Ever since day 1 ATI has had a boat load of driver issues and I for one will never use their cards again.

JJK

Shoot, Padre, since you're wishing, why not wish for faster than realtime rendering?

Well, i have made extensive work on a Canopus Storm RT and Matrox RT, and after Vegas experience i would *never* go back to an hardware dependant solution (let a part in an all broadcast situation).

Maybe you gain some time with RT, but you loose 4 times that in hardware/drivers related problems and incompatibility, and you have much more limitations in term of assets combatibility and fx.

agree with logiquem...to get married to a solution that requires certain hardware is asking for trouble down the road in my opinion. A decade ago there were audio editing solutions that only worked with their specific card, or pre-built box. It was expensive and in the long run there was less innovation...eventually many left the market.

You gotta think in the next two years, we'll be at a point with 6 ghz processors that render times will decrease and editing native hdv will be much easier.

Sean
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broadcast voiceovers

You gotta think in the next two years, we'll be at a point with 6 ghz processors that render times will decrease and editing native hdv will be much easier.

And that exactly why I'm in no rush to move into HDV at this time. Hopefully, in the next two or three years, HDV will be as easy (and as affordable) as SD is today.

Well, this is part of the promise of PCI Express-that you could make use of a GPU to do a lot of your processing. The killer feature of a PCI Express x16 bus is that it has high throughput in both directions-not just ougoing like an AGP bus.

The thing to look for is a general purpose GPU that simply does the raw number crunching better than your CPUs. Perhaps this is what ATI is pursuing, perhaps not.

Vegas in particular (if it followed the current pattern) would be aimed at very generalized hardware support-things that are pretty standard plumbing in a Windows environment.

So if any of these graphics cards offered specialized features I'd be surprised (and probably pleased) if Vegas used them. On the other hand if there was a very standard way for Vegas to use the GPU power of one of these cards in a generic way then maybe Vegas would do so.

You know, Windows Vista is supposed to be a bit more GPU intensive. Maybe the plumbing will be there when the OS is released.

Rob Mack

"Ever since day 1 ATI has had a boat load of driver issues and I for one will never use their cards again. "

I agree with you on that!

The ATI cards have always given me problems. As a matter of fact
I just took one back to the store and got a nvidia card with no problems.

I think the hardware thing can be done, you just have to have a good chip and driver Company like nvidia or creative labs.

ZION

coming from a non-programmer perspective. I know that some processor hand certain types of intructions better than others.

Why in this discussion is it so black or white GPU or CPU.Why not code for all letting processors run with what they do best. I am wishing for a balance that uses my Quad 64bit AMD opterons and the GPU and the SLI and the ram and the netwrok agents and whatever else the machine can provide to get the job done.

The fast the work gets done the more work can be sold means more money to put into more products.

let the GPU do what it does best and the CPU do what it does best and the multi processors working and predicting what you may be doing next and automaticly building ram previews in the background use the 64 bit math....utilize the machine.

Not all of us are amatuers having fun with this stuff for family videos. there is MovieStudio for those customers.

If you think Vegas PRO should sell for more to provide these things then raise the price, but make it something for the people who need it to work fast with highquality.

The pros will pay for it.

I have gone into to debt with HD cams and quad processing computers with great looking projects ready to put together and right now the bottle kneck is Vegas not using my investment to the fullest.

to much time is wasted rendering.

If I sound frustrated don't worry I'm not really. I appreciate Vegas for getting me this far.

Was it black and white? didn't notice that.

MS Vista will require a DX9 capable graphics processor so I'm assuming it'll be sending certain types of processes off to the GPU to handle. So perhaps there'll be something in it for Vegas.

The idea of a Vegas Pro has been bandied about here for a few years. My own opinion about this is to make such a product as an add-on to Vegas. If you want it you can buy it, maybe as a subscription or as a mix-and-match selection of tools with licensing levels for certain quantities of tool parts. The problem I imagine with this is that Vegas just doesn't seem like it was designed to easily build add-on modules for it. Just a guess based on the dearth of add-on tools. So maybe if the Madison folks had to work on the architecture to add modules then maybe more modules would follow.

People's fears of hardware based tools seem really foolish as far as Vegas goes. The program will never, ever be hardware dependent. If it had hardware support it'd be more along the lines of Axio, where everything still works without the hardware, just slower.

Rob Mack

Vegas Pro? Why? Isnt that what we use now? I thought Movie Studio was the hobbyist/beginner NLE from Sony. No need for another version but rather just add the features that we need.

One of the best features of Vegas is that it is NOT dependent on specific hardware.

"One of the best features of Vegas is that it is NOT dependent on specific hardware."

I totally agree. Being format and hardware agnostic is the best thing about Vegas. I cant say that about Avid (which I still like) and also PPro.

"One of the best features of Vegas is that it is NOT dependent on specific hardware. "

So who ever said it should be?

Rob

Just a name, that "Vegas Pro".

I'm thinking of it more from a business standpoint. There are certain core features that everbody needs and these are generally in Vegas. Then there are things that people in a high volume facility might need. For example, network rendering and the Media Manager might be better suited to a small production company with multiple seats and a budget for additional expenses. A better capture app might be an upgrade I'd pay more for as well.

The advantage to peeling some of those things off and charging a little more for them as "components" is that, hypothetically, they'd get a little more developement budget since they generated more income.

I don't really advocate a whole third Vegas "Pro". There's a real marketing disadvantage to that. The better plan seems to me to be able to add parts to Vegas to make it grow. That way you keep a base of Vegas users who can all be potential customers.

This get aside from using a GPU to help speed up renders. I think we really will see this start to happen, if not in V7 then certainly in V8. Think of it as a co-processor rather than some sort of specialized hardware.

Hardware dependence just isn't the Vegas way.

Rob Mack

There's a Windows Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) that deals with hiding hardware-specific implementations (with vendor-supplied software acting as the glue between the hardware and the OS). It's entirely possible that Windows XP (or Vista) provides a new API with methods for GPU-based encoding and/or decoding, and both nVidia and ATI develop their drivers to implement these methods on their respective hardware. Then Vegas need only support the API, and not the specific hardware, leaving Vegas hardware-agnostic while, at the same time, taking advantage of high-performance GPUs when available. I could even imagine this as an option to select with Vegas' preferences, similar to today's Vegas video capture, where you can select a particular device to capture from.


David