Funny, I'm actually thinking of switching to Avid MC since it supports more formats now. Vegas 9.x was supposed to be the 'fixed' version compared to 8. But it isn't.

Oh well, it's all just software.

But then again, I went to a local Avid user group meeting. There is a lot of griping going with them too. But they are getting real work done, and no one is talking about Avid crapping out when it's time to render things.

Yeah, well that's called "lock-in". That's what car companies are doing too. You can't change a stock radio without shelling out big bucks because it's integrated into a non-standard dash.

One reason other NLE makers fail to keep current is because they think THEY'RE the standard and got fat and lazy and snubbed customer input just like the cable companies when they had a lock too.

Another is that their installed base is shrinking, so they have to raise prices to keep the doors open, and that further fuels the loss.

And finally, they think iPhone and Flip cameras are a joke, and poo-poo consumer formats, and quite frankly they think they're "defending the brand" as a strictly "pro" application by ignoring consumer formats.

That same mentality is evidenced here in this forum.

When I try to offer a free demuxing utility I get lambasted and accused of stealing, and told I'm in "Area 51".

Wake up people!

One of the reasons Vegas is so wildly popular is that it "closes one eye" and allows 3rd party Direct Show filters and if you do a little research you'll get the "ah-ha", and you'll see clearly again.

"But then again, I went to a local Avid user group meeting. There is a lot of griping going with them too."

It's all over the place. As I have said in another post, I've come to the conclusion that it's the same in any nle you go to. Change the nle and you simply change one set of head aches for another. If you're real lucky you'll find a nle that will tolerate YOUR particular workflow without causing too many problems. Vegas at least for the most part does that for me.

It's not the NLE, it's getting control on your WINDOWS Direct Show filters.

Oh almighty and all-knowing Budweiser, please quit swilling the beer long enough to enlighten us old farts, our minds are failing and we need a youngster without the handicap of knowledge or experience to tell us what's really going on.

What do third-party Direct Show filters have to do with Vegas? Vegas is not a Direct Show application.

Rob, yes, but they aren't complaining about being able to finish things. Unlike Vegas users.

Third party Direct Show filters like FFDShow allow Vegas to decode just about any format out there and place it on the timeline.

Third party DirectShow filters like FFDShow enables VFW encoding to just about every codec out there, certainly the most common ones.

Third Party Direct Show filters like FFDShow enable FAST lossless encoding to raw, huffy, lagarith, and many more.

Check it out on the WiKi. Break the chains people.

>>>Other NLE's manage to support a wide variety of cameras. Why should anyone pick a camera to match their NLE.<<<

No they don't manage to support it. Camera is a part of the equation, just like hardware and OS.

First time I got AVID I had about 4-5 computers. AVID would not install on even a single laptop and only one PC. We all know FCP only runs on a mac. And we keep repeating this all the time. Other NLE are far more restrictive when it comes to everything.

You have to pick your entire pipeline and decide what piece is most important to you. What combination of cameras, hardware and software will give you results you want without giving you headaches. If that means using a Sony camera with Vegas then that's the way it should be.

Isn't it an option to educate oneself about video?

I don't know any golfers that went out and bought a set of clubs based on a particular golf course.

"Isn't it an option to educate oneself about video?" yes and I would suggest that you should start right away! ;-) And as John Cline was nice enough to point out....
"What do third-party Direct Show filters have to do with Vegas? Vegas is not a Direct Show application."

I already answered that, look back a few posts.

I can't believe the number of idiots in this forum. You people are lost in some kind of time warp or something. Hello! This aint 1986!!

I give up, it's like herding cats in here.

"I don't know any golfers that went out and bought a set of clubs based on a particular golf course. " OK, from that statement, your either 12yrs old or your parents have locked you up in the basement for the first 30yrs of your life! ;-) Since when has the average amateur golfer demonstrated good sense when they have been given an opportunity to play on a big name course..... new clubs, new bag, new clothes..etc..and so on. Pro Shops live on this dream!

"I give up, it's like herding cats in here."

I'd really like to help you out, which way did you come in? You keep saying you're leaving, but you don't.

hey, there's some pretty cool cats in here......

Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwatere just yet.
Mr BudWzr has gotten it into his head that ffdshow which has a vfw interface can work with Vegas. I can find nothing on the web to indicate anyone has any success doing this even as a decoder much less an encoder. Some appear to have tried it with Debugmode's Frameserver with little to no joy.
I suspect the problem is that ffdshow is a filter, not a filter in the Vegas or any other NLE's sense of the word but a pipeline filter. It can for example sit between a file and WMP or VLC to enable them to play almost any codec. Problem is NLEs are not simple media players. I'm also pretty certain that every 3rd party codec that does work through Vegas's vfw interface has to be specifically written to work with the way Vegas uses the vfw interface.

Or to put it another way, if it was all so simple to "break the chains" Satish wasted a lot of time.

Now we can throw the baby out :)

Bob.

"Now we can throw the baby out :)" Mr BudWzr it appears, did not fully understand ffdshow operations as defined by MS........ although he did post a direct link to the SDK definitions. I think you're right, Bob, that he was confused by MS use of the word filter in description of the file interface. MS is king of bloatware! ;-)

I think most individuals have wanted vegas to move away from the aging vfw interface, especially for the 64bit app.

"t every 3rd party codec that does work through Vegas's vfw interface has to be specifically written to work with the way Vegas uses the vfw interface." Bob, this is very true it seems, just look at Boris Red interface, it's a mess. Single frame work. vegas is good, but its cripple if more that one frame needs to be pass together.

I did some more research on where our friend is coming from.

So I thought I'd look into avidemux, well, after reading a few pages of wikis and forums I found the most bewildering array of advice, development spliting off into forks, conflicting views on which filter(s) to use or which ones might maybe work. YEAH GODS. Some people could actually get it to work, some of the time. Developers throwing in the towel etc. Of course as this is open source you have no leverage, zilch. You can't have a dummy spit and take your money elsewhere.
To put it another way. Maybe I could invest a week of my time and finally get this thing to do something. Now lets do some maths here. 40 hours at $50/hour. That just cost me $2,000 of my time. I could have bought Avid's MC for that money. I could have bought Vegas AND a PC to run it on.

Now in all fairness I'll still keep an open mind, maybe Budwiser is wiser. It might help his cause thought if instead of throwing platitudes around he could provide some hard core facts. I've done my best to find any validity to his claims of greener pastures but all I'm seeing is what the cows have left.

Bob.

>>>>I don't know any golfers that went out and bought a set of clubs based on a particular golf course.<<<

And why do you think it's called a set of clubs. Each one works best in a particular situation. Thanks for proving my point.

Yea, definitely ffdshow is not the way to go with Vegas. Even if it worked as well as he implies, there are too many versions and not enough testing.

What SCS has to do is to wait to release new versions of Vegas until they are thoroughly tested and free of errors. It can't be possible that AVCHD works fine, if not decent, in 8.0c, and then they release 9.0 and it works like crap, taking five seconds to go up to full speed when pressing the space bar. Now in 9.0c that doesn't happen anymore, so I took advantage of the "deal of the century" and bought it for $150. Still, even if AVCHD is working better now, even better than in 8.0c, it's not at the point where it should be.

In a 2.66 Ghz CPU with 8 GB of RAM, AVCHD has to play in real time consistently. In 9.0c it plays real time for a while, but at some points it stutters badly, and this is even with the quality set to preview full or even half. I suppose it's because there are parts of the footage that are more difficult to decode, but on the other hand, yesterday I downloaded a demo for Edius Neo 2.5 Booster, and it plays AVCHD consistently at full fps, even through transitions and color correction, in full quality. Unfortunately, even if the interface looks great, I still prefer Vegas, because things that I do in Vegas in a snap take longer in Neo. The timeline is to me the strongest advantage that Vegas' design has.

Also, as far as I can tell, Neo also doesn't have AVCHD smart rendering, which Vegas claims to have, but it's broken, it works whenever it wants. Plus, Sony's AVC codec doesn't allow to create a file with the m2ts container of more than 16 mbps, so if you have footage with 21 mbps vbr like I have, the parts that it has to recompress will look quite crappy.

In conclusion, one of the things SCS has to do with Vegas is to rewrite the AVCHD module so that it fully takes advantage of the computer and graphics card power, so that it plays in real time unless an event has several filters applied to it.

> When I try to offer a free demuxing utility I get lambasted and accused of stealing, and told I'm in "Area 51".

Yea, I read that thread too and I'm not sure why people jumped all over you. I think that they thought you were advocating using cracked software and didn't understand that you were talking about using freeware. Videohelp.com is a goldmine of a resource. I use tools like axidemux, tsremux, tsmuxer, all the time to cut the commercials out of shows that I record on my DVR and then copy to my media server to watch in HD. This was stuff Vegas simply wasn't designed to do. It's all about using the right tool for the job.

> I don't know any golfers that went out and bought a set of clubs based on a particular golf course.

Have you looked inside a golf bag? Did you see only one club? No, they have clubs for all sorts of situations. Some golfers have less, some have more depending on what they can afford. They have clubs of all different qualities (wood, metal, graphite, composites, etc.). This is the same as video editing, There is no one tool. You have to look at the challenge and select the right tool just like you have to select the right golf club (good analogy btw although it wasn't the point you were trying to make) ;-)

Getting back to the original question, "What's Happened to Vegas", it should be rephrased, "What's Happened to the Video Industry" and the answer is "lack of standards". One tool cannot rule them all. We as video editors need to be prepared with a kit of tools to take those formats that are not "edit friendly" and transcode them into edit friendly formats and then use our favorite NLE that supports those formats. You just can't expect Vegas to open every file you through at it anymore. Those days are over. There are just too many formats with more popping up every day with each new $99 HD camera.

~jr