Anyone with real experience to share? I too am curious to hear an honest comparison, biased as this forum may be. I'd also like to hear about anyone's experience with DVD Studio Pro. I've never been a Mac user, but my mind is open.

Luxo

Im new to SOFO and an experienced Mac FCP user. SOFO kicks ass for simplicity and is quite enjoyable to work with FCP is extreamly powerful but not quite as plug and play.

FCP boasts realtime FX as does Avid xpress....WEll ive got the dual 1 gig g4 and only have limited realtime fx.In VV realtime is a reality out of the box.

I've just been FORCED to use FCP3 on a new G4 (someone else's) for a project, and it is painful to work with compared with Vegas.

Even audio needs rendering if it's more than one track or isn't already 48Khz, and most FX and transitions need rendering before viewing.

The worst aspect is that many functions require opening new windows or going through various menus, whereas in Vegas so many things are right there where you want them.

By the way, I'm not a Vegas zealot - if FCP was better I would say so, but it's not.

OK.. I've been using Vegas since it came out (for audio) and it has basically followed my academic career (I was production director at my college radio station when VegasAudio first came out, and VV was released just around the time I went back to school for TV Production). So I have been using FCP at school in the last few months and here is what I have found..

The way I have been describing the difference between the two is that VV feels like you are painting.. while FCP feels like you are playing with one of those toys when you were a kid where you have a grid of squares with numbers and you have to slide them up/down/left/right in an attempt to get them in numercial order. Actually I would describe all other NLE's like that as well; but FCP is probably not as clunky as say, Premiere. The former is actually a description I would apply to most SF products - their greatest benefit is usually their brilliant interface design.

Still there are some things in FCP that gave me envy:

- Vectorscope/Waveform
- Nesting of projects (put one sequence within another and treat it like any other object)
- One project file is all you need to recreate your project from timecode tape
- When you slide objects left and right, it hovers an offset measurement in minutes:seconds:frames.

If you care to have a look at three projects I did for school, working on them mostly simultaneously, check out www.fongaboo.com/works/#newschool (the first row). The first two spots were done on FCP and the last one was done on VV. I think the latter would have been pretty grueling to accomplish in FCP.

Thanks for the useful comments Fongaboo. Those four advantages to FCP are all features I've longed for in Vegas and had to work around. Hopefully SF reads your post and considers them for VV 4.0, especially the nesting of projects, which sounds simply brilliant.

I refuse to install Real, so couldn't check out your work, but if this is the New School I'm thinking of -- James Lipton's Mew School? -- I'm sure it's all good.

More importantly though -- your link to archive.org. I knew they archived web pages, which is a stunning accomplishment alone, but I had no idea about the movies. That's almost unbelieveable! How in the world can they afford the bandwidth? And has most or all of that footage fallen into the public domain?

Luxo

"One project file is all you need to recreate your project from timecode tape"

Not sure if you are referring to some other FCP capability, but if you have a .veg file and the original dv source tapes, you can load the project into Vegas on another machine and recapture all the dv source files.

A knowledgable friend wrote . . .

>Considered VV3 for the station but went for FCP instead. A major problem is >project management within VV3 is a joke. There's no WF/V though most serious users >have hardware for this.
>
>VV3 is not equal to FCP for video editing. Just like FCP is not equal to
>VV3 for audio editing. I am confident I will not have dropped frames when I
>record a two-hour program to tape using FCP. Deck and Peak provide all
>sweetening you need. But John, how much audio fixing do you need to do? I
>have only left FCP about three time to use Deck or Peak in the last four
>years. That is just when I needed an audio filter not available in FCP.
>

. . . he made pursuasive arguments for buying a Mac workstation and FCP but ultimately I went with the familiar PC world. Nonetheless, he made serious points vis-a-vis project management weakness with VV3.

In part because I don't expect to use VV3 for real editing yet I've not worried about it - the workstation I've built is more for experimenting with a software NLE, i.e. to see what state-of-the-art is . . . and because this is the easiest way for us to ease into making DVDs as our vintage NLE doesn't have an easy way of manipulating files to make mpegs.

So, what is the status of an upgrade to VV3 - sometime soon, or wait until NAB? Also, does it make improvements to project management? Frankly, I bought into the VV3 thing primarily because it offered serious audio tools . . . I've come to think of my videos as radio programs with pictures :>)

Seriously, my audio guy flipped when he found out VV3 worked with Direct X audio plug-ins (which I'd previously bought for Cool Edit on the audio workstation).

John Beech

Your audio guy sounds like a true blue Mac fan. He isn't being objective.

I've done some EXTREMELY complex projects with Vegas Video, and there isn't any project managements issues. Typical Windows Explorer like Explorer to easily locate files regardless where they are on your system. I had hundreds of files spanning over six drives, both physical and virtual drives and had no problems at all. In fact VV3 does all the work. What problems was he referring to specifically?

BillyBoy,

> "In fact VV3 does all the work. What problems was he referring to specifically?" <

Possibly the lack of "standard" Edit Decision Lists (EDL) in Vegas Video 3.

The timeline is the only area where timeline-trimmed material can be referenced and there are no folders available in the media pool yet.

It would be great to sort media by scene, shot and take in the MP.



FWIW, It would be revealing (and fun) to list all the things VV can do to that the other folks can't...


For starters:

Flipping between takes while looping a sequence of four shots

Drag trimming and slipping while playing or looping

Previewing multiple layers/compositing to external monitor

Runs great on a Sony laptop




PLease add more...


Cheers, MPH

Ability to open multiple instances of application for cutting, pasting, rendering, etc. etc.
Come to think of it, I don't think I have any other software other than some free/shareware that can have multiple instances opened.

How bout window docking, and not having to SAVE a bunch of workspace templates. Vegas remembers how you like it.
Vegas seems to make the most of your screens "real estate".

Works great on a Toshiba Laptop, it is nice to capture direct to Vegas via firewire and a external drive, come back to the office and hook up the drive to a P4 2.26 do a rough cut at send a window dub to the client and never touch the backup tape I ran in the camera.

Dan

For some people, a drawback of VV might be it's inability to produce standard EDL's. If you capture, edit and output to DV, no problem, VV is phenomenal. But, if you tend to use an NLE to offline other video formats or a film cut, then VV can't help you, since it doesn't accomodate matchback features. FCP is equipped, albeit in a clunkier manner overall than VV, to handle offlines of these other formats.

My impression is that you must keep a copy of both your .veg file and your .sfvidcap file in order to recreate a project from timecoded tape? Is this not the case?

Regarding archive.org, some foundation is providing the online library. Check out http://www.archive.org/movies/faqs.html for further explanation.

RESOLUME.COM, a VJ site, also has footage links to other online public domain clips.

Ooh one more minor thing.. When you move the cursor back and forth in FCP, you can hear the audio, similar to how most CD player sound in scan mode. I find this useful for audio navigation in a lot of ways. I know SoundForge allows this also. Maybe VV4 could have a tool mode for this?

Scrubbing audio could be useful, but you would also want to be able to "turn it off" because for some people it could be quite annoying. I guess you could turn down the sound in Windows, but then you would lose all audible cues. It would be better to just make audio scrubbing an option. In my opinion. But I think this is worth a formal feature request.

Audio scrubbing: Yeah that's why I was suggesting that scrubbing be its own 'tool' along with the Normal, Envelope, Selection and Zoom tools.. I wouldn't want it on all the time, and since normal operation of Vegas does not involve dragging of the cursor, the standard tools do not lend themselves to audio scrubbing currently anyway. I could also see something similar to SoundForge, where you drag the cursor along the top and it audio-scrubs, but movement anywhere else is silent.

Fongaboo,

I am a little confused. Are you requesting audio scrubbing to be added to Vegas Video?

There is an audio scrub mode in Vegas, either using the scrub control bar or place the mouse over the cursor line and hit CTRL.

Or are you requesting something else?

Dave T2

"My impression is that you must keep a copy of both your .veg file and your .sfvidcap file in order to recreate a project from timecoded tape? Is this not the case?"

All you need is the .veg file if you want to redigitize an all-DV project.

DaveT2-

The audio scrubbing currently offered in VV3 is weak to useless, especially if you have used Premiere audio scrub. It is there in VV3, sort of, but there is a definite lag which IMHO defeats the purpose of scrubbing in the first place.

My personal workaround for it is to use play/stop and the arrow keys for by the frame adjustments.

So, I am with the others that would like a proper "real time" audio scrub.

I will drink to that---an awesome scrubber a la Premiere would just make this software near perfect---

I've noticed almost of the bitching comes form audio freaks that wanted a seperate forum and don't have the good sense to stay in it.