Using Vegas 6 in Corporate Video - Suggestions?

DavidBruce wrote on 4/25/2005, 5:55 AM
Sorry for a long post, but now that NAB is over I could use some advice from editors using Vegas with SDI video equipment. I work in a small four person in-house corporate video group producing primarily technical informational video programs for our US government customer.

We have a new manager since January who comes from a meeting coordination and corporate presentations background and knows virtually nothing about video production. I would like to sell her in looking at a Vegas 6 system as a new secondary editing system. I would propose to edit with this new system, although I am a Vegas novice at the moment. I currently write scripts, produce and do some DVD authoring.

Can Vegas users comment on using Vegas with SDI video configurations. I assume with Vegas 6, which supports Blackmagic Design’s DeckLink capture boards, getting SDI into Vegas is no longer an issue? Simply, what do we need to configure a decent system, besides a high power computer and DeckLink board? Hard drive storage is particularly confusing to me. Do you need a RAID array and how much storage would you suggest to do long form documentary programs?

Our non-linear editing system is an AVID Symphony (HP Pentium 4 computer) with the most up to date software (version 5). Our primary camera is a Sony Digital Betacam (DVW 709WS) along with DVW A500 studio recorders. All video is ingested by the AVID via SDI. We usually edit with only a two to one compression ratio with the AVID, so we don’t really compress the video too much.

We do some field recording with Sony DVCam and Panasonic DVC Pro (25 &50) video recorders (for cost reasons) of various computer displays but we generally dub the video to Digital Beatcam comp reels or capture directly with a DV recorder with an SDI output.

Our only in-house editor/producer believes any other editing system other than an AVID is a joke (not really professional) and can’t do a proper job or it takes forever to render the output to tape so the workflow is too slow. Although, he has looked and considered Apple’s Final Cut Pro HD as we look towards future HD applications. We’re located on the East Coast and most free-lance editors are AVID oriented. We do have some need for outside free-lance editors so in this sense an AVID makes sense.

I guess what I’m looking for is a short treatise from Vegas users working in our type of video production environment. I’d just like to show these responses to our manager and say there are some other options than another AVID editing system and they work well too!

I know Vegas is tops with native DV video, but that’s not what we do.

Thanks for your help.

Comments

craftech wrote on 4/25/2005, 6:01 AM
You might want to read this thread.

John
[r]Evolution wrote on 4/25/2005, 3:46 PM
...and take a look at my site:
www.planet9productions.net

Under DEMO materials you will find Corporate Videos done w/ Vegas. We now have 2 Vegas Editing Bays and outsource a lot less to the AVID guys.

The only difference is... we shoot and edit DVCam captuirng via firewire.
rmack350 wrote on 4/25/2005, 10:32 PM
It might be very difficult to fit vegas into your current setup. If your Avids are running on PCs then it's possible/probable that Vegas would run on them as well, and if they are high end systems then Vegas could take advantage of disc arrays and dual processors you already own. One of these could be a good demo box to show off Vegas.

I'm in a similar sized shop but we use Media100 and 844. We route SDI to 4 edit stations and our dv deck only offers SDI output. I have Vegas on my system and I capture from my own DSR11 using m100 log files I've imported through Veggie Toolkit.

I certainly look at the BMD card option from time to time. While there's just no way I'll ever be able to integrate Vegas into the Media100 flow, there is definitely a place for Vegas in our shop editing projects for the web. Vegas is 100 times better suited for this than Media100, and it's a heck of a lot cheaper.

So, if you want to start using Vegas in your shop you'll need to find a niche for it. That's the point where you can make a convincing argument. And then secondly, you need to be able to demonstrate that you can interchange projects between Vegas and your Avid system. The Avid editor is definitely not going to want you to edit anything that he won't be able to work on later on.

Regardless of how well Vegas works directly with the BMD cards, you can still capture independently using the BMD applications and then work with the files on the Vegas timeline. You can also print to tape that way. In fact, you could do this in V5 and probably V4. Also, the BMD codecs are free so you might do some tests with Vegas by transcoding some clips to the BMD 8 bit codec and then trying to edit with them. You'll soon get an idea of whether the machine you currently have can do it.

My assumption is that you'd want a pretty heavy duty dual processor system and a decently fast RAID array-scsi or fibrechannel and at least 4 disks. You will also need a PCI-X slot for the BMD card to perform well.

Rob Mack