And one more question - Is Sony going to Continue with Vegas - have a Vegas 5? That's a concern also!

FCP and Avid are yesterday's news. Did you hear... SONY bought the Sonic Foundy line. Vegas is wonderful. Download and try the demo., see for yourself. Fully functional except for MPEG, can't do due to the usual licensing restrictions since that's a Main Concept product.

There are hundreds (at least) converts of those "other" products. You looked at Premiere Pro? A knock off of Vegas. Pinnacle, not unless one of their top line products. The stuff you see in the retail channel, many converts from that here too.

Film look? Yes you can do that. 24P yes. Vegas does not support any add on hardware for real time rendering. Its all software based. Requires Windows. Best with a NTFS type file system due to the size of video files.

Oh... the industry is changing. Vegas is starting to turn a lot of heads. Even blockheads. You know there are a "few" in the industry.

If I understand your question - you are shooting with the Pani, I would guess in 24pa mode, and than you want to edit with software that will give you film look?

First if you are shooting with the Pani you will aready be part of the way there. Have your DP light as he would for film and shoot with the suggested camera methods given in the SoFo 24p white paper, or even the DvFilm site ssuggestions, and you are pretty much all set 'film look' wise. All VV will do after that is allow you to edit. I mean it will do more than that but I am saying you will already have the basic 'film look' coming out of the gate so you don't need to do too much tweaking if you shoot it right.

I love Premiere (I still use 6.5) but I don't think Premiere Pro has support for 24p yet...past versions of Premiere have not - enter DvFilm Maker. I personally don't like Avid that much and since you are actually shooting on film and won't need to do a matchback you don't need to worry about higher priced version that allow for that. FCP I hear a lot of great things about but I am not a Mac person and don't plan on going out and getting a mac any time soon. Pinnacle - no comment. (I have formulated that far too many people have been turned off to Premiere because of problems with hardware interaction with all of these bundled Premiere/Pinnacle products)

For what you want to do I see no cons to using VV. You may find some quirks in editing but for finishing, VV is maybe the best thing out there for 'doing it all'. If you have some other specific questions I could be more specific with answers.

As for VHS output - you need to go out via firewire and than out to your VHS. Many ways to do it, I personally use a JVC-VS30U. However according to SoFo/Sony this deck does not maintain the 24p headers when recording on the DV side. (But you can still output back to the Pani and all will be well, I am not sure if any of the decks keep the 24p header info actually) DVD wise - I am sure others can answer that part a lot better than I can.

Just a PS - do you alreayd have a pani or are you going to be getting one? I only ask because maybe you should wait and check out the new DVX 100A

Thanks for the info so far. Filmy - we have seen the info on the DVX 100 A - but I'm not sure when it's actually going to be available. If you know, feel free to add another post.

As i don't know what your project will contain apart from you wanting the 'film look' this maybe irrelevant.

Any of the NLEs you're looking at wil have its advocates (well apart from Pinnacle!), I think really its got more to do with comfort zone issue sthan anything else in reality, I'm amazed how many people still use FCP Ver 1.

So from the point of view of editing the image they'll all get the job done, as I've only used Premiere and VV I'd say VV is miles better and more stable. I've never used FCP but it looks way slower to get things done and I really cannot hack the Mac hardware platforms. I like my PCs built the way I like them.

But the point I want to get to is this. Convincing the audience that your DV footage is really film is not just about the image, I'm surprised no one mentioned VVs audio capabilities. The soundtrack is one other critical thing that makes a 'movie' very different from a 'video'. And this is where VV excels.

As far as I know no other NLE can touch VVs audio capabilities, Premiere Pro has a go but it's pretty clunky. That's understandable as they welded another's app on. FCP now has SoundTrack, i.e. Acid Style. DVXpress just doesn't really want to know about audio.

I'd certainly download the VV demo and give it a whirl, it's a bit different but it'd be pretty dumb if they didn't give it it's own flavour. But take a bit of time to look at the audio capabilities. Don;t be put off by the simple UI of VV either. FCP looks way more capable, to me it's just clutter to create the illusion that editing is so complex that you need years of training to do it.

Sony has a 24p whitepaper in the Vegas 4.0 manual section on the web site; might be worth looking at.

Thanks for responses... farss, the audio capabilities are a good point. As far as film look, we know it can't look identical to film, but close. ScottW, we'll take a look at the docs you mentioned. Maybe it boils down to "how much does anyone really need?" to get the job done. As farss mentioned, FCP looks very capable, but seems to have a lot going on as far as what is seen on screen. Is Vegas just as capable for the most part?

For DV editing, I would say that Vegas is more flexible then FCP--if you are moving up in formats---like DVCPRO50 etc then FCP is currently the best way to go---But remember you will have a bunch of additional hardware expenses.

Colonel,
FCP probably gives you a bit more capabilites than VV but with VV you can use 3rd party stuff and still come out way in front financially. Just things like 3D text, rolling credits etc. FCP has it built in. Problem is if you don't need it you still pay for it. And the hardware issues with FCP are not that minor either. No matter what Mac machine you buy think about how you are going to add things like more HDs.

For everything else though VV is just as capable and being format agnostic VV is far more fexible.