Vegas vs. Catalyst review

Jamon wrote on 12/12/2015, 7:11 AM

I created a sample project in both Vegas and Catalyst.

I imported an XAVC S clip from my Sony RX100 III.

In Vegas I used 32-bit full range, linear 1.0 gamma, and no view transform.
(But I also rendered a 32-bit video levels version, as Catalyst appears to use video levels)

After adding some video FX, I noticed the preview was slower in Catalyst than Vegas. I used Prepare to quickly transcode an XAVC Intra version, and used the relink and replace functions in both to swap the video. Then Catalyst previewed smoothly.

I used the same numbers for the plugins, but some looked differently (because I was using full range in Vegas). I did not try to match the appearance, I just left it however it looked using the same numbers. I tried to repeat the same procedure on both, but the interfaces are different and I did not bother with frame accuracy.

Both Vegas and Catalyst crashed, but Catalyst crashed much more frequently. It must've crashed at least 20 times.

In repeating the same procedure, I noticed subtle differences. I would've preferred Catalyst in most instances, but its pre-release quality made some things annoying and unstable.

A few notes about Catalyst:

* Side panes can be hidden, but they do an animated slide that is slow
* Mark In/Out points don't snap to clip boundaries when moved with the mouse
* Mark In/Out points aren't saved in project for both Catalyst and Vegas
* No Ctrl+Drag to make a copy of a clip
* Projects don't reopen after crash and there's no auto-recovery if you didn't save
* Many of the conventions and keyboard shortcuts are the same for both
* Plugins don't have presets, and I don't care much because it's quick to adjust

One thing particularly annoying was how the Inspector pane changes whenever you click anything, but it does not remember your scroll position. I would have it scrolled down to work on adjusting the video effect parameters, then use the mouse to click an empty part of the timeline to relocate the play cursor to that point in time, and then the clip lost focus so the Inspector switched to the track tab where I clicked. Then I'd click the clip again, and it'd go back to that clip's inspector, but the scroll was reset to the top so I'd have to scroll down again. To prevent that you have to remember not to click in the track, but instead drag the play cursor. Maybe they should change it to only auto-switch to the track tab when you click the far left area and select a track there. I don't know yet, but there's a better way to do it, and it should at least remember the last scroll position you had for that clip's inspector. There needs to be more keyboard navigation for jumping between the Inspector and timeline, so I can change time position and such while quickly adjusting properties in the inspector.

Catalyst doesn't have all the mouse ways to zoom the tracks like Vegas has. That's alright though, because there's more efficient ways it could be done. I used the keyboard shortcuts primarily, Up/Down arrows for horizontal, and Ctrl+Shift+Up/Down for vertical. There should be more shortcuts to do things like, "Auto-fit the entire timeline into view", "Auto-expand the current clip to fill entire view", which toggle back to the previous view when you repeat it. So if I want to adjust a fade more closely, I can instantly make that area as large as possible, then jump back to the overall view.

For the keyframe animation, Vegas is more powerful with a curve editor, and a line visualization. However, the basic way keyframes work in Catalyst is much nicer for some things, because it's actually part of the timeline. In Vegas you have the keyframes in the FX window, and have to use the sync button to use the play cursor in the main timeline. But in Catalyst you go into a keyframe editor mode where it uses the main timeline, and just hides everything except the keyframes. It's easier that way to navigate at which times things occur.

I didn't like Vegas' interface with all the tracks separated that I needed to resize, and all the tiny buttons everywhere on everything, and separate floating panes jumping around everywhere needing management. Part of why I liked the Tracktion audio software GUI is because it put everything on one screen, and there were no floating pieces, it was just all these input elements built into the main interface. Catalyst is somewhat similar, where most everything is right there, and you don't waste time messing with the interface much. You can't resize the panes, or drag and dock things, and that's good, because it'll force them to make the workflow more efficient with powerful shortcut functions, and you to actually learn them and be able to do most things with the keyboard.

Catalyst has a separate fade tool. I pressed F, my cursor changed, I did the fade right on the clip like I would in Vegas, release F, and it switches back to the default cursor. When I went to do fades in Vegas, I had a more difficult time getting my mouse cursor in just the right spot on the clip to drag the fade points. That was easier in the past, but now with UHD display the interface isn't as optimal. I think maybe they changed it too, where you need to hit the corner in a way that maybe doesn't feel the same as I recall from older versions.

When it was time to render, I chose XAVC S for both. But the resulting file from Catalyst would only play for a second, then stop. I could drag toward the end of the clip in some players, but the thing was broken and most of it was missing. In Windows explorer the thumbnail didn't even appear for it. I was trying different rendering profiles to see which one I could match to a Vegas one, and Catalyst even crashed when rendering. But it's a separate process, so I saw the problem report window, and the notification in the top notification area showed it failed, but only for that one rendering process, so the entire app did not close.

One thing interesting about how it renders, is you can continue to edit, or start multiple renders, and it will put them in a queue. Since I was trying to compare rendering profiles, I could start multiple ones then walk away and come back to multiple files done.

I found I'd have to use AVC, and it appears to use the MainConcept approach, so I inspected the resulting file to try to set the Vegas rendering profile to match. It was close enough, and in some parts of the videos where there's no FX when comparing they look identical.

(I figured some of the FX looked different because I originally used full range, and that changes the ranges for the numbers in the FX parameters. So I rendered again using 32-bit video levels, and now they look more similar. If you want to see the full range version, it's

.)

I used fades, but Vegas has presets for velocity-curved "smooth" fades. I left some of that in Vegas, because my goal wasn't to make the videos identical, but to see how the process and results differed between applications right now. That the fades can look nicer in Vegas right now is an advantage for it, and something Catalyst will probably have in an update.

I was going to use velocity envelopes to ramp up and down the speed, but Catalyst does not have that, it only has a flat rate control for clips. Another thing I was going to use is the track compositing modes in Vegas, but Catalyst does not have that, only clip opacity, and not even track opacity. There also isn't a reverse clip feature in Catalyst.

But I could use clip opacity, which I did, and the HSL plugin, Glow, Starburst, title generator, solid color generator, and clip rate.

I did use Stabilize, but they worked differently. In Vegas, it needed to be a media FX plugin, and seemed to apply to everything that used that media file. Whereas in Catalyst, I could drop it on a specific clip, and it seemed to only affect it, because when that clip played I noticed the jump in video because it scales and crops to allow for room to rotate the video to make it appear stable. But Vegas didn't have that jump, so I ended up disabling it to make them more similar. It's easy to bypass the plugins, just click the eye icon.

I think a point of the renders is that there's a lot of similarity between Vegas and Catalyst when it comes to the basics. When things are equal, I prefer Catalyst, in theory, if it didn't crash and annoy.

A lot of the micromanaging in Vegas is gone in Catalyst. I have no idea what bit depth Catalyst uses for processing, or the motion blur algorithm. There's not really any settings. It doesn't ask when you import your first clip if you want to match settings, it just does it. I don't know how it's doing color management; there's a "Grade in" option, which I left at Rec. 709, but there's no color space dropdown for the media file like there is in Vegas. All that complexity is missing, and it felt a little weird to just trust it to automatically do things correctly. But the end result is the same. The final render didn't come out with different colors or anything, and I didn't need a hack with a video levels plugin for studio to computer RGB. Everything just worked.

Well, it worked for a few minutes, until it'd crash, and I'd have to restart, re-open the project, do a little more, hitting Ctrl+S after every modification. It seems to save the undo history in the project file though, so after a restart of the app I could still use Ctrl+Z to undo steps that happened before I saved. Maybe some of the Vegas/Catalyst code they're reusing in both apps doesn't like a chipset or something, where it'd work better on other people's machines.

This little sample project taught me that Catalyst is very much like recent versions of Vegas, where it looks like a nice tool to have, and I pay money with that belief, but in practice it's unstable and unrefined. SCS seems to have this pattern I'll call a fumbling release cycle, where it's like a disorganized frantic kitchen with a deadline, where even when food is half cooked they still plop it on the plate and serve it to hungry people. They have a fancy menu, delightful atmosphere, and polite waiters. They even smother the uncooked food in seasoned sauces so it really looks and smells like it should be a good meal. But then when you're sinking your teeth into it, and taste the uncooked goo, you're filled with that mixed feeling like, "I should be loving this, but I'm also not." Yet you're already seated, already familiar, and there's nowhere else to go. So you eat it anyway, and keep coming back, thinking surely it's temporary, they're just too busy, but next time things will have calmed down, and the chefs will get it together, so it'll be the complete dining experience you expected. Except it's not, and I'm impressed with a lot of what they're doing, but also baffled why they can't get the basics perfected before releasing to the public for sale.

Maybe some of the crashing while editing is just my machine. But major things like rendering to XAVC S and the file not even playing? That has to be deeper than some odd hardware conflict.

I like much of Catalyst better than Vegas, but neither actually work for me right now to produce a little video without hassle on my current computer system.

If you like Vegas though, and haven't tried Catalyst, I'd give the trial a shot. There's been a lot of undeserved negativity in this forum about Catalyst, when really if you just compare the screenshots and renders you can see it's very similar, and a lot more simplistic, which can be refreshing depending on which features you use most. If you don't encounter bugs, I could see it being a favorite piece of software, especially once it's refined with more updates, which I'm sure they'll continue to produce in the months and years to come.

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Comments

Jamon wrote on 12/25/2015, 4:44 AM

I think pocket producers are more the now than the future. The reason why big budget productions are possible, is because there are so many people, and so little mainstream channels. But the majority of the consumers of media have primarily been interested in the cultural and entertainment aspects. Most do not recognize or appreciate the subtleties of the craft beyond that.

When it comes to culture, no studio can compete with the agility of the peer-to-peer production networks. Every niche interest, in every corner of society, can be stimulated immediately in a competitive environment that selects for the most exciting content. It isn't emulating or trying to keep up with the latest trends, it's setting them, and is the new medium for cultural exchange.

Since most people never really cared about the production quality, only the ability for a piece of media to stimulate them, or provide relevant meaning to their life, for most people a pocket device is more capable than a big screen or old distribution network controlled by a select few. Netflix on a tablet for scripted drama, and selfies on a phone for real drama; that's what many people prefer right now.

A professional news crew could've sent a van to someone's house, where they set up lights, microphones, and multiple camera angles, because a woman called with a tip about how her great-grandmother was turning 99 today, and they wanted to capture the "human interest" story to add to their reels and win awards for best broadcast of the year.

But instead I watched someone point their phone at their great-grandmother and ask her questions that we wrote on our own phones, as we all watched the same live view of this lady sharing the story of her life. The audience sent warm words, and a stream of hearts as feedback for the people to reach out and touch this person in a more intimate and honest video broadcast.

The quality of such a video on my pocket device is actually better than television I'd watch in the past. The audio is clear enough for the human voice to be understood, and it's the message people speak that is more compelling to most than the fidelity or richness of special effects.

When it comes to the common interests of the majority mass audience, the internet wins, and pocket devices are fully capable to meet the needs most have on a daily basis. The funny cat picture millions of people share has more social relevancy than most big-budget media today.

There is still room for the high end, and some people do appreciate bigger screens and special team productions with the most advanced technology behind it. But the reason why that's still practical, is in part because the costs for the high-end have dropped due to mass adoption of computer technology, which they also use now for personal social media productions.

So it's simply a different world. If you pull out a pocket device and record a shaky video that shares a real piece of yourself, where others who wish to connect with you socially can receive it and exchange with feedback and media of their own, odds are it'll be far more successful than if you pixel-peeped a staged production that cost $10K and a month of your dedication. That's because media is our common voice now, not only an artifact.

If I wrote a book and published it nobody would buy it; but you just read my forum post, and that's kind of where we're at with video now.

deusx wrote on 12/25/2015, 10:09 AM

>>>That's because media is our common voice now, not only an artifact.<<<

It's not a voice of any kind. It's just a distraction so they don't have to think about how moronic their lives are.

People who do have a voice and something to say will always want to do it the right way. People who just want to monetize the imbeciles and their mobile crap will give them crap they need. That's all it is.

If you happen to be a musician who actually cares about his/her music there is very little point in recording anything for people who will listen to it on their phones. No matter what you do it sounds like $hit.

>>>The funny cat picture millions of people share has more social relevancy than most big-budget media today.<<<<

What exactly is the relevance. It's just a bunch of sad people who have to watch these cat videos and similar crap because without those distractions they'd shoot themselves in the head or swallow a bunch of sleeping pills.

There is a reason Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Kardashians and Star Wars are so successful financially and it's not hard to see what it is.

>>>>>So it's simply a different world. If you pull out a pocket device and record a shaky video that shares a real piece of yourself<<<<

It's not real, they are all posers and fakers. The only difference is it's lo-fi while real actors are usually hi-fi.. Poor shaky video does not make it more real it's literally just poorly recorded shaky fake excrement.

>>>>If I wrote a book and published it nobody would buy it; but you just read my forum post, and that's kind of where we're at with video now.<<<<

The good news is you don't have to settle for that.

As for video editing Software, Vegas + Fusion and you don't need anything else. It's been like that since 2002 or so. I understand they want to sell us new stuff, but who needs it. And I don't understand what;'s going on with this crashing you describe. Vegas hasn't crashed on any of my laptops since about 2008 and even that was a one time fluke.

videoITguy wrote on 12/25/2015, 4:06 PM

Re the post above in several posts back:
Subject: RE: Vegas vs. Catalyst review
Reply by: ushere
Date: 12/25/2015 1:00:12 AM

Exactly correct that Sony is trying to enter the fray with Catalyst (nothing at all to do with market for VegasPro)! But can they possibly do this? That is a big question.

This thread has been posted as long blog by Jamon - but the hypothesis seemingly conceived that all of this has to do with social causalities and change is just the mere musings of a lay philosopher.

Better to get grounded with reality, understand what real people are doing in real environs..... enuf!

Jamon wrote on 12/26/2015, 7:46 AM

About the sad morons who would kill themselves, you're projecting how you feel about them onto how they'd feel about themselves. They're not you. If they turn off the distractions your voice isn't going to appear in their heads. The majority genuinely likes the popular stuff you've seen in mass media, and many of them are truly able to experience positive emotions one might call happiness. Everyone who records and publishes art is a poser. What other reason is there for doing that other than to get attention from people socially, and what reason is there to get attention that is outside the social games? A more true expression is when people sing in the shower by themselves, for themselves. But fidelity of music isn't what counts. That's like the guitarists who believed if they could just go faster then they'd win. Expressions are relevant to others when they're meaningfully relevant, and that is rarely ever limited by quality. People can be mostly deaf and still find meaning in some music. A tablet or phone speaker is plenty to share a message, even in the form of song, or piano melody that invokes an emotion.

"Philosopher" describes a trait, not a position. One cannot be a "lay philosopher" anymore than they can be "lay curious". Philosophy is about a passion and pursuit for wisdom and understanding, more through innate reasoning than hands-on experimentation like with the hard sciences. People can receive education about the ideas reasoned by philosophers, but that's like saying you're a trained musician because you memorized the discography of all the greatest bands.

In reality, Vegas isn't as comfortable for me to work with now that I have a UHD display and Windows 10. The icons are too tiny, and some plugins have parameters cut off I can't even access. Catalyst is more comfortable with everything being much larger. The crashing might be caused by something unique to my system. I forget what happened in the past, but before they said there were troubles with Wacom drivers. I also have a junky USB audio interface plugged in. I recently disabled an unusual BIOS setting that might have something to do with it. But I haven't used Vegas enough since then to see if there was any effect.

Yesterday I had a project involving money that I thought might need video. I started with Catalyst, but I needed a custom resolution and frame rate. After making a little test project, I discovered that the render presets don't get overridden with the custom settings for my timeline. I tried doing a test render anyways, and an effect didn't appear in the rendered result, presumably because of the dimension mismatch.

So Catalyst was completely unusable for that. I opened Vegas, and the pan/crop worked much better, and I could render with the correct settings I needed, while also adjusting the bitrate. That is just an example of how today Catalyst simply doesn't work for some things that Vegas can.

But for grabbing some 4K video, tweaking the colors, adding some fades and cuts, then rendering for YouTube, it might be better than Vegas in terms of the tools getting out of the way.

The question is just, how much potential does the Catalyst backend and GUI have for improvement, and will SCS ever accomplish what is needed to make it work for most cases where Vegas does today?

They don't need to add support for everything Vegas does, and support all old media formats. But you should be able to do most of the important things you can with Vegas using a modern 4K RAW format in Catalyst, and have it perform as speedily as Vegas would.

set wrote on 12/28/2015, 6:20 PM

Digital Video magazine's review of Sony Catalyst:
http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/newbay/dv_201601/index.php#/28

Set

deusx wrote on 12/28/2015, 7:05 PM

>>>>Expressions are relevant to others when they're meaningfully relevant, and that is rarely ever limited by quality. People can be mostly deaf and still find meaning in some music. A tablet or phone speaker is plenty to share a message, even in the form of song, or piano melody that invokes an emotion.<<<<

That's mantra for people who suck. It has been around long before the internet and is just an excuse for those who can't produce anything of quality therefore "quality doesn't really matter" gives them comfort.

Jamon wrote on 12/29/2015, 2:53 AM

"You have reached the maximum number of pages you can preview. To continue reading please click the "for more information link" below."

High fidelity is everything to a minority, like audiophiles. Many people don't even notice the difference between radio and CD, standard def. and HD. For many who could notice if you specifically asked, it wouldn't register in their conscious attention unless you did; it wouldn't matter enough to annoy them or even think about.

It's like wine tasting clubs, how there are people to whom the subtleties of flavor are everything; to most people, they don't notice nor care.

Not everyone perceives the same. Many people's vision cannot see subtle variations in color. Many see colors very differently than others. Many people, increasingly so with age, are completely deaf to high frequencies. Everyone processes sensory input differently.

That's what most people in the photography, videography, and audio clubs do not understand. It's like how in fashion someone can feel like some stitching style difference is extremely powerful, and yet to most people any cheap clothing is the same thing.

What we perceive is relative. To someone with different low and high points, what you consider top notch quality is the bottom of the barrel. People still alive today would dedicate their lives to finessing the audio that would be played back on 8-track tapes in loud cars over papery speakers. Now they wear hearing aids.

It's like the women who obsess over their skin, spending hours painting their face. To many people it just means they're shallow freaks not worth dating. They miss the point and get caught up in petty stuff that doesn't really matter much.

Odds are, most everything you all produce doesn't really matter much. Even if you were one of the ten people who recorded the President as she boarded the jet, the subtleties aren't anywhere near as relevant as you feel them to be. If the only recording of her taking a bullet were from a cameraphone shot from a tourist, the thousands of news reporters commenting over the endless replays would never mention the quality of the recording, only the meaning, which it captured effectively.

If you live long enough, you will lose much of your vision and hearing. You've already lost a lot, but for most people it happens slowly over years so their brains adapt and they're unaware of what they can't sense anymore. You'll still watch and listen to recordings, as you do now.

People get carried away. Someone with a broader perspective might choose not to waste time and money on subtle improvements in quality. It doesn't mean they are not capable; it means they're less foolish.

If you discover antibiotics, you significantly impact the world. If your recording looks and sounds better than someone else's, maybe a small number notice, and maybe it contributes to you impregnating someone. But people's sensory experiences are temporary and for a purpose. It is the meaning that matters most. Without real value behind the quality, you're just tasting wine. You may enjoy it, but if all the wine-tasters died tomorrow, it wouldn't be much consequence to most of the world.

There is a ceiling. If a recording has such clarity that a person cannot distinguish it from their natural sensory experience, then there's nowhere else to go in that direction. Yet the meaning continues to be valuable.

PeterWright wrote on 12/29/2015, 3:50 AM

Jamon, I’ve enjoyed reading some of your posts, but why so verbose?
You just stated a well known thing, “Opinions on quality are relative to peoples’ experience and knowledge” - but you said the same thing eleven times.
Why?
What do you expect us to get from your post?

Jamon wrote on 12/29/2015, 5:10 AM

I think the verbosity is more likely to increase when it feels like the person you're responding to doesn't share the same informational background or conclusion, so you try to give them a more complete reference book for them to see why you came to that conclusion.

For example, when you know you're with others who share the same expert knowledge, you can speak mostly with brevity using key words, many of which are often acronyms to compress it even further. But if someone doesn't share that knowledge, you not only have to expand the acronyms, but explain a little about each term.

That person I was replying to stuck with the same thing they said before, despite me already addressing it. In situations like that, I tend to repeat a few times, with increasing desperation, hoping if I share enough info that they'll at the very least understand why my opinion differs from theirs, and then we're mostly on the same page.

Sometimes however, no matter how much you try, people won't accept your perspective as valid, even to a different reference point, and instead they just want to combat anything you say. In those situations the verbosity is pointless, and it's time to be quiet.

Plus there's personal factors and environments that are conducive to verbose, and crazy posting. So depending on the time and situation, the writing can get out of hand. The very fact that I started this thread comes from that, so the whole thing is part of one of my obsessive episodes.

There's really a lack of Vegas vs. Catalyst activity, and the updates from SCS are too slow to satisfy right now. There's no promise of Vegas 14 or update to make the GUI more consistent and larger for high-PPI scaled displays. If that came out months ago, I'd probably just be using that and not posting anything. But although Catalyst updates are faster, I have a long list of bugs and feature requests, that I don't expect to see any solutions for until at least another month, probably multiple months for the bugs, and years for the features.

When you want to work on video stuff, and you have no tools today, you're apt to get restless; like if you want to build a shed, and your hammer is broken and there's no place to get a new one, you might start doing crazy things like pounding nails with a rock and calling every hardware store in the phone book every day asking when there'll be hammers in stock.

ushere wrote on 12/29/2015, 6:01 AM

There's really a lack of Vegas vs. Catalyst activity, and the updates from SCS are too slow to satisfy right now.

sums it up quite nicely ;-)

Jamon wrote on 12/29/2015, 7:15 AM

20% off today on SCS.

Catalyst Suite, Vegas Pro Edit, SpectraLayers Pro 3, Sound Forge Pro 11 are all $320 each.

But Catalyst is on sale today for less at B&H for $250.

But Amazon shows it for $235 on one page, and $170 on another.

Jamon wrote on 12/29/2015, 7:23 AM

Just noticed this PDF that describes a Catalyst workflow, which sounds aimed at a single person.

monoparadox wrote on 12/29/2015, 9:08 AM

Jamon,

I haven't chimed in on your thoughts thus far. Too many grandkids to enjoy over the Christmas holiday. But, I agree with many of your observations. I view Catalyst more as a utility at this point, using only Prepare. And, as Ushere has stated it isn't perfect.

The world has/is rapidly changing and it's hard for many to cope with it. It's nice to have absolutes that others embrace and respect, but it's increasingly less so. That doesn't change the truth there can be absolutes, but just as true can be that people do their own thing, their own way. Finding common ground between the two seems to be getting harder. At a ripening old age I have determined that In the end, one creates for oneself and sets their standards and derives their satisfaction from that. I have produced many photos/videos over my lifetime that only I enjoy for whatever the reason: such as a precious moment with a child that is out of focus or more importantly because it is my child or grandchild and others could care less.

However, that doesn't mean I don't strive for technical quality (and I immensely enjoy and value that) In the end "enjoyment" or "meaning" or whatever are within my realm of control, no one else. Nonetheless, that doesn't mean that creating something that impacts others isn't satisfying, too.

-- tom

JohnnyRoy wrote on 12/29/2015, 9:31 AM

> "Just noticed this PDF that describes a Catalyst workflow, which sounds aimed at a single person."

That's not what I read. On page 3 is says:

...you might start this process while still on set, especially if you have a dedicated Digital Imaging Technician on set with you to help manage all the media you create

If you're on a movie set, you definitely have a Digital Imaging Technician that is doing all of the logging. That's the beauty of the Suite. The person using Prepare to log doesn't have to be the same person using Edit to cut, but the decisions made by one are carried over for the other to benefit from and even change.

The compelling message in that paper is that the more you organize up front, the less work you have during the edit. I don't get the feeling that many Vegas Pro editors work that way (I know I don't), but when I started using Final Cut Pro X and hanging out in their forums on the Creative COW, I was amazed at how much those editors discuss logging and tagging and metadata. They spend a lot of time assigning roles to media in FCP X and then they can easily find all of the dialog, or music, or wide shots, or close ups, etc. FCP X allow you to rate clips and reject the ones you don't like and even hide rejected clips so you don't see them in your clip browser. It's heavily metadata based. I guess when you shooting a documentary and have terabytes of video shot over the course of several months you would never be able to find anything unless you had diligently tagged everything with metadata.

So while you can use the Suite as a single person, you can also use it as a team which is something Vegas Pro doesn't allow for.

~jr

Jamon wrote on 12/31/2015, 7:23 AM

Wow, interest in Sony Catalyst is suddenly spiking since last week.

There's more "reviews" coming out lately. Here's one from Creative Planet and one from B&H. They're not really what I consider full reviews, because they don't seem to critique enough. "It is safe to say that if I were looking for a terrific crash and burn from the software, no dice. In fact, it performed far better than I could have imagined." I just can't imagine any expert looking at Catalyst enough to review it could miss all the flaws.

Eek, embarrassingly though someone Tweeted this thread on Twitter. Although SCS allows this forum to be indexed by Google, instead of blocking it in robots.txt to keep it more private, I still feel like this place is fairly secluded from the general internet. So it feels more like a casual place for niche people to post anything, not a formal publication like those other reviews where people would Tweet about it. Maybe we can rewrite a more polished review on a regular website to replace this mess of a thread.

The B&H review mentioned something that was on my mind too, which is no Blackmagic CinemaDNG RAW support. I haven't looked into them much, but the Blackmagic cameras looked interesting, and it's on my todo list to see if any are worth buying. Right now the main cameras of interest to me happen to be from Sony. So the fact that Blackmagic might compete for some people in that space, means a possible disincentive for SCS to include CinemaDNG support, if Sony cameras don't use it and some Blackmagic ones do.

Glenn Thomas wrote on 1/16/2016, 7:30 PM

Interesting thread. I'm currently evaluating Catalyst (trial version), and so far I've found it completely useless for the work I do, editing music videos. Which is where pretty much all my income is derived from.

Catalyst Edit looks and feels good with the larger sliders and simplified gui. Then you try actually doing something with it, and that's where it fails. For music videos I always map out tracks on a beats and bars grid, and I'll place markers at bar 9 for verse 1, another marker at bar 25 for the chorus and so on. It makes navigating a song so much easier. Just as when I record my own music I'm looking at bars and beats. Vegas is the only video editor that lets you do that. Of course the option is completely gone in Catalyst edit, and I can't imagine it ever being implemented.

Then there's zooming. In Vegas this cannot be beaten. The mouse wheel on its own is fast and efficient. Although in Catalyst you also have to hold the alt key, like in Premiere Pro. That just doesn't make any sense, and only slows things down. It doesn't seem to be as precise either. Kind of slow and clunky.

Another big issue for me is the waveforms. I'll give Sony credit for still showing the full stereo waveforms, and not the silly rectified iMovie half waveforms that make it almost impossible to see the drum peaks in a music track. The trouble in Catalyst is, they're attached to the video file and I'm yet to find a way of detaching them? In Vegas, once I sync up different takes for a music video, I then delete the audio waveforms from them to provide more editing space for the video clips. And not only that, I'm still yet to find any way of being able to normalise the tracks, which I need to be able to do. Even zooming in or adjusting the height of the waveforms seems impossible? If there is way, finding it is far from intuitive.

Now, effects. There doesn't seem to be any way of adding an effect to whole track? Or even adding master effects to the output?

Of course, there's also the lack of automation, presets, blend modes, and the list goes on. So much of what I take for granted in Vegas just isn't there.

The Prepare app I have not opened and have no intention of ever opening. I just can't see the need to run a separate program for functions that should be accessible from a tab within the main program.

What puzzles me is that SCS are marketing the Catalyst suite to people producing 4K content. Vegas already does this, and does it well. I've already shot and edited 3 music videos in 4K using Vegas 12 with footage shot on my RX100 IV (which I'll be using at least until Sony release a 4K capable A6000 replacement). And apart from a few performance issues from using an older computer (i7 3770 cpu), it all runs very smoothly. Even editing the 100mbps files straight from the camera. Although I am considering using proxies for future projects to speed things up.

So at the end of the day, as someone making videos for a living, I currently can't see myself ever switching to Catalyst. I can imagine it will take them years to come even close to implementing all the features I take for granted in Vegas. And if SCS ever make the announcement that they're discontinuing Vegas, I will happily grab the v13 update and stick with that for the next 20 years or so. The fact that I can already edit decent 4K video makes it pretty much future proof. I can't imagine ever switching to editing 8K, as human eyesight just won't be able resolve that much detail in almost all cases. And if new cameras are released with codecs unsupported by Vegas, it will be easy enough to transcode them to a format Vegas does support. My only fear would be running out of registrations and SCS disabling online registration. As what appears to have happened with GoPro's Cineform Studio Premium.

ushere wrote on 1/16/2016, 11:13 PM

+1000% glenn....

i DO use prepare, it's great for transcoding camera files, but that's all.

edit is (so far) a miserable excuse for an nle. it lacks virtually everything i've taken for granted in vegas, and doesn't even begin to measure up to the free competition offered by resolve - which has now become my main nle. sorry scs, but what with the arrival of catalyst and the rumours of vegas's demise i thought it prudent to start looking seriously for a second string, just in case... my workflow now is pretty simple, transcode footage in prepare, rough cut in vegas (which is a doddle compared to resolve, but probably only because i'm so used to it), fine cut, fx, titles, cc, etc., in resolve, and, if necessary sweeten back in vegas, though even that last step is looking unnecessary as i begin to learn audio in resolve).

i have used and made a living with vegas for many years, and could probably still do so for the foreseeable future (which at my age IS foreseeable ;-() AND more than likely i would have continued buying upgrades as when they were offered. whereas my future is foreseeable, vegas's is not.

scs are doing themselves and their customers a great disservice by not being more precise about vegas's future.

Glenn Thomas wrote on 1/17/2016, 6:38 AM

Yes, I've tried Resolve also. In fact I even had a talk to the guy who I believe is the main designer or programmer at the SMPTE trade show in Sydney last year. I made a few suggestions for the software, based on features I always use in Vegas, and his response was always something along the lines of "Why would you want to do that?".

Resolve's not too bad. And yes, I agree the free version is definitely a better option than Catalyst Edit. Although it won't handle the 4K or 100P files from my RX100 IV. Unless I convert them to Cineform avi files. In which case, Resolve will then edit them without any hiccups at all.

Jamon wrote on 1/19/2016, 8:51 PM

I didn't even know the mouse scroll wheel works for zooming. It doesn't for my mouse, but I tried the scroll wheel on my Wacom tablet and that works. It looks like you have to hold alt because otherwise it scrolls up/down. If you think about it, the scroll wheel moves the window up/down in all other software, so that should be the default behavior. The alt then modifies that to allow zooming.

I think it's clunkier because it's using Qt instead of the native GUI. But they might be able to optimize it further.

I also think they should at least add bars/beats as a timeline view with snapping option. Though I don't think they need to focus so much on music as Vegas was, by adding things like ACID Loops support, or multiple BPMs. I'd guess they'll eventually add basic music timing grid options.

For waveforms, select the clip, and in the Inspector click "Audio" for streams. When every clip is "Audio" on a track, the track auto-collapses and only shows the waveform. When you click "Edit streams" you can resize the audio separately, but to have them completely separated like Vegas you make a copy of the clip on its own track, and set one to "Audio", and the other to "Video". To make the waveforms max size after making an audio-only clip view, use ctrl+shift+up arrow, then zoom in with up arrow. As I recall, which might be incorrect, the waveforms aren't drawn as precisely as Vegas though at maximum zoom.

Just drag an effect to the track name area on the left, and release. It will appear in the Track Inspector. Or, drag to a clip, and it is in the Clip Inspector. The effects have parameter automation with keyframes.

It's nice to have Prepare separate, for various reasons. Sometimes you only want to transcode, and there's no need to open up an editor. Sometimes you only want to focus on fullscreen trimming and curation of clips.

It's marketed toward 4K, because it's simplifying the process of using modern formats, with their unique methods of maximizing information for things like color correction. ACES, RAW, S-Log, LUTS, are some of the keywords used in that scene, which weren't in the vocabulary of old Vegas workflow.

There's growing pains, but they've come a long way from the introduction of Catalyst.

Glenn Thomas wrote on 1/26/2016, 3:50 AM

Thanks for that info. It does sound like there's a fair bit more to the software than it seems.

As for the zoom, they should just include an option for it to be used with or without the alt key.

I guess my main concern as a long time Vegas user is that the Catalyst Edit workflow is so different, that familiarising myself with it seems just as difficult as familiarising myself with any other NLE.

My wife and I recently signed up for a year of Creative Cloud recently when they had the 20% discount running. And although it's not one of the programs we decided to sign up for, I've been having a play with Premiere Pro. Surprisingly, the current version is quite good. Easily a much better option overall than Edit. The Lumetri colour panel is especially good. Although when attempting to edit a music video with 14 or so video tracks, the audio waveforms being stuck at the bottom of the screen made things really difficult. I quickly gave up and went straight back to Vegas.

I'm really hoping There's a Vegas Pro 14 with support for ACES, RAW, S-Log, and LUTS, as you mention being a part of the Catalyst vocabulary.

NickHope wrote on 1/26/2016, 9:59 AM

"As for the zoom, they should just include an option for it to be used with or without the alt key."

Agree. The lack of mousewheel zoom (without holding down a key) will probably be the most painful change for me if I have to change to another NLE.

Jamon wrote on 4/19/2016, 10:52 AM

Catalyst Production Suite 2016 is released under a forced subscription model, $200/year or $22/month. I do not support this, and now have useless buggy software that will never be updated. There was a post recently from a prominent member called "moving on". I think he has the right idea.

OldSmoke wrote on 4/19/2016, 1:06 PM

I cant believe that I am saying this but I am honestly looking into the latest FCPX. Now that multicam editing is back and at $299.00 it seems a great bargain. Just need yo test how well it runs on my i7 iMac.

DumplingandDots wrote on 6/6/2016, 3:49 PM

I am still interested with learning Resolve even though after trying it, it just seems complicated. It doesn't feel intuitive to me. Catalyst looks pretty but it's the same, I just can't get into it. Vegas Pro UI just feels right to me, but sometimes I feel "left out" because of the features, particularly color grading, gpu processing (AMD/Nvidia) Lut support, etc. the other pro NLE's have.