Uh, Oh Brother was not color corrected within FCP.

I don't know what you mean when you say "were in part a result of not being able to color balance the foundational white and black levels in a standardized way" but the Coen Brothers had access to the best digital color tools available and their Cinematographer was involved in the color correction process, so I'm sure they got exactly the look they wanted.

reid, that is a great post about editors as commodities.

Just cuz I always love this topic when it comes up with other editors I'll chime in. I love Veags, pretty sure just about everyone here already knows this but with that said at the end of the day who really gives a flying **** what you program you edit with? If someone has talent than it just doesn't matter one iota what they use. It's like criticizing Picasso for using the wrong kind of brush or Jimi Hendrix for playing the wrong kind of guitar. Now I may be lofty in my ideals but even the most mundane of work that I do editing has some degree of "art" to it:

art
–noun
1. the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.

5. any field using the skills or techniques of art: advertising art; industrial art.

With that in mind I just always fail to see the relevance of criticizing what other people use or on the flip side, being pompous about our program of choice. I don't think there's anything wrong with comparing features and exploring options, but in the end, just like art, what is good or best will always be subjective.

- Ray
www.undergroundplanet.com

Well, I have to say that I've occasionally been brave enough to crack open FCP over the past few months and find it utterly frustrating to say the least. Cumbersome transitions and unintuitive handling of clips aside, I find myself absolutely spoiled that Vegas recognizes and handles mixed formats, aspect ratios, etc. without throwing a fit. It took Vegas to prove to me that the Motion project I kept rendering out in WS was, in fact, WS - because it kept importing into FCP 4:3.

That DMN thread was very good about putting it all into perspective - if your workflow is a "many hats" one, it is great that we have an app that allows us to "do it all" (or most of it). As a director, to mirror raw media and be able to just send veggies over email is pretty cool, and quite a time/money saver.

One thing I would love to see is Wondertouch or someone else team up with Sony and develop something along the lines of Motion to improve titling and add some SFX capabilities to the mix. Even if it was a separate app...

I also think the the Thrid Party producers for Vegas are real forward-thinkers. Maybe because a lot of them are cutters themselves. VASST's Celluloid & Ultimate S, Zenoté's plugs, Tsunami, NewBlue's plugs and the others - they all have a real indie-friendly feel about them. The people who focus on Vegas just seem to have a feel for what Vegas users are looking for.

In short, my producer on my upcoming film project told me that we might be able to shoot on film, and I told him I wanted to stay with HD, so we could cut in Vegas. That's how much I believe in it.

KH

It's more about export in fact.
I'd like to be able to use Vegas for years AND be able to export my work without hickups to FCP or Avid editors if asked or if working on a group project.

Sure, Sony apps work well together (integration); it's the basics...

Concerning AE, well, I'd just render to AVI and go back and forth between the apps if needed and I suppose it would work.
Photoshop, I use it every day for photo, graphics, titles, etc and I see no problem using it in Vegas the way I do (well, I'm not asking the moon there)

But for editing itself, it's another thing. I'm surrounded by FCP users and feel I'll have to learn this program if I want to go further some day, on a practical/professionnal side. Unless I do whole projects all by myself, the (few) times I had to deal with somebody else there was this FCP wall standing by my way. And I can't change that for sure.

- There are Pros & Cons to them all... depending on what your needs are.

I now run a Video Production Department and I have 2 editors that work under/with me... simply because I can run the Adobe Production Bundle & FCP Studio. (I also run Avid... last studio was all Avid)

Now that I run the department (6 months) I have also incorporated the Sony Media Suite... but Premiere & FCP are still the Big Dogs in the Bays. Mainly because of their Suite Integration & 3rd Party support.

Long story short... because I was open to learning/knowing other NLE packages and not arguing about which is better... I now run a Department.

I received an email response from Mike Jones regarding his position on this topic - needless to say, his response was detailed and to the point. Bottom line is he feels Vegas, Edius, Speed Edit, etc are the wave of the future - the archaic way of editing as it is currently implemented by the AAA apps is going the way of the dinosaur.

Cliff Etzel
bluprojekt

<<Uh, Oh Brother was not color corrected within FCP.>>

So I'm right--it WAS unfair criticism :-)

Interesting though, that Apple's Final Cut Studio 2 site has a 5-minute interview with the Coen Brothers, showing animated color effects in Brother clips as they comment on how agile Final Cut Studio 2's "Color" application is. (Made me wonder when the first version of Color came out since Brother was a few years ago.)

Overall point stands, though, which together with other comments in this thread adds up (my take) to advising Sony:

1. Add an one-click white balancing feature to jump start routine color corrections.

2. Add output capability in XML which is what, e.g., Avid uses.

In Vegas auto-white balancing takes two/four clicks. Inconvenient perhaps... but not a huge deal.

2- XML may not necessarily work that well in practice. In the case of an application that will read it (e.g. Final Touch, now Color), the implementation of it sucked. It couldn't even handle speed changes, which even EDLs provide rudimentary support for (ok, this is because FT doesn't support speed changes). Nor did FT/XML maintain reel info. There were some cases where using EDLs was better.

2b- One problem with XML is that the XML created is different for each editing application... so the XML is essentially proprietary. One area where it can be useful is if a third-party developer like Automatic Duck will parse the extra data found in the XML. BUT, even if it handled all the information in there, not all of it would translate. Filters are implemented differently between apps, so those settings generally do not translate.

B3T - will Liquid install on XP64??? If it's like the other Avid products, the answer is no. Vegas installs without any issues on XP64 and just runs - and that's the beauty of Vegas.

Cliff Etzel
bluprojekt

Thanks for the insights GlennChan, you are a valuable asset to this forum and I have used many of your how-to's in color correcting the DV feature I have worked on for 2 years. In the end there is no substitute for manual color correction, but if there is a four-click way of white balancing within Vegas I must have missed the info before. Could you point me to it as a way of checking my work?

You would use the complementary color eyedroppers in the 3-way CC. It's 2 or 4 clicks depending on how you would like to count. Click the eyedropper, click on a color that's supposed to be neutral in the image (or better yet, click-drag an area).

a friend of mine had a clip to render that was only 37 sc.
and it was 4 hours to render ..........LOL
Final Cut Pro .........SONY VEGAS WINS
ALL THE WAY VERY HAPPY WITH SONY SOFTWARE

"B3T - will Liquid install on XP64??? If it's like the other Avid products, the answer is no. Vegas installs without any issues on XP64 and just runs - and that's the beauty of Vegas."

=============================================================

Don't know about XP64 but I have not been able to get liquid to install on Vista ultimate 64 without some painful issues, so I guess the short answer is No.

Vegas on the other hand works quite well in vista64.... gotta jump through a few extra hoops to get Media Manger up and running, but it does work. The only problem I had installing to vista 64 was the install itself. The Vegas install doesn't give you a choice on where to install the program.... it automatically installs to "Program files". But in vista 64 all x86 programs are rerouted to "Program files(x86)". This causes a few minor problems when Vegas goes to look for your extra plugins, and VST's (vegas looks in the wrong program files folder)... but the problem is and was correctable.

But anyway... at present Liquid is only certified to work on XPHome or Pro, and you MUST have a DX9 hardware compatible video card with 256M dedicated ram for HDV work (128M for all other work . Liquid uses the graphics memory to process background rendering as well as the GPU effects). It is even suggested that you dedicate an entire machine solely to liquid with nothing but the OS on it...... I find that a bit silly.

Sync2Rhythm, - There are Pros & Cons to them all... depending on what your needs are. Most important, work, production, project deadlines & profit, Mac's OSx running on Linux BSD wins, no contest.

The argument is as dumb as HD DVD vs Blu-Ray. Both programs are equally capable of producing excellent video. Both programs are equally both intuitive and unintuitive and require practice to learn well. Both programs are more dependent upon the camera, camera person, and the editor than anything the programs themselves can do for you. Most people who engage in these arguments that "my editor is better than your editor" and "my dog is meaner than your dog" are pretty childish IMO and don't really deserve a response over four letters long.

John

I use both programs every day. They're more or less equal, but different. Each does something better than the other. Each does something the other doesn't do at all. I find OSX is sometimes primitive, sometimes more advanced than XP.
For me, it's like choosing between a Ford and a Chevy, except the Chevy has a prettier box and costs 3X as much as the Ford.

I deal with Mac people all the time. Because it's unrealistic to expect that they might be able to develop computer literacy, it's an advantage that I can speak their lingo.

In the future, It is unlikely that I will spend much more in the Mac world, just because of the bang/buck issue.
As additional little benefits in Vegas world, I'll get at least the same amount of work done. If I mute a track, or if I save, while a project is playing, playback won't stop. I will be able to export MPEG-2. I will be able to invoke a context menu without using two hands.

Another story of why I love Vegas sooooooooo much more than Final Cut.


Aside: In my day gig as production manager at a software/DVD publisher we have Final Cut Studio on the Mac Pros for Video editing and DVD authoring, and Vegas 7e on my personal notebook. Vegas ends up saving my ass more often then not. In addition, Sound Forge 9a gets used daily. I do however love DVD Studio Pro! It is a great DVD authoring environment.

So in Final Cut we re-cut all the videos for a legacy PC product that we are about to re-release. The editing went well. The color correcting went so-so. (Some footage shot with cameras in auto mode. Ouch!!!) Then things went over to compressor. Now, I like the batch processing capability of Compressor quite a bit. As a matter of fact, I end up using the batch processor in Sound Forge to compress DV into other formats I need for web etc. in work flow that is almost identical to Compressor because I was so taken with Compressors ease of use. So I begin to inspect the final output of Compressors Sorenson 3 compression. There are weird noise bursts about every 10-12 frames. I look through some of the other projects that were not DVD ready M2T, or whatever the extension they put on DVD related video, same thing. I ended up doing a compression batch through Sound Forge using my Vegas profile for Sorenson videos and got way better results minus noise bursts and with slightly smaller file sizes. (Note: Smaller files sizes with the same data rates for audio and video.) I love Sony's products!

Joe

yep. fcp is strictly for 'final' 'cuts'. anything else you need to farm it out to another software cuz outta the box, it's an average software. (color correction, mattes, masks, rotoscoping, titling, compositing.... the list goes on)

vegas is for anyone who wants more control on how that video should be presented.

Bigsole? Could you expand a bit on your comment: "on how that video should be presented"?

Thanks

Grazie

Final Cut Pro 6 just got reviewed on Digital Media Net
http://videoediting.digitalmedianet.com/

Here's what they like about the new version.

>The most popular new features include an Open Format timeline
This has been in Vegas for years

>Another is the ProRes 422 codec, which can take a large, uncompressed HD file and bring the size down to that of an SD clip, but maintaining the HD resolution
I can't talk about the quality of the codec but it sounds like the Sony 4:2:2 YUV codec

>Another new important feature is SmoothCam;
Vegas has nothing like this. Check out the article, it has before and after clips, very impressive

The article doesn't go into detail on other new features
"Other new features include better integration with Motion; new features in Cinema Tools and Compressor; more real time FX and filter plug-ins, more audio options; integration with the new Color grading and finishing application, and more."

So it seems Final Cut got some improvements which definitely help workflow and better integration with the FCP suite of tools

The smooth cam looked good, except it left the guy with no head room. Does the software let you set limits on the amount of zoom to preserve critical framing? Of course, that would leave the shot a little less smooth.