There's also the old customer survey. Have a site page that accumulates 10 thousand or so responses to a long, detailed questionnaire, maybe even refine it with a second questionnaire later, and simply calculate and report the results, like an e-focus group. Prior user comments at forums like this, could set the agenda for what questions go on the questionnaire. The tallest graphic gets first priority, and so on, with allowance for comments on why some features, even if not near the top of the poll, deserve consideration.

But one problem--the competition can visit forums too. If 67% of users want a feature and Sony can't or won't implement it, it could mysteriously show up in an upgrade or update of Premiere Liquid Avid Whatever.

Yes, but has there been one upgrade requested by anyone that isn't already in one of the other programs? I don't think there is any secrecy involved at this point. Sony could surprise us w/ something that we are not aware of and nobody has, but as far as requests worth requesting I don't think there needs to be any secrecy at all.

Just my $0.02

"But one problem--the competition can visit forums too. If 67% of users want a feature and Sony can't or won't implement it, it could mysteriously show up in an upgrade or update of Premiere Liquid Avid Whatever. "

good point... but the need to compete willa alwyas be there and this is god fo the consumer.. albeit for a state of functionality, or a cost...
And if Sony want to keep both of these lements, in turn retaining and gaining a new customer base, then it too will need to compete.
It seems that SOny are trying to compete, but without direction.. in all honesty i dont see how an NLE of this "stature" can compete with the others when the basic features of the others arent even implemented within this program... Yes Vegas IS different, but i think those difference have been flogged to death... everyone now knows that vegas doesnt work like the other NLEs and in many ways, these difference are not only what appeals to potential and current users, but also allow the program to be as flexible as it is...

a pay per "feature" structure would be wise.. this way we can upgrade out NLE as WE need it.. for now, i have no need for XDCam.. MXF for Panasonic, yes, but for sony no... id gladly pay a grand to have native editing possible straight out of a HVX... but for now, were stuck with raylight (which IS slow... ) and Cineform (which defeats the purpose of instant editing...

There are many other elements which can be improved upon and i wont go through the copious lists written here, but needless to say, that if pricing and RD was an issue, maybe Sony should take a step up and consider a professional (as in commercial) levels system of vegas which is structured into base elements.
What i mean is to consider how Avid works... consider ho wCanopus manage edius...
Same program, different levels of function.
Perfect example, is Edius with the option of SP and NX.. sure theyre hardware, but shouldnt those who WANT to use HW have that option? If its too expensive, dont buy it.. if RD is expensive, consider teh broadcast and featrue film options. Considering Sony own quite afew studios in hollywood, wouldnt placing one of these hardcore NLE's in certain editors office's give Vegas a foot in the door for this line of work, in turn giving the program more exposure within THAT realm of ediing... and as proven in the past THAT realm of editing is virtually never eneding when it comes to requirements and functionality.. and of course cost.. which in teh end equates to profit..

Look at avid.. from stadard DV, al lthe way through to umcompressed HD... from SW engines through to broadcast systems whch can be run live out of a box...

THIS is what Vegas needs... its far beyond the competition when it comes to speed and functionality, the issue is that its now being held back by its SW limitations and current price point.

SW is all good as it mostly guarantees compatibility and a trouble free environment, however the times are a changing. Our clients demands increase, in turn demanding us to work in certain ways to make these demands profitable for us. If our tools are not efficient in the same levels as we need to be as editors, then we must either take steps (which is what were doing here.. by communicating our concerns... ) or look to a system which will make us more efficient in what we do

Like the Canopus and Avid systems, i feel that Vegas could take a step up by evolving into a system like this.Premiere is also along those lines, but not to these type of broadcast levels (apart from teh AXIO... I wounlt bother with teh RT2 s Prem with a kickarse GFX card maks the RT2 obsolete... but thats another point.)

Either way, id gladllly pay funds upfront for RD on development on a new editing system. Mybe if sSony looked beynf the "prosumer" mentality of the program, they may cosndier a type of bolt on NLE straucture where we can upgrade elements we need, or jsut keep the base elements within a general structure of teh program.

Either way they go, i dont see why it cant work...

The idea of a Vegas Pro has been discussed a long time ago, I think one perceived problem was having it bang into the bottom of the Xpri market. One of the developments (from memory) in V6 was project portability to Xpri. One has to wonder if any Xpri users bought Vegas for offlining, would be interesting to know. I know a lot of stuff is confidential but in this game when you whip out the trusty Vegas and the client looks a bit frightened it helps being able to say "Hey xyz use this....".

Damn it, now I remember what I'd love to see in V8, support for those shuttle controllers that ship with Xpri.

Xpri as a hardware system has been end of lifed... Xpri I think is coming back as a software-based editor, as part of Sonaps (million dollar news editing mega-system for large news organizations).

2- You know what... having a Vegas Pro would mostly be for marketing reasons. The consumer + prosumer + "desktop professionals" are a much much larger market than professionals with significant investment in broadcast gear.

If you look at Final Cut Pro, most of its 500,000 registered users (Apple marketing figure, may be inflated) probably aren't in the latter group. And at ~$1,000/unit (or even up to $5,000/unit in profit when you consider Apple hardware)... their profit isn't coming from professional users.

*By "desktop professionals" I mean people who are editing on desktops off their DV cameras. i.e. they don't have significant cash tied up in VTRs and such. There's certainly nothing wrong with this work, and it probably makes the industry more talent-oriented than gear-oriented.

"desktop professionals"

That's me to a tee! Thanks Glenn, I'll amend my biz card accordingly. And your last comment . .luv it!

Now I MUST get your DVD on colour correction.

"2- You know what... having a Vegas Pro would mostly be for marketing reasons. The consumer + prosumer + "desktop professionals" are a much much larger market than professionals with significant investment in broadcast gear.

If you look at Final Cut Pro, most of its 500,000 registered users (Apple marketing figure, may be inflated) probably aren't in the latter group. And at ~$1,000/unit (or even up to $5,000/unit in profit when you consider Apple hardware)... their profit isn't coming from professional users.

*By "desktop professionals" I mean people who are editing on desktops off their DV cameras. i.e. they don't have significant cash tied up in VTRs and such. There's certainly nothing wrong with this work, and it probably makes the industry more talent-oriented than gear-oriented."

Understood, however the largest kay factor with FCPs market penetration is the fact that FCP is pretty much the only video editing solution available for that platform. Forget about MacPC hybrids and dual boot mac systems.. im talking about PLATFORM based NLE's and lets face it on a mac, in OSX.. FCP IS the only editor... there are smaller crappy ones, but on the levels were talkin about here (semi pro to pro) FCP is the ONLY option. THis is a nail in the head when it comes to statistics, as its a very biased figure based on one product which is only available on one platform... if however there were mac versions of Vegas and Premiere, im sure FCP would have that type of "penetration" I mean i remember selling Prem4 & 5 to mac G3 owners.. FCP was out (cant recall the version), but it couldnt do half the stuff premiere could.. but still it was there.. eventually more than likely apple nuked the Adobe video licenses when they rebuilt teh FCP engine forcing people who wanted the OS platform to go with an apple owned NLE

Smart marketing or a monopoly?
I dont see why PremPro2 cant work on an Mac... the HW is nigh on identical to PC based turnkey systems.... in addition, adobe still ahve their licenses for content creation on mac considering so many mac users still use Photoshop and CS2... so thres something goin on in the Mac front .... marketing or monopoly.. u decide..

as for HW based systems, welll ive been messing with Avid Mojo systems now for abotu 18months to 2 yrs.. .upon their release.. and sure theyve had their problems... but now, with teh current updates and patches, a ssytem along these lines could very well work with Vegas. Fair enough the throughput wont be as intense as an integrated ssytem as we consider the throughput of 1394, but i think 16 streams of HDV <based on 25mbps HDV native> would be far more than sufficient for most uses... hell even 8 would do.. the most if seen axio do was about 8 anyway... then again the system was just built and not tweaked...

But ts not the strems im worried about..
Its not the editign engine itself..
hell these are all awesome as they are..
what we need is a faster option when it comes to previewing our work, refining our cuts, perfecting our compositions, outputting our work in a reasonable time, giving us clena and cler filtering options for higher bandwidth formats such as 10 bit and uncompressed...
Hell if all the BoB would do is accelerate the video decode/encode engine, capture from compnent (hell even SDI if they REALLY wanted to make an impact... ) id be happy for that...
Hell id be happy if it was a plain empty box, with 1 firewire slot... so long as the bastard did the work, i couldnt care less what else it could do...

All these 3rd party solutions to basic problems are convoluted.
Lets face it ,go spnd 2 grand on an edius system, and u get all the HW you need to capture any format you want.
Agreed, your restricted to hardware limitations, but in the end, its the fact that its ONE system, which behaves as ONE system.

Its that simple...
with vegas. what do u have?
Vegas..
then a decklink..
then cineform

then theres all the drivers, configuration, intermediates and fgetting all tehse things to work as one..
Yes they DO work as one, but at what price?
Time AND money.

with edius as an example (and to an extent.. liquid... )
Hook up your camera/deck
open the NLE, hit capture.. voila.. all done..

On addition, one thing thats always baffled me is why vegas doesnt even offer a realtime MPG capture option...?? I mean the Lowly Pinnacle studio7 used to do this. and pretty much every NLE on teh market does this now as well... i mean a consumer app which captures straigth to MPG... over a "pro" app which doesnt..
Sure enough some peopl think this is insiginificant.. but look at the tme issues we're facing when it comes to rendering/encoding..

I dont know, ut NOW.. for Vegas 7 and the obvious lack of direction which vegas has been heading since V6.. it seems the program is on its last legs... i mean they havent even thrown down any new filters or filtering engines... they havent updated any of the new filters save from CPU utilisation... i look at premiere and the abundance of filters available for it.. i also see after effects and the way it manages itself..

i mean hell where are we to go with V8?? the same old thin again? only to be "refined" again.. ??

Is vegas on its last legs? can it not go any further ?? CAN it go any further? I think it can, but sony must lookoutside the square to see for itself what its users need from the app to be able to grow with the times..

and with teh coming of MP4 based acquisition, relying on a SW CPU engine, jsut wont cut it.. it took THIS long to get it refined for HDV and even with that it struggles... MP4 will either make or break Vegas...
i think.....

Its at that time when we will know that Vegas is dead...

reason i say this is that sooner or later these intermediate options (cineform and proxy systems as an example) will not be good enough for the workflow.. sure they offer significant benefits when editing, however as time is also a significant element, most of us jsut want to edit.. we dont get paid to sit around and deal with the issues of any given format. Were paid to edit, no matter waht the footage format might be....

Vegas needs to be refined. It needs to be rebuilt

Guys,
lets stop arguing about the specifics. The whole point of my concept is to avoid that. This is pretty much a rerun of the lather the audio guy(s) got themselves into.
Two points that we need to keep in mind:

1) Everything costs and the developers need to make a return on that.

2) It's quite likely that changing one thing can break another.

It could well be that to right some of the video things some of the flexibility on the audio side needs to go. Or the reverse might be true, I don't really haven't a clue, just an uneducated guess. Until it's costed in terms of dollars and functionality we're all punching air.

Let's top doing that, it gets no one anywhere.

See here we have one example.

Some seem to think that perhaps 'Vegas Pro' would be a world beater and others think it's dead in the water. Who knows and who'd risk the serious development dollars to find out?
Well the way I see it there's a pretty simple way to answer that without spends more than few 100 dollars. Put the option out there, those that want it pony up a serious deposit. Not enough takers, fine, they get their money back.

I seem to recall Glenn saying the way Vegas handles the color space isn't really upto scratch. Well there's another option. Maybe almost no one cares, maybe a lot of users do and will pay for it. The only way to know for certain is to lets people vote with their wallet.

The audio guys reckoned Rewire would float their boat, same thing again.

This way there's no argy bargy, no hurt feelings. You want it, you get the chance to have it and pay for it. Not enough people willing to pay what it costs, well, that's life.

Its that simple...

Arguably, the interchangeability of parts is why the PC market dominated Apple.

A point could be made for either approach... turnkey solutions like Avid are really popular, as is 'interchangeable' systems like Final Cut. Final Cut has a larger user base when you consider all the educational copies, Final Cut Express seats, etc. etc.

2- Sony ?Broadcast? has tried a high-end NLE system in Xpri. Sony Media Software however hasn't.

3- In my opinion, SMS might be better off sticking with what they have proven they are good at.

As a "desktop" NLE, Vegas is very strong in that you can do everything in Vegas. "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas." Very often in 1-editor situations, the editor has to do it all- graphics, audio, titling, color correction, etc. Being able to do audio work inside Vegas is a strong point other NLEs don't have.

4- If you want a high-end offline system (i.e. in the context of high-end workflows), Avid and FCP are fairly cheap and serve their markets very well. I don't see much point in competing with them... although Vegas could conceviably be made to work. I don't think there's much money here other than the marketing value for the desktop masses.

If you want a high-end finishing/online system, the market is already served by solutions like:
Avid Nitris DS
Avid Symphony
Mistika
Discreet FFI (in the commercial world)
Quantel iQ
Assimilate Scratch
Nucoda
etc. etc.
All these systems are five/six/seven figures.

5- To get back on topic... I don't think a deposit system would work too well for gauging interest in this case?

Let's try thinking outside the square.
What makes say Scratch so expensive? Well the R&D effort has to be recovered from a relatively small user base. The user base is small because the hardware to use it's capabilities in real time is very expensive at 4K. Bit of a Catch 22 happening there.
If they could sell 10,000s copies of the software it could be sold way, way cheaper. Now I can think of no reason why their core code couldn't live inside of Vegas, if everything coming in is converted to linear light. The internals are already resolution independant, the decoder takes care of whatever needs to be done to convert to linear, the outgoing encoder converts to whatever is the specified output format.
That gives you an editing system that can edit anything, without spending a huge amount of money, sure at 4K it'll be a total joke but that's fine, you want 4K RT playback with FX, you plug in the hardware to do that. You want just DV25, what you've got already has you covered. Or you can edit DV proxies and take your project to a suite with the capabilities to run 4K and grade on that. But you're still using the same software. The attraction is you can go from being a desktop editor to the full Hollywood show without having to learn new apps or being like a fish out of water when you finally hit the big time and walk into a high end suite.
It seems that FCP comes close to this ideal but I think there's too many bolted on bits and workarounds to really meet this ideal. Avid sort of comes close but not really, you are moving projects to different systems, not more capable platforms running the same app.

Might be just a pipe dream, maybe I've missed a whole heap of issues but so far it looks like one mad scientist is going to pull off something similar with a digital film camera.