Oh dear, only for rendering :(
The improved playback performance is what's already in Vegas. Deshaking is built into just about every NLE these days, simply playing catchup.

Bob.

Hmmm...

And why does the hobbyist-level Vegas get all the bells and whistles FIRST?

Or is it so that the major income for SCS comes from selling/upgrading the "el cheapo" versions of Vegas... and that's why they lay the first eggs in that basket?

Christian

"Oh dear, only for rendering :("

Hey... it's a start

"Or is it so that the major income for SCS comes from selling/upgrading the "el cheapo" versions of Vegas"

I cannot say how profitable it is but a while back I was told it outsells Vegas 10:1. I've "sold" it to several people. For many people's needs it's more than enough.

Bob.

"I cannot say how profitable it is but a while back I was told it outsells Vegas 10:1"

I would have thought that it was to iron out any possible bugs in the new features before releasing them to the Pro crowd, but as Vegas Pro 9.0 have shown us that is not really the case.

I see the image stabilization supports Rolling Shutter Correction which is a big plus. I bought Mercalli and have seldom used it because of all the rolling shutters issues on my HDV and AVCHD footage.

I see they have also upped the number of video and audio tracks to 10... nice package.

An idea SCS ought to consider, is that registered users/owners of Vegas Pro 9 (and possibly 8) should get an extended (60 or 90 days?) nag free trial period of Vegas Movie Studio 10. As Farss said, he's sold quite a few for SCS, and that is easier to do if you know it.
And it allows us to test the potential new features before they make it to the next Vegas Pro.

I have to say, that if it were me, I'd want to have them focus more on the rendering, than the preview performance, however there are times when it wastes my time having to RAM Render a stuff, but I'm not very worried, it's pretty rare that I am so overloaded with contents on the T/L across the whole project that this is a problem. I'm hoping that GPU accelerated rendering is any format to MP4, rather than rendering from MP4. The real question is how it handles FX, etc.. is that being enhanced by it, or is it still going through the CPU to do the FX, etc.. and then just getting that image crunched by the GPU?

Either way, it's definitely more progress in the direction of GPU than we've seen so far, and that puts us a step closer to the goal.

I do find it interesting that they're giving so much power to Vegas Movie Studio ( 10 tracks, CC tools, etc... ) at such a low price. Perhaps the bar is getting raised though? I'm excited to see what the future brings.

Dave

Here's a thought: Maybe if it is ring-fenced to the Rendering that a NESTED Veg would render up faster and that in turn would give us between Previewing?

One doesn't have to be "overloaded" with content for Vegas needing to drop to Preview quality. It is the FX-ing, Video-bussing, Track manipulations ON that content that presently is hobbling performance.

The thought that the Graphics Card is being employed for rendering kinda seems to misses the point for me? Why not have Vegas audit the RAM and CORES I have at its disposal and rather use that.

I'm confused by the underlying philosophy here . . . ?

Grazie

"I'm confused by the underlying philosophy here . . . ?" Many are, but trends force design directions that are not always good in long term product development! Confused.... take two "pills" and kick back for a while, then ride your "bike" to the local pub and enjoy! ;-)

Its possible to analysis the user hardware resources and modify the performance options for preview and rendering BUT that would special features being added to video "engines"; this sounds easy but it is not because "time" is consumed passing and patching together sub-frames/frames etc..

"Here's a thought: Maybe if it is ring-fenced to the Rendering that a NESTED Veg would render up faster and that in turn would give us between Previewing?"

Certainly a good thought however the nested .veg files are prerendered to some intermediate codec. The CUDA support is only for renders using the Sony AVC encoder. So even with nested .veg files the performance hit during editing comes from decoding the intermediate. Perhaps the codec used for the intermediate could be changed so it was done using CUDA. That'd at least decrease the time it takes from when you add the .veg file until you can get going again.

"One doesn't have to be "overloaded" with content for Vegas needing to drop to Preview quality. It is the FX-ing, Video-bussing, Track manipulations ON that content that presently is hobbling performance."

My biggest complaint is when it drops a frame or two on a cut. It took me years to understand the importance of the timing of that "transition" and now with HD I can't get the feel of it. This is fundamental to editing. All the other "transitions" I don't care about, who uses them anyway and for the rare times they are the exact timing is not so important.


"The thought that the Graphics Card is being employed for rendering kinda seems to misses the point for me? Why not have Vegas audit the RAM and CORES I have at its disposal and rather use that.

The GPU has hundreds of cores each working on a pipeline. Very different architecture to a CPU. The GPU isn't terribly smart but for tasks that can be done in parrallel it can be much, much faster than a CPU at the same clock speed. It just so happens that some of the specific functions built into the GPU are the same as what's used by AVCHD / H.264.

That said though, yes indeed, Vegas also needs better core and memory management. In general render times don't affect me much. When I used to do 100 projects per week I had one PC batch rendering while I edited on another. With the advent of HD and my growing understanding of the craft of editing playback performance has become mission critical to me. I don't have many creative neurons and any delay in them being fed causes them to wilt.

Bob.

"The GPU has hundreds of cores each working on a pipeline." This is where one has to remember that theses adders have data access on the video card and that this extra work must be loaded into the video memory on the video card. This means the main cpu has already organized the frames,etc,,,, to be loaded into the video card memory. Now with video cards exceeding 1G of memory, a lot can be done BUT remember the video card still has to maintain the displays at their current refresh rate. ;-)

great!!!!

so we'll probably get fantastic tl playback, but our displays will flicker instead :p)

Nah, you can have more than one video card. Water cooling and a private power station recommended :)

Our local overclocking community has a folding at home team, second highest global score usually. Our score goes up a lot in winter.

Bob.

I just wanted to forewarn everyone that running dual 1920x1080xdepth color will have an impact on performance..... of course, disk performance, number of files....etc.... all are part of the performance picture. Sometimes its something simple that kills thru put, like a secondary drive or USB drive with poor response times that kills or hangs up the rendering process.

Adding a secondary graphic card like Farss suggestion is a good ideal.

I don't have many creative neurons and any delay in them being fed causes them to wilt.

Very apt description of it.

Rob

great!!!! so we'll probably get fantastic tl playback, but our displays will flicker instead

Or when the render crashes it'll completely take down your display.

Rob

And why does the hobbyist-level Vegas get all the bells and whistles FIRST?

Deshaking and assorted FX filters only excite the amateur.

unfortunately deshake has no controls so its hardly usable.
but color corrections are nice.

And why does the hobbyist-level Vegas get all the bells and whistles FIRST?

DGates mentioned one reason, though I guess testing is another reason.

But I noticed that the ACID Studio 8 have received a comparable abound of the ACID Pro features as VMS 10 have from Vegas Pro. Are they closing the gab between the Consumer and Pro editions, or are they planning something equally big for the Pro's later this year?

Besides, the studio version still lacks a vital (to some) feature; Masking.

Just tried the MS demo's stabilization feature on some clips that have stymied NewBlue and Mercalli. The result looks pretty darn good--easily superior. The rolling shutter correction seems to make a big difference.

So I decided to render out to Sony AVC/mp4 to take a closer look...and MS crashed immediately. Some things never change with Sony, apparently.

Sigh.

I wonder if CUDA AVC encoding is of decent quality for anything above iPods and smart phones. I tried the supposed-to-be-great ATI Stream rendering and it's pathetic. It's lightning fast, but the quality, at least for 1080i video, is junk. There's pixels everywhere, even using the highest quality setting, at a high bitrate. I haven't got a CUDA based card to try this, though, so it could be good. Has anyone tried it? I'm not talking about Vegas Platinum 10, I'm talking about any type of CUDA accelerated encoding.