Here's a simple question for DSE that a NDA should not be able to restrict legally;


How many Vista 64bit systems are you using in your video work flow?

Post 100 - a good round number, and just the place to post the following request. Please Sony, find time in between working on the new Vegas 8 to fix the following to issues with Vegas 7: the constant crashing with corrupt m2t clips and the two black frame bug!

If history is any indication, fixes stop for past versions once the new version is released. Maybe that will change this time around.

32 multicam tracks though? seriously, who the hell has 32 cams?

They had a 64bit AMD machine that they were demoing it on and gave away as a door prize. The press release says much the same thing.

"We have and will continue to be hardware agnostic....."

"The only way forward is 64 bit....we need to be able to address more than 4GB of RAM....."

Run demo of 4 streams of HD in a 4 way split...

I doubt that's a verbatim quote and my apologies in advance if I've misquoted, it was a while ago and I was down the back where it was hard to hear over the aholes who refused to shut up.

The press release is even wierder, something about AMD being the choice of artists? Most artists I've met are running on Intel CPUs with OSX, the rest that aren't I doubt give a rats about what CPU is in the box.

All I can say about dogma is it's fine in religion and politics, in business and engineering it's been the driving force behind many a corporate crash. If it wasn't for dogma I'd still be working in engineering for what was one of the worlds leading companies in process control and so would 6,000 other good people. They had the opposite problem, they couldn't believe that off the shelf hardware would ever replace custom built computers, yeah righ!

Bob.

Yeah! Why not 256 cameras? That's a nice round 8-bit number.

I think 32 cameras ought to cover anyone's needs, even a dance club VJ wanting to switch between streams with a drum pad or something.

Rob Mack

Yeah, well, the AMD press release was obviously marketing blather. However, on the "more than 4 GB of memory" desire, I've been hearing it first hand (mostly in the form of cursing and swearing) with three Premiere Pro systems with Axio hardware. They need more memory. Vegas is much less in dire need but it's a good thing to add to the general rewrites that things like DirectShow might require.

Still, they can't possibly expect their users to all adopt 64-bit systems.

Rob Mack

I would say in a year or two, all systems sold off the shelf will be 64 bit anyway. Getting 64bit certified now will save them from having to rewrite later. It seems to be that Vegas is being rewritten for the future and not so much for legacy systems.

Maybe, but if they make GPU acceleration usable in Vegas then you might start seeing people with dual graphics cards with lots of memory using lots of resources.Our Axio systems with 4GB installed only have something like 2.3 GB available after memory mapped I/O takes it's address tax, and that's with a single 512 MB graphics card (and the axio card, and the fibrechannel card, and whatever else is in there.) If you use a 64bit OS then the motherboard can remap that memory into space above 4GB and it's actually usable. Plus, Vegas gets to use more than 2GB.

I don't think that a 64-bit OS is going to be anything but exotic for a while, but then video editing is also a fairly exotic application.

Rob

I'm hoping Vegas 8 Pro will license both 32 bit and 64 bit versions under the same key. So that we can use whichever we want. Right now I have 64bit capable hardware, but don't trust Vista 64bit. however it would nice if I didn't have to rebuy 100% of my software when the drivers and such get up to par.

32 multicam tracks though? seriously, who the hell has 32 cams?
The first thing I thought of was sports highlights editors -- the guy sitting in a big truck outside a football/baseball/basketball stadium, trying to quickly edit a highlights clip. Wasn't there a post some time ago about somebody for CBS or ESPN or something doing this sort of thing with Vegas?

Plus, lots of 32-cam wedding shoots, I suppose.

Tim L

Plus, lots of 32-cam wedding shoots, I suppose.

I think I would hang up my hat and put in my resume at Burger King if I had to do a 32 cam wedding!

j razz

32 cam weddings LOL. Dude, if i had 32 cameras I sure as heck wouldnt be doing wedding gigs. How many gigs would you have to do to cover equipment costs?

Yes. If they get released at the same time, and if they're the same version, then it'd be good if they came out under the same key.

I suppose there's always the possibility that the 64-bit version would be a higher end product with more features for more money, like higher bit depths, things like that. I kind of doubt that will happen even though it seems sensible to me. People who actually need these features can probably pay a little more for them, users who simply have a Jones for them are probably a support liability anyway.

Rob Mack

64 bit should be one screaming machine.
From what I understand, it's only a little bit faster.
A- You can get significantly longer RAM previews. But, you need to buy your RAM (of course) and the maximum amount of RAM is limited by what your motherboard, chipset, and OS supports.
With HD and HDV, you'll need more RAM for RAM previews since you're dealing with a lot more pixels.
B- More registers in 64-bit lets you do certain optimizations... but I don't believe you'll see a huge leap in performance (like you would between Vegas and high-end GPU accelerated programs).

And there may be another difference between 64-bit and 32-bit, but I don't remember. I think they were demo'ing 4 streams of HDV playing back in real-time, resized. I can't remember if there were filters on the clips, and I don't think they did RAM preview on it before. This was on a AMD system (dual CPU???)... the Intel stuff now is faster than what they were showing. Hmm you know what I probably didn't remember that stuff right.

Keep in mind also that in the Desktop DDR3 world there is only one 2 gig chip available at 1333 speed (Hynix) and very few in the DDR3 1066 speed. DDR2 has some in the 800 speed and none in the 1066 speed. So right now you would have to purchase the 4 chip package 800 speed to get 8 meg of ram. And the reviews are real "chair slouchers".
JJK

What's a chair sloucher? Is Vegas missing this? If Vegas 8 doesn't have it, should I switch to Premiere.

'At least 20, and probably more if push came to shove'

Obviously, you would be able to. I bet you Mark Holmes can't though so his post was nothing but vacuous sycophancy.

The point I was trying to make is that I don't believe the anonymity of the developers and product managers does the company any favours. It's madness, for example, that Matthew Chaboud can address users elsewhere while endless opportunities for clarification and reassurance (none of which need ever compromise commercial interests) go begging in these forums. Has no one at Sony noticed how well appreciated Peter Haller's contributions have always been (however grumpy he sometimes seems - perhaps he's quite different in person!) or how welcome J's fielding of bug reports has been in the Sound Forge forum lately (see for example a post yesterday)?

In my experience, nothing fosters respect and moderation like contact between users and the developers and product managers (I shall never forget a chastening exchange with Lowell Levinger of Passport Designs, many moons ago). I also believe that these forums might be much happier places if the contributors had more of a sense that anyone at Sony might actually be listening.

Personally, I hope that if in fact Vegas 8 does have multi-cam functionality, that it's just not another bundled script (as several "new" features they've added have been). Scripts are great and I write and use them daily, but while you can get very far with scripts, I would really like a truly native tool, with a truly integrated workflow (i.e. multi-cam "mode" with native key bindings, etc.).

Scripts are great for 3rd-party developers to add features to Vegas, but the scripting API has its limits and it just doesn't make sense when those with direct access to Vegas' source code choose to add new features via scripts.

BarleyCorn,

Ouch. Why is it that in forums people say things they would never say to a persons face? I guess there is something to be said for anonymity...

...if you would read my post addressed to CEO of Sony Howard Stringer, started a few days before this one, you would see that I have leveled my fair share of criticism at Sony lately. I also wanted to pass along kudos to the developers of my favorite software. Call me sycophantic if you will, but the flip side of criticism is praise. People never come far on criticism alone.

BusterK, LOL. "switch to premiere". That's funny.

On a more serious note though, that chair sloucher feature does sound really cool. I'm always having trouble with chair slouch situations so it would be really helpful if Vegas 8 included new workflow tools to manage this. Does Premiere CS3 now support that feature? It must have completely slipped by me. Maybe I need to give the CS3 demo another try.

To elaborate on my wishes about having 32bit and 64bit under a single license, I want to have a secondary 64bit test system running to play around with but not have any mission critical tasks asigned to it. Still have the 32bit system running alongside.

Therefore as a test system, it would be nice not to have to spend extra money until I know everything works smoothly. Vegas 64bit may run great out of the box, or it may have bugs. But worse the 64bit system itself my have problems with other things driver or 32-bit application related.

So basicly, I was just hoping not to have to spend extra to test (for a single user), when I'm already buying a 32bit version for sure.

Don't most of the 3D modeling and rendering applications offer either binary under the same license? Maybe there's hope.

The only bummer about them renaming it is they miss out on all those cool marketing slogans like "put a V8 under your hood."

Maybe with gas over $3 a gallon, Sony figured that kind of advertising might turn customers away....

On the other hand, they could have gone with some co-branding opportunities with the well known vegetable drink of the same name. (We do call them veggie files, after all).

Picture this: an editor working for hours after deadline, sweating bullets, the boss man screaming over his shoulder. You see the screen, and you see he's working in Premiere Pro (or FCP, or Avid, or Pinnacle....). The blue screen of death comes on the screen, and the editor smacks himself on the head and says,

"I could have been using V8!"

;-)