoring. (Damn, it's pretty good now, til you pile on a couple WAVES plugs)"


Finer pitch control? = YES !

Hmmm....for the most part I love Vegas for the audio and it was for the audio that I first looked into it - i was using Studio 16 and really wanted to port that over to the PC so Vegas somewhat filled that bill.

So with that in mind. Ways to improve audio that I can think of -

1> Better sync locking. I know lots of folks hate the Premiere comparison but if I make a cut in Premiere the audio comes with it unless I unlock it. With Vegas this is not true. Been discussed many times on various threads by other people. And another sync thing - with Studio 16 I could sync up all dailies with no problems - however this was done via timecode. All one had to do was enter the TC and it would be in sync. There doesn't seem to be that relationship in Vegas...but I might be missing it. (To be clear - in Studio 16 you entered TC info on the *audio* track. This allowed for syncing to the incoming TC signal as it related to the picture)

2> A few of things I really liked about Studio 16 was the abilty to lock to time code. Now I know you can do this with Vegas as well but you need to go Midi > TV or TC > Midi. With Studio 16 there was a card (Yeah I know - hardware) that dealt with the audio but it also had an RCA in for LTC in. The only way I can think to work this into Vegas off the top of my head would be with deck control *or* creating some sort of interface to read a channel of LTC comeing in via an audio card. So, say, you could assign TC in on CH 2 (right Ch) of your existing sound card and lock the timeline to that.

The subsection of this is that you need to step back and forget that Vegas is also an NLE. Studio 16 was audio only. So the workflow was to get a workprint with both LTC and VITC *and* a widnow burn. You would look at the video on a monitor but the TC would come in via the LTC (Normally CH2 / Right channel) and into Studio 16 via the TC in jack. So once you get all the effects and such you would hit the lock to TC button, hit playback of the workprint VCR and output to whatever you were outputting to.

3> Ability to output audio with video via firewire. I asked it this way in the past - you can drop any file into vidcap.exe for output via firewire and audio plays fine. On the timeline no audio out and when you do a PTT all audio renderd to *.w64 format, even if the audio is not touched in any way. Why?

Beyond that - I am not sure. I guess hardware support to allow output to DA-88 or ADAT...does it exist already? I know the PC cards exist but do they work with vegas?

Whoa!! I didn't say that 70% of folks would pirate audio! Not by a long shot. I doubt it's even 1%. But I also doubt Sony wants to open those legal doors, and Dolby really isn't happy to either. Plus the expense of coding it. Having an AC3 simulator is a big need though, because we all want to know EXACTLY what it will sound like before spending the time to encode.
Piracy is just a very big deal, at all levels. and I find it hard to accept that there are many legit reasons to re-encode AC3. Yes, there are a few. But it's more for reasons of laziness than necessity. Archive your work correctly, the way that broadcasters and recording engineers/producers have had to do for nearly a century, and you won't need AC3. The end quality is barely usable anyway. And where will the blame lie for bad sounding audio? With Vegas. It's not Vegas' fault, but it will be blamed.

Anyway, if enough users demand it, and Sony isn't worried about being sued the way that the two NLE's out there that DO import AC3 have been, then I'm certain that Sony will put it in regardless of what I think.
Vegas is supposed to be a professional tool, and professionals are supposed to log and archive correctly, yes?
I'm not in the mindset to rip off material either. I'm in the mindset of protecting material.

Why do you leave complex audio to facilities that do it? I assure you, Vegas has all the audio tools you could ever need. This is why it's used by some of the biggest producers in the world for audio. It's HUGE as to what it can do. But it can stand some improvement. Broadcast wave files would be wonderful on import. More support for external would be nice. I'd love to see access to VST without a converter. I'd love to see the ability to optimize and bring in 48 tracks simultaneously. (rare need, but occasional)

If it's good enough for me to record the MoTab Choir for the Olympics, good enough for Rod Stewarts last two CD's, good enough for YES, Pink Floyd, Garbage, and many more, it's good enough for most things, but like everyone else, I like a lot of hammers in the toolbox.

I'd love to see a more Acid - like integration with loops.

yeah, a Sony Graphic would be nice. I use WAVES, and it's automatable in Vegas, so is the Sonic Timeworx, so I use those...
Oxford plugs in Vegas would be very nice. Sony already owns those..