I've been using edious er i mean edius for several years,, it used to blow away vegas for preview , the vegs pro does much much better, but edius can still playback with effects stronger than vegas , thats a fact jack,, does that mean its better overall,, if it was i wouldn't be on this forum showing off my typing skills

"Actually it was the other way around... I was quite the hell-raiser who gave 'em."

Wow. You are definitely the coolest guy in this forum if you gave people wedgies. Well done.

"I've been using edious er i mean edius for several years,, it used to blow away vegas for preview , the vegs pro does much much better,"

And that MAY be one of the ways Canonpus is doing it. I know that when I dumb down Vegas's display I get a drastic improvement in playback performance, (which I sometimes have to do).

Sure. I'm repeating other people's rumors as far as that NAB demo goes. There's nothing to lie about here, but there's certainly room to be wrong.

I think you're mixing up the ideas of 64-bit addressing and 64-bit data paths. The hardware you're using already has a bit of the latter. Graphics cards often use wider paths than that to access their on-card memory. Win32 already uses these wider hardware data paths.

I'd love to hear that a 64-bit Vegas is faster, I just don't see the evidence for it, and general reviews of XP 64 usually claimed it was a little slower. But we all read and hear whatever reinforces our current ideas. Maybe I missed all the raves about how fast XPor Vista-64 is compared to its 32-bit sibling.

I do hope that Vegas sees some nice improvements and I think that the 64-bit effort is a sign of other major renovations. I just don't think that being 64-bit is going to be the main reason for anything being faster.

Rob

I was at the NAB party last year and saw that demo. Was it all smoke and mirrors I couldn't really say. However given how it was run it wouldn't be unreasonable to draw that conclusion.

Every other system I looked at at NAB they built the project of what I was interested in while I watched. Some of the vendors had some very good footage to showcase their products too. SCS and their skateboard footage just mades me cringe. I really hope that's not meant to appeal to what they see as their client base.

Bob.

"I'd love to hear that a 64-bit Vegas is faster,"

I would be very surprised to see any serious increase in speed.... 64 bit systems by nature aren't faster than 32 bit systems in terms of raw speed. In fact if anything they may be a few milliseconds slower here and there. They simply provide more paths for information to follow so to speak.... and I *THINK* that's the plan behind Vegas 64. At least that's what I got out of the NAB demos. They seemed to be advertising Vegas's ability to handle MORE as opposed to handling things faster.

"I think you're mixing up the ideas of 64-bit addressing and 64-bit data paths. The hardware you're using already has a bit of the latter. Graphics cards often use wider paths than that to access their on-card memory. Win32 already uses these wider hardware data paths."

There are GPU based NLE's out there, and in fact I have Avid Liquid which is heavily GPU dependent (a 256Mb, DX9 card minimum is required) and the preview display is simply beautiful as well as the flow with multiple HDV timelines with effects. You can throw a bunch of HDV clips on the timeline and play them back with no bogging what so ever..... but then on the other hand..... they're discontinuing Liquid now and replacing it in 2009

I was at the NAB party and clearly heard him say that playback was better, but this has been played through before so it's been cached in the RAM some already.

I heard it clear as a bell, and unless I'm just completely mis-remembering or I mis-heard him which I won't categorically refuse as a possibility, but don't think that's the case, so I think we'll see better playback performance assuming you're not trying to push the limits of your disk I/O, but I also think that you're acting like 64bit will make all the difference in the world, when I don't think it's going to be the holy grail of editing, just a boosted performance version of the software for those that are willing to work in a 64bit OS and put the dough into the RAM that will be necessary to make it beneficial.

Dave

Pretty much my view of it as well.
But here's the thing. That was last year when 25Mb/sec HDV was all most of us had to deal with. Now I've got an EX1 and it's good for 35Mb/sec and by around this NAB thanks to Convergent Design's XDR I might have to deal 150Mb/sec 10 bit XDCAM.

What I'm still more interested in is how Vegas will cope with 10 bit material.

Bob.

i dont think it will bob.. to be honest, it wasa big deal bringing a somewaht 32bit float engine into play..

If its 10bit, then ill eat my words, but in al honesty, i realy dnt see them rebuilding the entire engine to compenate that bandwidth

As it stands, i woudlnt use Vegas for 10bit.. Axio or Edius SP yes, but not Vegas.. For me, the drive access and atrovious preview is bad enough. Adding more to it will confound the issue

"For me, the drive access and atrovious preview is bad enough."

Then why the heck do you use it?

There is a preference in Vegas that tells it to close all media files when it loses focus. This is the default and allows you to fiddle with your media in photoshop or sound forge and then go back to Vegas. It's the default behavior.

Very good point - I just changed this setting, and indeed it's now much faster to get Veags full speed after some time in the background - thanks!

However, a question arises: is it actually safe for the clip files? I mean, they're open all the time - and should a power failure or another disaster happen, they may get corrupt. I remember my first experience with Edius some time ago; it did some destructive things to my clip(s) - although I don't remember now the circumstances.

Anyway, there probably exists a reason to Vegas closing clip files while out of focus being the default behaviour - don't you think?

It's safe for the clip files, Vegas should only have them open in Read mode. The main reason for having Vegas release the files when it looses focus is if you use an external editor such as SF or PS, you'd not be able to save the file as Vegas would have it locked.

I think the other advantage to having Vegas close the files is it also frees up a lot of RAM. So again if running an external editor that'd be a good thing.

Bob.

Atrovious?
JJK

This thread has brought up my greatest concern with the Vegas platform. The fundamental software philosophy was written to excel at editting DV video. It's clear how much the image data has evolved since Vegas was first written. It's my position, and I have no info to support what I think, but, Vegas is in need of major rewrite to stay competitive in the NLE marketplace. I do not see the commitment from Sony, or SCS for that matter, to do anything but continue to issue annual bandaids and patches. I would LOVE to hear otherwise from SCS, but, we all know how likely THAT is.

Unfortunaltely for all the third party vendors whose product lines rely almost exclusively on the Vegas trademark, their business will suffer.

What's even worse for how Vegas looks against the newest Edius 4.6 - I have just rendered my HQ mxf into SD DVD format, and it looks SPLENDID, absolutely line-twitter free! And that's without ANY special treatment of the source...In a 720x576 window, the render looks EXACTLY like the original on a full 1920x1080 - same rich colours, no compression artefacting.

Oh, and did I mention that Edius now uses all 100% of my Quad CPU all the time when rendering? Sony, wake up!

Disclaimer: I am using the newest TBYB version downloadable since only recently from Canopus site (Broadcast 4.6)

I downloaded the trial as well. Pretty smooth, but the Vegas interface is MUCH better. I'm finding the edius interface quite clunky. Granted I'm not at all used to it, but I enjoy Vegas BECAUSE of it's interface.

Not sure what you mean by cpu usage.... Vegas uses close to 100% of my 4 cores almost all of the time (except for when "no re-compress" kicks in.

customize your edius interface:

http://www.ediustips.com/four4ppro.html

"Then why the heck do you use it?"
1) With my work and shoting style, i dont need to be 100% frame accurate with my previews. I know my shots and i know what to do with them

2) Vegas is the only editor which is a "realtime" editor. Edius comes close, but its nowhere near as tweakable during playback. To be editing in realtime is far more important than previewing in realtime. Let me be accurate in that comment by refering to realtime preview as full frame rate.

3) I dont use Vegas when a client wants to offer input in an edit.
This in itself has raised more problems than theyre worth. Even Ram Renders dont aleviate client concerns and i have lost count on how mnay times i have said "the final will be full frame rate much like this" begin ram render

4) I like Vegas. Im fast with it.. Faster than most in any case and Im happy with the workflow

Is that enough for you?

Everytime I read about an NLE out there that is purported to be better than Vegas, I fall prey to my curiosity and give it a go. After 2 hours of time trying to wrap my head around the Edius interface, I uninstalled and went right back to trusty Vegas Pro 8. Maybe it's me, but I have yet to run into anything VP8 can't handle. True I'm working with footage shot on HC7's and maybe that has something to do with it. I'm not working with really long complicated projects so I've been impressed again and again at what I consider my bread and butter editing - straight cuts, dissolves and minor color grading - all with final delivery for internet distribution of some kind.

I'm sure there are others here who expect more from their NLE, but I've still not found a more solid NLE than Vegas.

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt

While I'm really not at all acquainted with Edius, I think that Vegas does its own thing with previews that is very different from what anything else does, in that it tries to render its previews on the fly. The idea, I think, is to be flexible, resample everything to make it play even though it doesn't match the project, lean hard on CPU power, and let you switch project templates at any time, even in the middle of a project.

For this you make a trade-off. Sometimes you can't get a flawless playback. Sometimes your final renders are long.

The other side of the coin, and what I've seen in all the other edit systems I have seen, is that you start a project, pick a template, pick a render location, and then you stick with it. By making the decisions at the start, these systems can make prerenders, in fact they can even demand prerenders. They can enforce a situation where you will get full framerate playback. And in the end, most of the project is prerendered and the final render will be a bit faster than what Vegas can do.

Yeah, there are other things that Vegas could be doing; gpu acceleration, directX instead of VFW, but I think that, really, Vegas's scheme of caching frames to RAM to make things playable needs to be rethought because it's just not enough and no amount of RAM or CPU grunt is going to change that.

Rob Mack

The "Realtime" bit is very useful. Even just a little thing like being able to listen to a looped region while I type in Word is a big deal. PPro just stops playing if you leave it.

The lack of guaranteed playback is a huge issue though. This is something that smacks most people long before they ever get to see that they can tweak filters while the timeline plays (which is VERY cool). Having the bad stuff up front like that just isn't good.

Rob Mack