Vegas is in pretty good shape. It is version 4, after all. DVDA is another story. The DVDA forum already contains several threads about new feature requests. I won't repeat them here.
Personnaly, the one and only feature I would like added to Vegas is nested timelines. I saw that in FCP and Pinnacle Edition and I think it's an essential feature.
I would love to loop a region and select "create new object from the events" I would then have a big block containing all my events. I could apply transitions and effects to that block which would affect all the events. And by rightclicking the block I could access all the events as they were in the begining in a new Timeline that would either popup in a new window or appear as a new tab.
I'd say the whole group / ungroup area needs some serious work.
Unless I'm really stupid (more than likely) I cannot see anyway to actually display what is grouped with what. I haven't really tried any complex setups with large numbers of audio and video tracks but without someway to lock mulitple events and a visual cue as to what is locked to what it must get might confusing. I know this can be handled through good workflow practices but the great thing about VV in general is how it ignores the traditional methodolgies.
Perhaps the best way to do this is through a parent /child relationship. I could for example have four audio events as childs of one video event and it is in turn a child of another video event. Whenever I move a parent all its children go with it but I can move any of the children without affecting the parent.
Of course you'd still need to create sibling relationships so that you could lock audio to video.
Maybe thats all a bit hard and might be a difficult concept for users to grasp, but at least VV should keep captured video and its matching audio locked until told to unlock it, this is about the only good thing Premiere seems to do compare to VV. It seems to start out that way but doing something as simple as splitting an event and then deleting the video to the right of the split still leaves the audio there. Fine if you realise whats happening but its not logical and its one more thing your brain has to keep track of.
Bins - in anything V4 does. Use a clip from a Bin - move clip on TL do UNDO - Bin cllapses into the Media Pool & standard Bin. Very frustrating. Bins from Advance Capture to Bins in Media Pool. Creation of Bins in AdvCap don't appear in Openned V4 Project, from whence I started the AdvCap session.
Listen, I may be doing something incorrectly, but I don't think so.
I'd like to be able to use Pan/Crop motion of a clip and the Vector path of that clip to be registered in the Key/Frame T/L.
I've got some ideas about the K/F function as well, but I'm being greedy.
1. Incorporate a credit roll with adjustable pre-delay and post delay and use
very small and slow speed fonts that don't blink like stars. (I haven't tried this in 4.0c
yet so it might not be relevant)
2. Incorporate some of the Virtual dub stuff that would help solve some of the
intermitant analog capture judder.
3. Come up with a video noise reduction filter that is astounding, even better than
the sound noise reduction algorithm. If the filter is super good then people would
have to buy V-4.0.
4. Make it totally HD fluent from front to back.
5. Make recommendations on how much computing power is necessary to view
all realtime stuff without slowing down frame rate.
I would after to agree the one area when Vegas is weak is in removing video noise. Having to pre process or frame serve to do it simply shouldn't be necessary in an otherwise top notch application. I know some of the FX filters already there help, but none attack the problem head on like many VirtualDub filters do.
I think the Video Bus is one of Vegas 4 most oridiginal and best features, but often when I use it I think it would be great if you could apply all the same attributes that are incorporated on regular tracks (pan,crop,motion,effects,automation...) to the Video Bus - and maybe the ability to have more than one Video Bus. I think this would take care of the nesting feature requests and compositing would be amazing
Hey jetdv, I was one of the FIRST to by Excalibur AND used it on two multicam
projects already. I would just like something I guess that would be MORE seamless
with Vegas. Like combining the program "Multicam" and "Vegas" together.
I guess I should NOT have made it the #1 choice, because of excalibur!
1. Much better titling capability. Premiere’s new titler is really good in this respect. Vegas title box is also very small to work in.
2. 3d capability in the event/pan tool.
3. Bezier curves
4. A true realtime hardware box with true realtime capabilities like Storm and Avid Mojo. This would bring many over from the dark side as Premiere still really sucks –but true realtime is not always easy to give up. Come on Sony – you can do it!
5. Photoshop layer import support (as a composition each layer landing on it’s own track)
6. Better forums where you can expand an entire thread to read it (see Canopus forums)
Speaking from a film editing perspective - meaning the ability to edit a feature film as a basic bottom line:
1> Built in EDL Import/Export that supports formats such as CMX and Grass Valley. A subsection to this might be the ability to import/convert other EDL formats - Avid, Premiere, etc.
2> Better sync locking and insert edit ability.
3> Ability to change the layout fully. Currently you really can't move the actual timeline as it is glued in place.
4> Better bin handling.
5> Deck control. (Not just firewire)
Options that are nice in addition to editing -
6> Support for photoshop image format.
7> HD supported fully via software and cards such as BlueFish cards.
8> Ability to *not* convert/render all audio to *.w64 format before a PTT is possible via firewire.
9> Full function title program *or* the ability to import TitleDeko layouts into VV.
10> Ability to save presets so that other users can easly use them.
IMHO VV is an awesome program and clearly comes from an audio mixing POV overall. The fact it can edit is a plus and the fact that SoFo has tossed in all sorts of extras such as Color Correction and lots of nifty filters is a huge bonus. However I also feel that VV is, at times, trying to be a swiss army knife NLE. Lots of people don't seem to care about the EDL ability, for example, on the video side but the fact there is a plug-in that will convert VV EDL's to work in other software DAW's shows that there is a stronger Audio use than Video at the moment.
1. Drag and drop regions from the trimmer or explorer to the Media Pool to create instant sub-clips.
2. Customizable button icons for scripts on the toolbar.
3. Better 3-point editing model that follows standard conventions and automatically places trimmed clips on selected tracks. (i.e., set in and out points on timeline, set in OR out point in clip in the trimmer, press button and have video delivered to selected track, and audio placed in synch on selected audio track.)