HVX200 -> Avid Xpress or Vegas 7?

M

mik303

Active member
I sold my DVX100 recently and upgraded to an HVX200. I'm very proud of my new camera and all of it's new features. I do low budget music videos right now. On the last music video, I shot in 720/24pn mode, and then just dubbed the footage down to miniDV tape when the card got full. That was fine for a small client, and the footage looked better than just regular DVX100 footage (especially with the gliding 60 frames slow motion). I need some advice for the future though.

I own Vegas 5, and for editing DV, that was great. Is it worth it to upgrade to Vegas 7 and add the Raylight plug-in to edit DVCPRO HD. Or should I go to Avid Xpress Pro?

1) Which program handles DVCPRO HD better?
2) Does Avid Xpress Render more quickly than Vegas 7 + Raylight?
3) Are there limitations that the Vegas 7 + Raylight combo has, that Avid does not?
4) Is my current laptop completely under powered to render a 4 minute music video with effects in DVCPRO HD?
5) Does Avid Xpress Pro have network rendering features like Vegas does? (I've never done that, but it sounds cool.)

Any advice would be great.


My current setup:

Panasonic HVX200
External Harddrive 300 gigs, Firewire
(1) 8 gig P2 card
Dell Latitude 2.0 ghz, P4 Laptop PC, w/ 1.5 gigs RAM
Sony Vegas 5
Magic Bullett
 
You're going to want a new laptop. A 2.0 GHz processor is weak even for DV.

1) Natively, Avid, because Vegas needs Raylight. Avid had better playback than Vegas/Raylight, but that may change once Raylight 3.0 comes out of beta and into production.

2) Don't know.

3) Limitations of what? Actually, Avid is limited compared to Vegas/Raylight, considering (unless it's changed very recently) that you can't remove pulldown from 1080/24pA footage or DVCPRO 50 24pA footage in Avid. It's also a more complicated process to import the footage.

4) It's not the render which is a problem -- Vegas will render (almost) anything on (almost) any computer -- it'll just take a long time.

5) Don't know.


I'll tell you what, though . . . after working in Vegas, you are going to haaaaaate Avid. And when I say "haaaaaate," I mean despise, loathe, curse, wish nothing but death upon . . .

Vegas is a simple, elegant, intuitive dream. Avid . . . isn't.
 
Loving Vegas...

Loving Vegas...

yeah... I love Vegas, and I've always heard that Avid was not as intuitive. I had no idea about the Raylight 3.0 update. Good info, thanks alot.

I've read about Sony Vegas with 64 bit support with AMD coming in the fall. If they could throw DVCPROHD support in there too, that would be pretty nice.

I will take your advice about looking for a faster machine.


Thanks David.
 
Don't hold your breath. They will not add DVCPRO HD support.

Raylight does great things from what I have read. Filling in the gap that Vegas and Premiere (for some reason) won't fill. It's not like DVCPRO is an obscure codec... But, anyways.

Native support will probably always be the optimum choice (until computers get a pretty decent clip more powerful. That said, as David pointed out, it's still going to be easier to get your mxf files from your card to the timeline w/ Raylight than with Avid. But, I would imagine you can expect better real-time from Avid. At least from the recording formats that Avid supports.

You could always try out a trial verison of EDIUS Broadcast too. It's not the most intuitive of NLE's, but it is super powerful and has full and proper support for HVX/P2. Just an option. Pick the one you want, of course, but if proper p2 support is really important to you, then EDIUS would be the way to go. Beyond that, it just comes down to personal preference.

Later,
Jason
 
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