This is moving steadily down in the ranks, from the high end to the mundane, will be considered vanilla soon enough, so let's hope Madison starts planning now...
What about integration with special effects and roto software instead? It would be nice if you had a "open clip in video editor", much like what there is for audio. Right click a clip, open it up in a video editor (perhaps with a menu to specify handles). Do your work, save/render it, and it comes back in as a take. And if you want, you can right click your clip and open back up the original project file. Ideally, parameters like lower/upper field first, anamorphic, pulldown flagging, straight or premult. alpha are all transferred correctly. Saves button pushing compared to the export/import dance (which you can do currently and get per vertex feathering).
I don't think Vegas is the best environment for very detailed roto work.
2- Personally, I've done a little bit of roto work and never had to use per vertex feathering control. Motion tracking is more useful to me in roto (and in color grading, where you motion track your spline-based masks). Just having a solid 1-point tracker would be really cool, since I'd personally find it the most useful / use it the most.
But at some level, that's sort of a frill. Bread and butter things I would like to see are:
--Format support (Avid MXF/opatom, HVX/Panny MXF, dpx might be nice, faster AVC, etc.)
--Being able to add notes while capturing (while I capture, I will sometimes put notes onto paper)
--Search markers and regions (though scripting tools like US can turn regions into subclips)
--Paste attributes like FCP.
1. titler (i'm not asking for type deko, hyro, etc.,) just something a little more sophisticated for everyday use. styles (on individual characters / lines...). for serious work i usually use cs2, or for animated - bluff.
2. a thorough check of m2t capture and within vegas t/l - i too have been getting the occasional 2 black frames. in what is otherwise a highly reliable nle, i find this a disturbing anomaly.
3. tc batch capture of hdv (i know, no one wants to know about it).
Reelsmart Motion Blur, please, pretty please. Without proper MB all this animation stuff in Vegas looks well, you know. Especially when you work at 24fps.
And when you look down the list of apps these FXs work in.
I don't expect the guys at SCS to create these FXs, that's costly and duplication of work and most Vegas users mightn't want or need them anyway but those that need them are forced to jump ship just so they can.
Add options to the options menu to select which player or device to preview too: IE---Media Player, Nero Showtime, Quicktime Player, MY-HD 120 or 130 Video device, other video device, etc.
The possibility to "connect" 2 soundtracks so that when something is said something on the "Narration track" then the "Music track" is played at a lower level.
Ducking: Excalibur has a script that does that for me. I can select a load of audio tracks to "duck" with ramps in and out. Works great for my interviews + music beds + SFX + foley stuff.
I already submitted a suggestion to "Dragon Speaking" to adapt it to NLE's to create an "on the fly" video subtitle track which can be then modified for text, font, size, background, mis-spelling, etc. The track would then have to be sucked into the dvd writng software as a subtitle track
JJK.
Compositing modes on an EVENT level, rather than on a track level. I hate that when I want to composite something I have to change an entire track to that composite mode, rather than just that one event.
Also, something I miss from my Speed Razor days: let the timeline play back after a render (RAM, etc).
Often, I'll highlight an area to be rendered and walk away. It would be nice if Vegas began playing back when done rendering. That way I get an audio cue that the render is done and it's time to come back and view the resulting renders.
Ok - Although I see requests for 10bit color space, I need some clarification as to WHY.
If I understand this correctly - the vast majority of consumer HDV and DV cameras shoot in an 8bit color space - correct? If that is the case, what will 10bit color space bring to the table if someone isn't shooting in that color space? Can you bring miniDV or HDV footage in, convert to 10bit for editing and then render back out accordingly?
This has been a sticking point for me since I don't understand some of the more technical aspects of shooting video.
In addition, I just had the opportunity to play with Final Cut Pro - umm.. I was impressed initally - up until it came time to render out, then it was quite slow - even for a 30 second clip as compared to either Vegas or PPro. But it's handling of native formats was something I walked away with wishing the apps I work with on Windows could do. And a titler like the one in Premiere Pro would be a major plus - I truly prefer the titler in PPro and dread having to try to use the one in Vegas.
Trust me, I'm TRYING to like Vegas, but I do find it's work flow quite cumbersome - but I'm probably just set in my ways in how I do things with Premiere Pro.
You incur rounding error from going 8-bit Y'CbCr --> R'G'B' --> Y'CbCr. To avoid this, you need to go 10bits or more (10 if you implement something like Sheer/Synchromy).
SDI carries 10-bit Y'CbCr.
2- Will consumer with 6-bit LCD panels tell the difference? Um, maybe not.
3- As mentioned before, there are tricks to improve performance out of 8-bit pipelines. Rounding instead of truncating, dynamic rounding, dithering, Synchromy.
4-
Perhaps you could post your issues in a new thread? There's probably an answer to them.
Glenn, regarding item #3, What do you mean by rounding & dynamic rounding instead of truncating and how does this apply while working in Vegas (if it even does apply)???
Truncating (with decimal numbers) is when you throw away the end part of a number.
So say you divide 7 by 4 and get 1.75. If you truncate, you end up with 1.
If you round the number, you end up with 2.
If you do something like dynamic rounding, then I believe you end up with 2 75% of the time, and 1 25% of the time. If you have a big string of 1.75s (but only the end result of them, i.e. 1s or 2s), and then average them all together, then you can get back your original value.
Dynamic rounding: Dynamic Rounding
And then there's dithering... which is adding noise to make banding not visible.
And then there's Sheer's Synchromy scheme, which claims to reduce the rounding error when converting between Y'CbCr and R'G'B'.
(I might be wrong here. But I hope I'm not...)
2- But basically, the point is... some 8-bit implementations are better than other implementations.
So in layman's terms - even though one is shooting in 8 bit, try to edit in 10 bit color space if possible (next version of Vegas???), then render back out???
Something like that. Though when you implement stuff, you either hold the image as 16-bit integer or 32-bit floating point (because desktop CPUs do 16 and 32-bit integer and float). Doing processing in the higher bit depth will reduce rounding error when you pass material from YCbCr/video --> RGB to filter to filter and then back to RGB and back to YCbCr/video.
For SDI capture, you want to keep the original 10 bits in your incoming signal (the signal is natively 10-bit).
How about native support for 24p footage which doesn't have flags. For example, footage from the Canon HV20. Cineform & others can do it by analyzing the frames instead of relying upon the flags to be present.
ummmm...... let me think....
really the only thing I'm missing these days is a storyboard.
Oh yeah, and fix the FX preset window so it tells me if I'm using a preset, instead of defaulting to "unsaved."
I can't think of anything else.
Oops, I lied: Just thought of two more:
1. Be able to select and go to markers, regions or events from the "Edit Details" menu. (Sound Forge does this, why not Vegas?)