Taking Victor's analogy here's what we'd like:

Splicing tape that sticks.
That cleaning lady to stop emptying our bins at night.
No more neg matchers ringing us up to say they can't read our edge numbers as they're in Swahili.

Getting Vegas as bulletproof as the technology from decades ago would be a HUGE leap forward. I seem to recall back then there was no problems cutting images at 4K res and 14 bit depth (if not more) and getting two reels of film and 6 of audio out of sync was pretty hard damn hard.

And you wanted to see what your movie looked like, no problem with full res playback at 24fps!


Bob.

I hope 24fps doesn't linger with us as long as the 4 foot 8.5 inch railroad track width established by the Roman Empire.

JJK

24fps might stick around for a long while.

A- Significant production on 35mm film.

B- If you want to have material for the PAL and NTSC worlds, 24p works nicely. Add 3:2 pulldown for NTSC, speed it up for PAL.

You can get good results with 60i too. However:
--A good 60i--50i conversion is hard. Getting the motion looking right is difficult.
--60i doesn't have film-like motion. IMO, 60i motion on a CRT looks weird. It just looks weird. 30p IMO has film-like motion and potentially looks better than 24p, but it won't interchange with PAL well.
--A lot of displays nowadays are progressive (theatre and home), so progressive capture will eventually have some technical advantages in resolution versus de-interlacing.

2 - In my opinion, interlacing should go away!! The interlaced motion looks weird on CRTs and you lose resolution on other display types. Interlaced footage does not rotoscope easily (you usually just de-interlace and take the resolution hit) and interlacing is weird for computers to deal with (i.e. sync is one of the issues).

Yea, and ditch those bogus pixel aspect ratios too, what the hell man. A pixel should be as tall as it is wide, a SQUARE, otherwise, it just ain't right.

WHY?

There were two main things I really wanted from Vegas 7 that sony just seem to ignore (without a plugin).

No DVC pro HD support? (without have that cineform plugin) my HVX200 is my primary now, it puts my Z1 to shame!!

No Blu-ray or HD DVD support in DVDA4?

What is wrong with these guys? How many of us actually have or use their XDCAM stuff? Enhanced Enhanced Enhanced, sounds like they are trying to make something better by not adding anything to it but words. I was really counting on DVDA4 for blu ray or HD-DVD authoring. Why is sony releasing a computer in the fall with a blu-ray burner but no real pro app except if you want to pay thousands for sonys? I'm really pissed but I'll just wait and see what the final word is before I do something about it.

I can't understand the HVX, there is so much pixel stretching I might as well just take my DVX and push it out to a 720p Rez and call it HD. The only benefits I can see on it are better bitrates and the potential for a great recording format (in the future). Some just love it, but I feel like Panny dropped the ball when they made this the HD successor to the DVX. Now I'm stuck waiting for someone to put my DVX in an HD capability and really mean it.

Dave

and the potential for a great recording format (in the future).
There is little future in the DVCProHD format. It's a consumer-codec based format that is pretty well EOL.
Looks like the next wagon being hitched up is AVC-HD, another consumer-only format (at this time) that can somewhat easily be developed to have more options. MPEG ability is where the smart money is on all sides of the game, IMO.

I've avoided the maudlin cries of doom so many have posted. Since only a few here actually know what is coming, I'm going to be upbeat and not worry about.

As far as guessing...with better bmd and aja support coming, it sounds like Cineform and Sony have gotten to be good friends. I wouldn't be surprised if Vegas went beyond 10bit into full hdr support. As far as improved work flow, anyone who went to NAB should have seen some of the things Sony was previewing. Pretty cool stuff. I could be way off, but at the very worst, I'll just stick with 6 if I don't like the new stuff.

As fas as Blu Ray? Not even gonna think about it till next year. Presently, not a big enough market to make it worth my time.. When high quality players are going for well under 500, and true 1080p tv sets have a larger market share, then I'll worry about it. In the mean time I already have what I need to future proof my content at 720p and/or 1080i/p. Geez.

Media management and workflow may not be important for all, but if you want to play with the big dogs, you better have it to be taken seriously. Workflow and media management has been getting a BIG push from AVID the last six months.

Ditto on the BD authoring. The technology is probably not mature enough to make it worth delaying the release of Vegas 7. And maybe there are still a lot of copyright / anti-piracy disputes going on, enough so that Madison doesn't want to touch it just yet.

The technology is probably not mature enough to make it worth delaying the release of Vegas 7.
Truer words haven't been spoken in this thread.
Bear in mind, I can't comment on what is or isn't in 7 or DVDA 4, but having just received my BD burner...and owning all the various authoring apps, I'm wondering what to do. None of the "We support BD software actually does at the moment, and none of them likely will for a bit of time yet.

Regarding Blu-ray, you should plan on 64-bit Windows Vista, not 32-bit. MS won't support it fully on 32-bit. New today: http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=3922

Yea, and ditch those bogus pixel aspect ratios too, what the hell man. A pixel should be as tall as it is wide, a SQUARE, otherwise, it just ain't right.
The latest HD standards have square pixels (i.e. what everyone refers to as 1080i, 720p, etc. etc.).

I think there was a time where people were contemplating analog HD broadcasts, with 1035 lines. There is some transitional HD equipment that work at 1035 lines.

I'm not under an NDA, so here's what's in my notes from watching V7/DVDA4 at the WEVA show.

V7 - John Meyer - you got your wish. markers are now on I-frames. HDV editing on the timeline without an intermediate. Cinescore is a true plugin, a drop-down on the insert menu.

DVDA4 - Again, John wins the feature request parade - there is a flag to warn you of markers on non-I-frames. Three types of markers, Chapter, Menu and (? I missed the third type). Detachable windows, I will be able to use my second screen with DVDA. Picture compilations can generate a montage similar to the Excalibur "PBS" mode. Menu buttons can be animated and keyframed. Scripting - lets you read and make decisions on DVD player registers. The example shown was to read the region code of the DVD player and enable the appropriate menus and media on the DVD. (I think regions are stupid, but this way a if the default language of the DVD can be decided by the region code of the player). I don't know what other capabilities scripting will give us, but remember that DVDA still has to make discs that are "book" compliant, so don't get carried away with complaints about what you can't do with scripting.

And the one that really blew me away...

Live menu buttons on the video. (Can you say: "Interactive DVD"?) I didn't even know that this was possible in the DVD spec, but until now the only way to make an interactive DVD was to create a complex structure of menus and end-actions. Think of the possibilities for corporate DVD applications......

There were other new buttons on the V7 menu bar but I didn't get a chance to query wat they did. There are surely other new features but I didn't see them in the demo I watched, so don't ask.

Steve M.

So they've fixed the things that should have been done right from day 1, added a feature that every pro DVD authoring app has but not all of them (not that I care that much).

Hope there's some improvement in core functionality yet to be announced, somehow I doubt it though, all the R&D budget seems to have been spent on 'features' rather than functionality.

Ah, hang on, I just read that Red is planning a big surprise at IBC, I know, it's going to be Vegas editing 2K 10 bit from a Red camera.

Bob.

n19093, thanks for the review.

Farss, "I just read that Red is planning a big surprise at IBC, I know, it's going to be Vegas editing 2K 10 bit from a Red camera." are we pulling on one's chain???

"Are we pulling on one's chain?"

I wish I could say no but I'm under this NDA that prevents me from saying anything about what I don't know and I don't know that it isn't true.

Bob.

LOL!

> There is little future in the DVCProHD format.
> It's a consumer-codec based format that is pretty well EOL.

Huh? You think the Varicam is a consumer camera? 100 Mbit/s is on par with HDV? I think NBC, who is heavily invested in the DVCPro format, might disagree.

I think it IS obvious that Sony is choosing to not support a format that competes with their own. And I think it's obvious from Spots' posts here that I shouldn't hold my breath waiting for DVCPro support in VV.

You can't compare bitrates between an intraframe compression format like DVCPROHD and an interframe ditto like HDV or XDCAM.

In practice, 35 Mbps and even 25 Mbps XDCAM contains a lot more useable picture information than 100 Mbps DVCPROHD.

I was quite revved up by DVCPROHD in the past, until I saw all the limitations.

It's OK as a camera format, terrible in post. As an aside, I also didn't understand the "consumer" part.

And lest anyone get the wrong idea, I have seen a LOT of DVCPROHD footage, as well as other HD formats, and I certainly have no interest in theoretical punditry.

But I should also say that a few years ago, Varicam footage (DVCPROHD) beat F900 footage (HDCAM) 100% of the time. Not in the sharpness, where the Sony won every time, but in the overall pleasure of watching the image.

Don't confuse DVCPROHD on the Varicam with DVCPROHD on an HVX200, they're not in the same league because another order of magnitude was spent on electronics and optics in the former.

When will Sony be showing off Vegas 7 & DVD Architect 4? Don't they have a convention to get to?

Yes indeed DVCPro HD is indeed a consummer codec. To quote Adam Wilts description, it's just 4 DV codecs running in parallel. They bumped up the chroma sampling and that's all.

It's lower resolution than even HDV and higher compression than HDCAM.
The only reason for it's popularity is Macs lacked the CPU grunt to handle professional codecs like Digibetam and HDCAM. Apple didn't want to expose the truth about how underpowered their machines were so got into bed with Panasonic.

This has nothing to do with the 'look' of the image, Panasonic have always been pushing the gamma curve trying to look more 'filmic', Sony have wisely resisted, they know how much broadcast degrades a noisy image produced by pushing gain up at the bottom end of the curve. As the world slowly moves over to DVB I think we'll see more the wisdom of Sony's engineering.

Bob.

It may well be that the format doesn't get supported, but getting frustrated that, in a period when no new rev of vegas has been released, no support for the panasonic formats has appeared seems a bit silly.

Vegas 6 didn't support it. It's generous for the madison team to actually add real features in these a,b,c,d revisions. They didn't have to do it. So when you actually see the real feature list for V7 that's when you can start saying that Sony won't support the Panasonic formats.

Personally, of course I hope they do offer the support, even if you have to pay more for it as an add-in.

Rob Mack