Vegas can't do what Ultra can do, based on the ability of Ultra to see and interpolate differences between vectors/marked color areas. Vegas does a great job, but Ultra, like many "specialist" applications, does it better.

So, even with good lighting I should go ahead and get Ultra? Really I was fairly impressed with what Vegas did by using the secondary color corrector, a little chroma blur and then the keyer and getting a decent distance away from my drop - I had assumed that most of the issues I was having were more related to my lighting.

--Scott

Before you dump your money in Ultra, venture out to fxhome.com and check out a trial version of Chromanator. It has performed miracles for me, and you'll be pleasantly surprised how robust and feature rich Chromanator is.

SM Ultra kicks total butt.

See one of my video clips done with it on the homepage at

www.daytradingu.com

Vegas can't touch it for keying. SM Ultra has sophisiticated 3d modeled sets that have boom/track pans and so much more ..

Main thing is, ultra is a great keyer.. look at their demo video right now, I liked it so much I made a DVD with it so I could watch it on my home theatre..

You've gotta watch this, it's great:

http://www.seriousmagic.com/msl2.cfm

click the "demo video" button. Nothing in the industry comes close.
(hmm looks like it's not up now, check back l8er)

I use ultra for 100% of my DVDs.

ken

Thank you for the fxhome.com pointer - I had looked at this from a post on this forum many months ago but couldn't find it via search (too many hits).

I really don't need everything the Ultra does at this point, so fxhome may just be perfect.

--Scott