So, Spot, 18 months and I will have had to have HD in place? Ok.

I really don't want to be left behind on the Vegas platform, only using say Vegas 5. Thanks for the reassurance on that one.

I guess you have far more and more demanding clients than I. I've yet to see a standalone DVD player in one of the organiations I do do work for! Most of them still have VCRs blinking 00:00 into the night . . . Yes, dumbed down HD is still HD waiting and ready for when their new HD monitors appear on the scene. But if it HASN'T been filmed and edited in HD, then they got nothing - well SD. Now THAT might be an issue for me! Hadn't thought of THAT wrinkle. . .. hmmm....

Grazie

I might put a slightly different spin on it to SPOT, at least a view from down under.
I don't see a lot of HD happening, sure a lot of stuff is being sold as "HD ready" whatever that might mean. But the actual amount of HD being shot and broadcast isn't that great. That's NOT to say they're not broadcasting a HD signal 24/7, it's just that a lot of the content is upsampled SD.
Now DVB (DTV) is a big thing. The government has mandated that analogue transmission will cease in I think the end of 2006 so DVB receivers are selling very well down here. The difference in image quality is staggering, plain old SD looks so much better, particularly if you can get RGB from the decoder to the TV.
So what does all this mean. Well I think SD has still got a fair bit of life left in it, but it has to be 16:9. Good 16:9 4:2:2 upsamples pretty well to HD, 4:3 4:2:0, well I think you could say it's already dead down here if you want to sell it to a network. Even much of the corporate stuff is now for widescreen plasma displays, now you might or might not need to be shooting HD, but you sure need 16:9.
Bob.

Grazie, I'm not saying you'll have to have HD in place, but if you aren't prepared to talk to clients about HD in 18 months, you'll be lost. You'll have clients asking about it, and you'll need to answer intelligently, that's all. Will all DV cams go "Poof" in 18 months? Of course not. Folks will still be watching DVDs, and DV is great for that. But....
You'll also need to learn new ways of shooting, as per what Bob mentions above. You'll likely need to buy an anamorphic adapter, and you'll likely need to have access to an HD Camcorder for certain clients.
It's kinda funny that today videographers are also editors are also color correctionists are also mastering post editors. Used to be, if you had a camera, you handed tape to the client at end of day and said "Have fun!"
It's gonna be a long while before you see everything broadcasting 24/7 in HD...at least here in the US. Europe seems to be heading to that goal a little faster.

Grazie,
I'm very much using gaussion blur on 1080 HD and it seems to work just fine on both HD and SD, although I still don't know just what the 0.001 means. I mean PS specifies pretty well everything in px which means you know precisely what it's doing.
I do find a LOT of the Vegas FXs a bit confusing as there's no clue as to what the units are they're referring to.
Hopefully someone can fill me in on this.
Bob.

Grazie:

EXCELLENT question/observation/comment/???

SONY WILL move in the HD Direction - its a given. Those of us that had/have dpsVelocity - LeItch moved into the Studio/Professional end with the release of HD and left others hanging. YES for an additional $10K you could move but in our situation - not justified. So, we now have a dpsVelocity $6K editing suite just collecting dust. This is precisely why we moved to Vegas. IT’S NOT WILL IT HAPPEN but WHEN WILL IT HAPPEN!!!

Jerry Bryant

BUT it happened years ago!
Ever since I bought V4 I've been happily outputting 1080i, have I missed something?
That's the whole pint of Vegas, it is format and hardware agnostic. It solely relies on CPU power to get the job done. Given enough CPU it can output uncompressed 1080 in realtime.
You cannot connect a HDCAM deck and get machine control and I doubt you'll every see that in Vegas but buy a HD card and you get the means to do it outside of Vegas anyway. Once you've captured your footage Vegas will edit it.
The ONLY thing that COULD happen is Vegas gets a serious step up to handle 10 bit video but I don't see that this decade, Sony already have a high end system that works nicely with Vegas, XPRI.
Bob.

Hey Spot...

I'm interested in what your vision of the future says about film transfer? Since most of what I do is ultimately destined for celluloid, are there transfer houses out there clamoring for an effective means to put HDV on film? This does mean 24p, I beleive. DVFilm will now convert HDV to 24p.....
http://www.dvfilm.com/fx1/index.htm

I'm not trying to be a wise-ass, just trying to understand my migration path.

Yeah, I think there are transfer houses gearing up for this, based on the "chatter" I see for NAB. But the 24p isn't part of that. Most transferhouses, in fact all the transfer houses I've trained in Vegas, have all said they prefer 60i or 30p to do the transfer, and then they manage the pulldown. Since I don't do a lot of this myself, I can only take them at their word.
So.....how does that affect you? I'm not sure it does.

The Sony cams don't have 24p so you're better off starting with 60i and converting it in post.

The RE:Vision tools seem to make the best job of deinterlacing and frame rate conversion (http://www.revisionfx.com). Better than other tools I have seen. Not supercheap, but gooood. Anybody know anything better, I'd like to hear about it.

"The ONLY thing that COULD happen is Vegas gets a serious step up to handle 10 bit video but I don't see that this decade, Sony already have a high end system that works nicely with Vegas, XPRI."

XPRI is 8-bit only.

I'd also like to see 10-bit in Vegas (as that is what I shoot), but I'm making
good progress with workarounds.

Grazie,

Vegas already works in HD resolutions and can work in 4:4:4 color spaces using 8 bit color. So in that sense you're okay since Vegas isn't really limited to SD with 4:1:1 sampling.

However, at the minimum, Vegas will need some subsitute for the 1394 card. If you want to work in a non-DV format then Vegas will need to output something other than DV25 to your monitor. Generally, Vegas uses standardized system plumbing so you'll be required to use some sort of commonly available output-probably an output on a graphic card that is dedicated and configured to drive an HDTV monitor with a dgital signal. This will be useful in general as the whole objection to using video output on current cards like the All in Wonder is that these don't neccesarily give you true and accurate output. Digital output over DVI should be pretty true to the original, I'd think

If you are working with HDV you'll be using an intermediate format and then outputting that to your monitor as you work. You'll also need to output the final program to whatever medium you prefer.

Although I haven't heard it lately, some people used to advocate either a more expensive price tag for vegas or a higher tiered Vegas Pro type product. I suppose that HDV might provide a jumping off point. The higher tiered product might provide certain hardware compatibility, better compositing tools, better titling, and generally better media management. It would be geared towards long form projects going to HD, but it wouldn't work with HD media directly.

I don't feel that there's much of a linear flow from Studio to Vegas but it seems a worthwhile goal to build that flow into the product line in the future:

Studio=>Vegas=>Vegas Pro=>=>XPRI

XPRI isn't really in the product line but I think it would be wise on Sony's part to work on funneling Vegas projects up to XPRI for finishing.

Vegas projects already do open up in Xpri, see the last chapter of the Vegas 5 Editing Workshop book.
Export XML from Vegas, you're good to go. Works better than AAF. Julian Ramm (Sony Xpri guy) and I did this at a couple different tradeshows together recently, using media from Fear Factor with lots of fast cuts, titles, and basic transitions.

Thanks for all your inputs . . interesting thoughtful thread. - Graham