Vegas 6 Wish List

gaoptimize wrote on 5/24/2004, 9:07 AM
Hi,

First, let me say I like Vagas alot, as does Mr. Cheung at Tom's Hardware:
http://www.tomshardware.com/video/20040524/index.html . I bought Vegas to use with my GR-HD1, and it works as advertised. Thank you Sony and JVC.

Second, I am struggling with the decision to upgrade from 4 to 5. So, I wanted to pass on to Sony what would make me want to upgrade to 6. I realize some of this is beyond their control, but here goes:

I'd like the Main Concept High Definition MPEG encoder to run on 64-bit Windows XP and take advantage of Athlon64 processors to speed encoding and the quality and speed of the UI update. I hate to say this, but on my 2400 AthlonXP system, Vegas is a dog. It takes 10 minutes to load a 30 minute HD project, it takes many seconds to update the thumbnails on a page scroll over, it takes many seconds to update the media pool thumbnails after adding anything to it. With 521 MBytes of RAM, my WindowsXP page file expands to more than 2.5 GBytes, before refusing to render. Another anoyance is any switch to any other application causes a 25 to 40 minute delay while apparently Vegas switches out and back into memory.

Sony needs to publish recommended system specs that are based upon the size and other attributes of the projects that are anticipated. My 22 minute Yosemite High Definition project will load, barely edits, and will not render. My 1 hour high definition Disneyland project will not even load. If I was told to have one or two gigs of system memory per hour of project, I would have planned for this.

I would like to believe that a 64-bit version of Vegas could be twice as fast and handle projects of unlimited size with no UI update waiting.

Another wish list item would be for Vegas to support a second monitor for the Preview window. I would send it out the DVI port of a ATI Radeon converted to component to my HDTV.

Another wish list would be for Sony, if it wants to push Blue Ray DVD, to bundle a Vegas 6 upgrade with a HD Blue Ray burner, saving us a few bucks...oh...and in time for Christmas!

Another would be to support the WindowsXP Media Edition controller in some way that would speed editing.

All that said, I can not thank Sony enough for this great software. I wish you could see the joy and pride on my wife's face as she creates and show's of our movies to her friends and family. I like the 21st century!

-Tom Schaefer

Comments

SHTUNOT wrote on 5/24/2004, 9:18 AM
Are you seriously trying to edit HD with an AMD athlon 2400??? Bro if I were you I'd upgrade to dual opteron 250 with 5gigs of ram and scsi HD...then come back here and update us.

Mind you that a windows 64bit OS is still in beta. Without that I don't think vegas or any software can utilize it.

Ed.

Btw...to speed up editing I use my contour shuttle pro 2...

http://www.contourdesign.com/shuttlepro/index.htm
John_Cline wrote on 5/24/2004, 10:12 AM
As for speedups from 64-bit computing, don't expect too much. 64-bit brings some downsides over regular 32-bit, particularly in terms of higher memory usage and thus lower cache locality due to the larger pointers. Existing x86 CPUs already have at least one 64-bit ALU, for floating-point and MMX, so the increased width of general-purpose calculations itself isn't going to help for applications that already make heavy use of CPU extensions. In the specific case of AMD64 (x86-64), it appears that most of the gains come from the increased number of registers, compared to the IA-32 architecture.

TheHappyFriar wrote on 5/24/2004, 10:43 AM
I e-mailed mainconcept a couple months ago & they said that there will be a 64-bit version of their encoder, but it isn't on the "must do now" list.

I'd expect one after soon after Intel releases their 64-bit desktop chip & 32-bit chips are no longer being produced.