One of the big features of version 6 was the Media Manager.

This has turned out to be a bust. A lot of users have turned it off completely because it was such a resource hog. I think you need really fast system to use it.


You can download the demo of Vegas 6 and see how it performs on your system.

For me, going from Vegas4 to Vegas6 was very worthwhile, even for SD/DV - just by having the VGA preview for in-the-field-dual-head-editing. My camcorder does have a firewire to SVIDEO passthrough capability - but I'd rather not hook it up as I've already broken one firewire port by way of the Sony (amongst the majority of other manufacturers of) consumer camera design having little or no use of self-resetting fuses to cater for all possible plug-and-play/hot-plug in-rush current and spike eventualities. I'm all for gigabit-ethernet and USB2 until I hear that FW800 is any better.

So VGA preview and the DVDA3 features above that of DVDA1 were worthwhile for me - given the introductory upgrade price at the time.

Thereby bringing two financial reasons to perhaps wait until after or at the very least - until closer to NAB2006. It is usually possible to upgrade Vegas or VegasVideo to the latest major release at the cheapest price when NAB arrives. Quite whether Vegas7 and/or Architect4 will be worth the extra depends on who is holding the ball at Sony and whether the competition have anything to draw you away with.

8K sized projects/ingest and enhanced ITU-T709 and 10bit RGB or 8bit YUV improvements would please me. Even if third party plug-ins got broken in those modes. Floating point multichannel WAV audio might also be handy if represented across timelines on import in an appropriate manner. Currently mono or stereo tracks need to be discrete. All these are possibly long shots even for Vegas8 for NAB2007!

I've been very happy using Vegas 4, it works great...
A home run with Vegas 4...works just fine.

Ken

(edited to keep things positive :)

Ditto on the homerun for Vegas 4. Clearly the best Vegas program SF/Sony has come out with to date and it runs flawlessly in W98SE as well. My objection to "upgrading" has been and will remain that the software developers refuse to upgrade the basic editor in favor of adding bells and whistles. I wait every year to see if they are going to upgrade the editor and address the problems that stem back to Vegas 2 (which is where I started) and every year they refuse to fix long standing problems or improve antequated yet important tools such as the Credit Roll generator to name only one.
We'll see this year.

John

I did write to them when Vegas 5 came out to see if they would sell DVDA separate from Vegas. but they refused. I still get by with DVDA 1.0 which does OK and if I get tired of it I will buy DVD Movie Factory or some other brand.

So I am not in any rush to beta-test sony's V5/V6/V7 for them.

It's hard to imagine what you can easily see on *most* systems. There is no "beta" testing of Vegas 5 or 6. Both are rock solid on thousands of computers in the broadcast industry, web-authoring industry, corporate, and event industry. Just because it's not for you doesn't mean it's not a complete, solid application.

Vegas 4 works just fine. I am not ever going to upgrade. I can make a living fine w/Vegas 4, why rock the boat?

Therein lies the true crux of the issue. If Nested Timelines, most scripting tools, 3D planes, ACID audio features, deep surround tools, faster renders, HD/HDV support, full screen dual monitors, docking windows, hardware interface devices/HUI support, VST plugs, input monitoring, automation, SDI support, scrubbing, bus to bus audio, keyboard maps/strong keyboard editing support, high quality 60i to 24p converting, sync repair tools, Flash support, Bezier masks, MPEG 4 support, and so much more aren't important to you, then they aren't. But for many of us, some of those features are do-or-die features. There are others, like Network rendering, subtitle import, right click reverse, subclips, better MPEG 2 encoding, Media Manager, etc that are also great tools but wouldn't fall into the do-or-die feature set for me.

If you don't need to upgrade, that's one thing. But to call it a "beta" or call it "buggy" is another. No software is flawless, but these forums and others are strong testaments to Vegas' lack of problems compared to virtually any other NLE out there. Visit them. The discussions are about PROBLEMS, and not solutions within the software offerings.

What would life be like without "high quality 60i to 24p converting"??!!

That would be no fun....'specially for those of us who don't have 24p cameras yet. :-]
--
Mike

funny...I usually upgrade all my software regularly but have never been able to pull the trigger past Vegas 4. I haven't yet found a reasonable excuse to do it. Even a better aesthetic treatment on the GUI could do it. For sure FLASH8 and iPod video export would do it...not used to having to be distracted by codec issues with SOFO.

Good points, Spot - it all depends on the needs of the different users. For some folks, the new features probably do justify the jump to the newer versions, for some of us, not.

We can all agree that Vegas is a superb NLE platform, so that's encouraging! Best wishes to you and others, using Vegas this coming year...

Ken