Good point :-)

cliff - don't worry about it ;-)

if it's paying your bills it's pro. if your clients want you to edit with, say, avid, ask why? most times they're simply basing their opinion on 'buzz' words or simply what they've read.

when i had my production house we had avid, fcp, and vegas. all in house was done on vegas whilst the other two were simply used when collaboration was needed - never had a client either complain that their project had been edited on vegas (they never asked / knew), but were often surprised by our turnaround times relative to other production houses using just avid or fcp.

if it works for you, use it.

It's just common perception..., but after you have tried it, you know the power inside it...

I debated about this sometimes ago with one person from TV industry, saying this programs cannot be used because it doesn't export to MOV DVCPRO codec. Of course, because it is not available instantly on Vegas' export template, but actually you CAN do it by adding that codec manually.

Don't judge the book by its' cover or common gossip about it :)

Set

Personally I think the name has a bit to do with it. I've always found "Sony Vegas" to be a bit tacky. It certainly doesn't sound very pro-ish anyway.

As for fcpX, if you own a mac and are used to fcp then the chances are you're going on to fcpX

And his servant turned to Ezekiel and said "Master, the horse is dead." And Ezekiel replied " 'tis so,' and stopped beating it.

Please!

Jack

Vegas's issues working in a collaborative environment has a lot to do with it and it's a self perpetuating issue.
Not many Vegas users are asking for OMF import/export, many don't care about time code and EDLs not do they own or shoot with Sony F5s or Arri Alexas.

That said only a few days ago I spent a day doing a supervised edit with a director of 20 years. Oh dear, it's the little things that made me wish I wasn't using Vegas. We were regularly hunting through hours of footage looking for usable grabs with the trimmer. I'd mark out the good bit, then back to the T/L to find a good spot to insert it and yikes, hit "A" and Vegas inserted most of the program from the trimmer, very embarrassing :( I've complained about the Trimmer and the ease with which it can lose the In/Out points but I guess not many Vegas users are ever called on to do the kind of editing where this matters so it'll never get fixed which means serious editors will pass it up :(

Bob.

+1 bob - vegas is NOT collaborative friendly at all

however, i regularly work with time code and edl's. the former is obviously dependent on the camera.

yes, i/o in the trimmer can be fraught with frustration, but when searching for material i usually make regions out of my i/o's - always useful with indecisive clients ;-)

I love Vegas and find it's method of editing very intuitive to me. BUT! There are some really fundamental problems already addressed in this thread which include the lack of GPU support. GPU can significantly reduce render times. While I accept that this isn't a problem just with Vegas, it does impact on render times and as such does Vegas no favours. Especially considering this problem has been ongoing for years and has never been fixed by Sony. If I was creating videos/films semi-commercially, I relied on this income, and intended to equip a new studio, then lack of GPU support would affect my buying decisions. A "Pro" product has to offer reliable "Pro" features and in this area Vegas sadly fails.

which include the lack of GPU support.

That is your opinion. Buy the right GPU and you get all the GPU support you want. This has been discussed over and over again. I have 2x R9 290 in my system now and I cant be happier with the GPU acceleration, even better then my 2x GTX580s I had before.

@OldSMoke - I finally received the Radeon 6970 and installed it yesterday to test out. Based upon everything I had read and had taken notes on setting it up with Vegas Pro, when all was said and done, there was no difference in performance over my NVidia 660ti card! I mean I saw no difference which surprised me as everything I had read on the subject here pointed to a marked increase in performance.

I have a project that I had exported out of Premiere Pro CS6 as an XML file, removed all transitions and color corrections. First ran it through with my NVidia card, Best full timeline playback barely got me 14fps on average. Went in, turned off GPU support, restarted, same results. Then shut down, installed the Radeon card, installed the Catalyst 13.9 drivers restarted again, opened Vegas Pro, activated GPU support (saw the Cayman option) restart Vegas Pro - I literally have the same frame rate on playback as with the NVidia card.

I'm left scratching my head at this point.

Many good experienced comments in this thread thus - one thing most people missed was the rollout of VegasPro13 with cloud service and remote control based collaboration. Admittedly these are not perfected services, but this is where a client is really able to call you up and request a pro NLE service.

Pro NLE work is generally not the province of one-man shops or even single person directorial administration. This is where cloud and remote control collaboration open some doors. But not just that, also requires manipulation of codec delivery to and from which many an average NLE would suffer.

No doubt VegasPro could move into pro NLE work if the industry would come around - it's not just a SCS issue for them to "solve".

" We were regularly hunting through hours of footage looking for usable grabs with the trimmer. I'd mark out the good bit, then back to the T/L to find a good spot to insert it and yikes, hit "A" and Vegas inserted most of the program from the trimmer, very embarrassing"

Interesting Bob. I use the trimmer on every job I edit. Admittedly I 'drag' the area I've selected down to where I want it (just prefer it to the keyboard shortcuts because sometimes I forget to position the cursor first) but, if I select in/out points then load that event back into the trimmer later, it still shows those points.

[I]"Admittedly I 'drag' the area I've selected down to where I want it (just prefer it to the keyboard shortcuts because sometimes I forget to position the cursor first) but, if I select in/out points then load that event back into the trimmer later, it still shows those points. "[/I]

Sure, the problem I've had the three times in 15 years I've done a supervised edit is the director's brain and mouth is running ahead of me all the time!
What compounded the problem is we'd find the say 20 second clip, put that on the T/L, got the audio for it sorted and then go looking for cut aways because we wanted the pace of the promo to be fast. I did find a setting in Preferences that changes the function of the "A" key so it would only paste vision but having to go to and fro changing preferences would have been too much. To get over this I'd paste the cutaways onto another track, delete the audio and then slide the vision down to the cutaway track. All that did lead to more tracks on the T/L than ideal plus the "iconitis" problem caught me out a few times :(

That said, I was directly editing DVD images I'd copied onto the HDD, using the "IFO" method, thanks all for that tip. AFAIK Vegas is the only NLE that'll do that, serious points to Vegas for that. Much of the footage was 16:9, some was 4:3 and some was a PAR mess. All that was sorted very quickly and easily with Vegas, then de-interlaced using YADIF and uploaded to YT.

Bob.

I think that deinterlacing in Handbrake using the decomb option looks as good or better than anything available directly in Vegas.

One of the first things I would discuss with anyone asking me to work with another NLE is to make sure that they were aware of the hit in quality that I would get because of not being able to work with this frameserving script. I would want to make sure that they were ok with that.

When editors cut film, the director was not around. The same thing happened when videotape machines were used to edit manually.

Then we got computers, and the director was able to sit in on the session. That's where the rot set in :-)

"That is your opinion. Buy the right GPU and you get all the GPU support you want. This has been discussed over and over again. I have 2x R9 290 in my system now and I cant be happier with the GPU acceleration, even better then my 2x GTX580s I had before."

That's not a solution - many of us use NVidia cards for rendering with other software so AMD is not an option. Even then the advice here is to reinstall Windows, the NET framework and various drivers just to get these old GPU's to work. All my other GPU accelerated software works straight out of the box without any fiddling about.

According to Sony, Vegas "Pro" is capable of GPU acceleration. If this only works with certain cards then they should specify which ones. The fact that they can't be bothered to test recent GPU's and advise their customers is not what I would describe as a professional approach. The latest GPU's are far less power hungry, make less noise and are much more powerful than 3 generations ago. Sony needs to catch up. This is an ongoing problem that has nothing to do with customer opinion and everything to do with Sony not implementing GPU acceleration properly.

Another issue I've run into is GPU accelerated plugins not working properly even when Vegas itself is.

[I]" Then we got computers, and the director was able to sit in on the session. That's where the rot set in :-)"[/I]

Probably some truth there :)
This directors normal fare was editing 4 cameras through a vision switcher. Two of the cameras were recorded iso. This was a panel type show that ran down here for several years. Within 4 to 5 hours of studio and editing time 1 hour of program was done and that was with a linear editing system and 1" tape. As the show soon developed a certain format, everyone knew what would happen and how it would be cut. I was amazed how predictable people are in front of a camera!

Bob.

I think the first comment farss made in this thread is really at the root of why Vegas is not considered "Pro."

For whatever reason Vegas had (has) a higher hurdle to overcome to be considered pro. Adobe was firmly in the Pro camp with photoshop and Apple was ALWAYS the preferred app for "creative people." You know what I mean.

So now we have Vegas trying to prove itself as Pro. And ANY stability problem cropping up gives the naysayers the "right" to say "yup, there it is, that's why it's not a professional application."

And to add insult to injury there have been some stability issues over the past few years, the critical years where Vegas needed to prove it was pro.

Should Sony have forgone features and gone for stability? Who knows? Hindsight is always 20/20. Perhaps in that case we would have a really stable product but people would instead be claiming it's not pro because it just doesn't have the full feature set.

"I did find a setting in Preferences that changes the function of the "A" key so it would only paste vision but having to go to and fro changing preferences would have been too much". Bob, you're aware that the TAB key toggles between video/audio/both?

I use TAB in the trimmer to change between Video, Audio or Both.

[I]" Bob, you're aware that the TAB key toggles between video/audio/both?"[/I]

No, I wasn't but I do now and I can assure you I'll not forget that.
Thanks.
I just tried it and there's even a little icon to show which mode it's in, cool.

There's also a Save Markers / Regions button. Where are they saved to, what are they saved as and how are they recalled?

I get the distinct impression what I was forced into doing with Vegas is not a common way Vegas is used, certainly not by me. In keeping with the topic of this thread I think it'd be a good move for SCS to pay someone who does this kind of editing as their daily fare to show them why or how Vegas does or doesn't work the way they'd need it to.


Bob.