For that kind of cash, you might as well as switch to Avid.
Don't forget to budget for a new PC also then, Avid Express is really picky and if it doesn't like your PC it will crash and make your life hell.

Also:

I love Avid's Nitris DS. Only $100K with OK hardware. But wonderful.

Avid Express is not Nitris. By any stretch of imagination. I'm yet to hear from a single person who is thrilled with it. What I hear is more "resigned acceptance."

Well, even as a Vegas-purist, I have to state that Edius has some supperior capabilities, especially in the HDV area:

- capture with automatic scene detection, direct conversion to the Canpus HQ intermediate

- much better preview capabilities from the timeline, even without a hardware support like NX

- no crash if you import more then 50 or 100 m2t files in the timeline

If you combine it with the Canopus NX, you have a powerfull system - but then it is much more expensive.


On the othere side, the editor is still not so superior like Vegas. Keyframes are far less developed, compositing is much weaker, the editor is not so functional compared with Vegas. And up to now no 5.1 support in Edius.

What I tend to do, are two things:
- I tend to use the Canopus HQ codec in Vegas
- I tend to capture in Edius, given the automatic scene detection

I will continue to use both Edius and Vegas, even when I will have my new PC, where I will also have a NX.

You dont need a hard card, Edius will run with firewire

.

but you wont get real time without the hardware cards.

Avid is releasing Liquid 7

http://www.avid.com/products/liquid/techspecs.asp

Looks like Avid just upped the ante on Sony and Adobe.

I found their Liquid line to be a piece of sh*t. And, you can't polish a turd.

Pinnacle's Liquid was quite crappy. However, under Avid Im interested to see if the old bugs are still there or if someone has finally fixed what was wrong with past versions. From what I have heard, its far more stable now than it ever was under Pinnacle.

> but you wont get real time without the hardware cards.

Software overlay - for example usint a Matrox P750 or AIT radeon X700 - is possible for both Vegas and Edius.

In the OHCI version, the internal preview it is very similar to what Vegas offers. But here I prefer Vegas, since I am more familiar with Vegas, for SD.

For m2t strems, the preview capabilities in Edius are better. 1080 50i is played back with Vegas with 10-12 fps, in Edius you come near to 25 fps (PAL). For 720 25p, both NLEs have good preview capabilities for one videostream, even without intermediates (3.2 Ghz P4).

For Intermediates, both NLE seems to be similar (Edius as OHCI version).

I have been using both the Edius NX for HDV system and Vegas 6 now for several months. In the posts abbove Wolfang has done an excellent job of descriibng the relative strengths and weaknesses of these two editors, and I use Edius exaclty as Wolfang does, capturing HDV in Edius with scene detection, rendering to CanopusHQ and then bringing this into Vegas for further work. For capturing and editing HDV in real time using the compoonent output of my NX card displaying on a 23 in. HP L2335 monitor at 1920 X 1080 resolution, the Edius NX system does a great job. All of the strengths of Edius can be had in the software only version with the exception of real time display of the HD output and the lack of TltleMotion Pro which is not included in the Edius 3 Pro offer.

Tom

Tom,

a question: do you see a HD-resolution also from the Vegas timeline, via the component output of the NX? Or at least the preview in SD via the NX analog outputs?

I have the NX, but not yet build in my PC, due to the fact that I need a new PC for the NX (the NX is a demanding beast, in terms of hardware requirements).


Capturing HDV in Edius with scene detection and rendering to Canopus HQ intermediate works on the fly, even with the Edius pure software version. That is one of the most impressive features, that I miss up to now in Vegas, in terms of capturing, scene detetction and on-the-fly conversion compareable to the Connect HD tool from Cineform.

Wolfgang,

Sorry for the delay in responding.

No, the HD output of the NX card (actually the Expansion Kit for the NX card) is
available only from within Edius and not from within Vegas. The peview in SD from within Vegas is also not viewable on the NX component output.

Yes, the real time on-the-fly capturing with scene detection is so addictive that I have ceased to use Vegas at all for captruing HDV footage. And yes, a high performance computer system is necessary to achieve the full benefit of the NX card plus Expansion Kit. I use a Supermicro XDAE8-G2 motherboard dual 3.6 GHz system with an Asus XT800 Platinum Extreme video card. This gives me full realtime playback of multiple HDV streams with full real-time playback of the XPlode for Edius 3D effects as well.

Tom