Comments

seeker wrote on 7/16/2002, 3:03 PM
Fuzzzzy,

I have not used Avid Xpress, and I doubt that many, if any, participants here do. I think the Avid Xpress DV 3.5 DV codec is licensed from Canopus, but I am not sure of that. Avid Xpress DV Version 3.5 is priced at $1699, which puts it in the prosumer and professional market, but excludes it from the consumer market. On the other hand, Vegas Video 3 is list-priced at $599.95 which, with available discounts, puts Vegas Video squarely in the consumer market, as well as the prosumer market and, to a certain extent, in the professional market as well.

You might expect that Avid Xpress' much higher price would give it a far superior feature set to Vegas Video, but that is not necessarily so. For example, Avid Xpress DV 3.5 is limited to 8 video tracks and 8 audio tracks, while Vegas Video 3 has "unlimited" video and audio tracks.

Another serious limitation of Avid Xpress DV 3.5 is its much more restrictive system requirements. Vegas Video 3 runs on a much wider variety of PC systems than Avid Xpress DV 3.X does. For more information on that, click on:

http://xdvfaq.tripod.com/#1.1

Avid Xpress DV 3.5 is available on the Mac platform, where it comes into direct competition with Apple's Final Cut Pro 3.0, and there have been some fiery debates between FCP3 users and Avid users over the relative superiority of each other's video editors. I feel good that Vegas Video 3 has been compared favorably with Final Cut Pro 3.

Based on the more or less equal competition between Final Cut and Avid, that implies to me that Vegas Video is successfully "playing with the big boys." Now, if Vegas Video 4 would just include support for surround sound...

-- Burton --
Spot|DSE wrote on 7/17/2002, 1:36 AM
The codec for AVID 3+ is not from Canopus, but rather their own. They dropped Canopus with 3.0
I've got both Vegas and AVID, the ONLY place Avid scores higher, is in media file management, and output to their own format of EDL, that they are trying to score as the standard, and doing a very good job of it. However, even their own high end tools won't accurately open their DVXpress EDL's.
Vegas is MUCH more solid, format agnostic, and more or less resolution independent. Runs on nearly any PC, and is much more intuitive. It doesn't convert all your files to proprietary like AVID does either. It plays better in the sandbox than does AVID.
AVID is a great name to have around though. So, I just have an AVID mousepad laying there when working in Vegas. Most clients don't know the difference.
Vegas codec is equal in every way to the Avid codec, and costs a heckuva lot less.
seeker wrote on 7/17/2002, 6:00 AM
DSE,

I am delighted that we got a response from someone with such good credentials.

"AVID is a great name to have around though. So, I just have an AVID mousepad laying there when working in Vegas. Most clients don't know the difference."

I got a real chuckle out of that.

-- Burton --