Sony NAB Announcement 10d and more

HyperMedia wrote on 4/11/2011, 8:40 AM

http://blastmagazine.com/the-magazine/technology/tech-news/computers/sony-creative-to-announce-groundbreaking-film-and-sound-software-at-2011-nab-show/

Independent film production took another giant step forward this week at the National Association of Broadcasters Show, with a pair of software debuts from Sony Creative Software sure to make waves in both the professional and consumer markets.

In the area of film editing, Sony’s debuted Vegas Pro 10.0d, an innovative program that boasts extensive post-production capabilities. An update to the already successful Vegas Pro 10 series, the non-linear video editing software expands into the burgeoning fields of 3D film and Blu-ray disc storage.

“The new enhancements in Vegas Pro 10.0d … provide cutting edge tools that equip industry professionals with improved capabilities to produce quality work at a greater efficiency,” said Dave Chaimson, vice president of global marketing for Sony Creative Software, in a press release Monday. These improvements include streamlined closed captioning embedding, as well as support for Advanced Micro Device (AMD) graphic chipsets – an upgrade that allows for faster project rendering. Additionally, the software features a new burning capability that allows for complete high-quality 3D Blu-ray film creation.

Vegas 10.0d has adopted Open Computing Language (OpenCL) – a cross-platform programming framework that has become an industry standard in recent years – a decision that Manju Hegde, the corporate vice president of the AMD Fusion Experience Program, sees as “key to advancing innovation, helping creative professionals to rely on and fully leverage available computing power on a common industry platform to bring inspiration to reality.”

Registered Vegas Pro 10 users can enjoy the 10.0d upgrade, which also includes improved audio track workflow and support for 3D Multiview Video Coding (MVC) and Multi Picture Object (MPO) file formats, free of charge starting in late April. The full suite will retail with a suggested price of $699.95.

On the sound-editing front, Sony Creative announced a high-quality sound effect series developed in partnership with acclaimed production studio The Detroit Chop Shop. The series spans a range of genres – from Action to Nature, from Transportation to Explosions & Impacts – in 10 volumes. Delivered in broadcast standard 24-bit/48 kHz sound, the effects are encoded with metadata, allowing for full searchability in standard search engines like Google and Bing.

Already an industry standard, The Detroit Chop Shop’s partnership with Sony Creative will “ensure parity for producers working with high-impact sound in the broadcast and film industries,” said Chaimson. The series is now available, retailing for $99.95 for individual titles or $799.95 for all 10 volumes.

Both products will be available for download from www.sonycreativesoftware.com or for purchase at retailers worldwide.

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Comments

jabloomf1230 wrote on 4/12/2011, 10:21 AM

Imagineer has not changed it's policy since mocha AE 1.0 and Adobe CS4. Back then you got a free version of mocha included with CS4, but if you wanted additional features, bug fixes, speed improvements, you had to buy the upgrade to mocha AE. The same holds true for AE 2.0 and CS5. I've never worried about this issue, since I have the full version of mocha and with the full version, you get all the within major version updates (2.x --> 2.y) for free.

It's not uncommon for software vendors to issue these "half updates" and charge for them. Adobe has done this before, as I recall. CS 5.5 suites apparently have some improvements but not enough for Adobe to market them as major version changes (for example, Photoshop CS5 is virtually unchanged and only goes to version 5.1). CS 5.5 won't be available until early May, so we won't know whether it is worth the money until that time.

But we do know that Vegas Pro 10d is worth the money.

Woodenmike wrote on 4/12/2011, 10:25 AM

I am glad that as beta testers beyond release, we get the update for "free" (I don't know about you, but I paid for a complete software release), I only hope that most of the issues that have been posted since the release have indeed been addressed. I for one will be happy if 10d will play nice with Sound Forge again. As has been stated, while it is nice to have some new features included, for me living up to the hype of the original release and making the program a solid, fully functional software title is most important to me. I have been behind on the equipment end of things but have been holding off to see what equipment is going to work best with the software tools i use, but would like to see a relatively bug-free release before committing hard-earned towards upgrading that end of things. The amount of chatter on these forums seems to indicate that many are banking on 10d to do just that...hope it's true.

Lovelight wrote on 4/12/2011, 12:16 PM

Seems like the buggy update is not ready for prime time and Sony is putting the cart before the horse. I have no confidence in any of the Sony teams' half baked updates. This is a real sign of the times. Where are all the REAL programmers? Have they all gone to Avid.

Bottom line: Sony has lost a lot with version 10..

Since customers are willing to put up with less there is nothing we can do except not buy Sony Vegas 11. Let are dollars do the talking.

reberclark wrote on 4/12/2011, 12:49 PM

Troll alert!!!

amendegw wrote on 4/12/2011, 12:55 PM

Oh my. Our friend Dartus has two posts since joining the forum - both are rather incendiary.

What do you you say we all throw in a dollar with a guess as to how many posts he gets before being banned - winner takes all?

...Jerry

John_Cline wrote on 4/12/2011, 3:45 PM

"Bottom line: Sony has lost a lot with version 10."

Bottom line: I've made a lot of money with version 10.

yatesd wrote on 4/12/2011, 3:47 PM

I have a pretty fast i7 laptop with an ATI graphics card. I was frustrated when both Adobe and Sony were only optimized for Nvidia.

I am so happy that Sony stepped up to the plate!

Not sure why anyone would complain about a free update with enhanced features??? Maybe those folks should stick with 10c while we play with 10d.

Rob Franks wrote on 4/12/2011, 5:14 PM

"Not sure why anyone would complain about a free update with enhanced features???"

Are you kidding?? I've come to learn that there are people here who would complain even if SCS was over every morning cooking their breakfast, seeing them off to work... and cleaning the house just before they left.

farss wrote on 4/12/2011, 5:24 PM

"Not sure why anyone would complain about a free update with enhanced features??? "

Pretty certain I've read every post in this thread and no one is complaining about that. So far the only useless and provocative comments are from our token ex Liquid user. Such idle chatter is easily ignored, don't beat yourself up over it.

I guess the closest I could come to a "complaint" is to suggest SCS are giving stuff away too cheaply, I for one would gladly pay more if it'd fund a bigger team working on Vegas.

Bob.

Alf Hanna wrote on 4/12/2011, 5:43 PM

The issue that was raised about "Sony adopting OpenCL" is a valid concern. Having worked at various software vendors, that phrase is often used as a code phrase to describe a baseline shift. For example, they may have found that it's ugly working with CUDA. Buggy, support problematic, etc. They would NOT announce that they were dropping CUDA. There can be many possible scenarios so I won't go there. But I'll be waiting to hear about what this means with the actual release, before selling my state of the art ATI card that came with my HP a while back, which has been sitting in a static bag since I purchased the unit.

But IMHO this is very good news, as HP for example is much more into supporting ATI in their low and mid end computers, as does Dell. It opens up a much wider array of prebuilt machines Sony will be optimized for.

Himanshu wrote on 4/12/2011, 6:01 PM

The first mentions of OpenCL that I can remember on this forum appeared here: www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=662400 Rob

Hi Rob,

Four months prior to the thread you mentioned, there was also this thread in which I said on 2/7/2009 (with apologies for quoting myself)

"My best guess is that Vegas will continue to be dependent on Microsoft technologies, and hopefully incremental access to the GPU via DirectX/Direct3D will eventually improve performance, or

Notice how I conveniently highlighted portions that actually came to fruition :)

apit34356 wrote on 4/12/2011, 8:00 PM

"OpenCL (or some such technology) will become a defacto standard and Sony will eventually port to it." Sony vegas is changing, OpenCL hints of bigger things to come.

Geoff_Wood wrote on 4/12/2011, 8:39 PM

You'd think that would make it worth calling 10.1 at least , no ? ;-)

geoff

rmack350 wrote on 4/12/2011, 9:46 PM

Hi Himanshu,

Yep, that was only as far back as I could remember. It was also as far back as this forum would search for me. But I know you and I were talking a little about GPU acceleration prior to that. And I'm pretty sure that I didn't really know what OpenCL was until JABloom used the phrase and I went to look it up.

Anyway, it's been several years coming and probably wasn't a good option until both AMD and Nvidia supported it. For those who need CUDA, I guess the Nvidia GPUs can do both so that's still the product to get.

Interestingly, Apple announced FCP Pro X today at NAB. Half the features look like things Vegas already has but one of their bullet points is that FCP will use OpenCL. Seems like a no-brainer since it's on an Apple platform but I thought it interesting that Sony and Apple are both announcing it. Perhaps SCS knew it was coming but it takes time to develop these things. Maybe it makes it easier to attract third party developers if they're already writing similar things for FCP Pro X.

Rob

Seth wrote on 4/12/2011, 10:22 PM

"Half the features look like things Vegas already has"

Really? Vegas has face detection? Shot detection [CU vs Wide vs 2-Shot]? Automatic color correction across the active timeline? Automatic rolling shutter correction/image stabilization on ingest?

All snarkiness aside, FCP has been playing catch up with Vegas on the proclaimed open timeline and even-more-user-friendly UI selling points since Apple first began to sing that song, but the advanced 'prosumer' features that Apple is writing into this proposed version of FCP as freebies are going to be game-changing. The codebase they have to draw from is unparalleled: Color, Motion [which already subsumed Shake], and as has already been mentioned, an advanced jump on the OpenCL standard. Hopefully a 3rd party will step up to fill in these gaps for Vegas using the OFX standard [Who knows, maybe it will even be a cross-platform plugin that runs on FCP as well, hahaha]

Vegas still has quite a few cards up it's sleeve, but Final Cut Pro X looks like a pretty cool application, and all the would-be videographers and 'film editors' out there are going to buy it in droves, just like how they all blindly bought Macbooks and Canon T2i's last year.

At any rate, as far as VP10d is concerned, I'm personally excited by the native MVC encoding, especially now that it might fully leverage OpenCL. If nothing else, this opens up possibilities for distribution and exhibition that no one else has come close to touching yet, at least not natively.

rmack350 wrote on 4/13/2011, 10:35 AM

"Really? Vegas has face detection? Shot detection [CU vs Wide vs 2-Shot]? Automatic color correction across the active timeline? Automatic rolling shutter correction/image stabilization on ingest?"

Those would be examples of the other half of the features. The ones Vegas doesn't have. ;-)

Apple is kind of going after Avid and Adobe with these. Both have been showing off tools to help you manage media and scripts a bit better. SCS hasn't really had any ideas on this front since Media Manager.

Rob

jabloomf1230 wrote on 4/13/2011, 10:54 AM

OpenCL sounds like all the previous "unifying" technologies. nVidia will probably stick with CUDA and AMD with Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP, what used to be called ATI Stream Technology). Anyone writing software based on OpenCL will be at the mercy of both companies for supporting OpenCL in their drivers, unless the two proprietary approaches disappear entirely. Heck, nVidia barely supports CUDA properly in their drivers now.

Every ten minutes, we hear or read about either the latest, greatest hardware standardization or the end-all/be-all new codec that will eliminate video format bloat. By the time that true standardization occurs, a newer, competing technology usually comes on the scene and the process starts all over. Such conflicts are endemic to the tech sector. The Blu ray vs. HD-DVD conflict was a perfect example. The two sides continued to argue over as unification of the two formats. By the time Blu ray "won", people had moved on to "the cloud" and/or other forms of archiving and portable storage.

rmack350 wrote on 4/13/2011, 11:09 AM

The key point is that there's more than one supporter of OpenCL. You're not tied to one vendor's cards, and Apple has a big enough market share to entice those vendors to continue to support OpenCL. This makes it a better choice for Vegas because the market is bigger, and you need big markets if you want to sell a lot of units.

The other question no one has asked yet is what Vegas is actually going to do with OpenCL? It doesn't matter that much if they use it to accelerate the rendering of just one codec.

Links:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_opencl_new.html
http://www.amd.com/us/products/technologies/stream-technology/opencl/Pages/opencl.aspx

farss wrote on 4/13/2011, 3:00 PM

From the full press release:
"Improved Track Grouping Workflow — Improvements to track grouping include new mute/solo technology to help users isolate and work with specific tracks while mixing"

Very interested to see what this brings to Vegas.

Bob.

Atomic wrote on 4/13/2011, 4:20 PM

I read sony's press release. I see nothing to indicate that sony is accelerating anything but the rendering of their output plugin.

So, they probably just switched from a CUDA codebase in the Sony AVC renderer, to an openCL one, and billed it as a huge upgrade.

I'll note that the quality of that renderer is terrible, and the mainconcept mp4 renderer in sony vegas is of much higher qualities at the same bitrate.

yatesd wrote on 4/13/2011, 5:45 PM

"Really? Vegas has face detection? Shot detection [CU vs Wide vs 2-Shot]? Automatic color correction across the active timeline? Automatic rolling shutter correction/image stabilization on ingest?"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You forgot the biggest shortcomings of FCP....only works on Mac's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems

Personally not a fan of a proprietary operating system that doesn't play well with others...

Seth wrote on 4/13/2011, 10:27 PM

I don't much like closed systems either, but I gave up on getting anyone here to support Vegas on Linux via WINE, so the 'closed system' argument is kind of like the pot calling the kettle black, no?

ushere wrote on 4/14/2011, 12:02 AM

oops... wrong thread....

fp615 wrote on 4/14/2011, 2:40 AM

> The other question no one has asked yet is what Vegas is actually going to do with OpenCL? It doesn't matter that much if they use it to accelerate the rendering of just one codec.

I believe that introducing OpenCL can't be a pervasive thing... Codecs seems to be the main target for improvement, but also FX, cc... but all the code must be ported and adapted ! And since (up to now) OpenCL is not a requirement, you should mantain a double codebase...

So, in the end, I think that they just licensed a codec from some company... mainconcept has one OpenCL™ H.264/AVC Encoder BETA...