Thinking of jumping ship from FCP to Vegas.

Richard J. Johnson

Richard J. Johnson

Joystick Member
I Have been using FCP on a PowerPc G5 for a few years now and was thinking of going back to PC and running Vegas. Good Idea, Bad Idea? I have never used vegas, but I can build my own monster PC for much less money. And I have FCP academic and can't upgrade. PC is looking real good right now. :dankk2:
 
For DV, DVCPRO, and DVCPRO 50, sure. For P2HD stuff, it's fine, it's workable, it'll play. But best choices are Edius Broadcast and Premiere Pro CS3.

Vegas needs Raylight, of course.
 
I used Dual G5 1,8 with FCP5 when I has my old VX2000. Then I bought an FX1. When I moved from SD to HD, the FCP became a nightmare on G5. So, I decide to move. I changed my G5 to an iMac. It was also slow, with FCP. Then I tried Vegas7 first. It was fast enough.
Some of old progs are missing, like motion. I'm using Vegas8 actually, and I satisfied with it. 2-3times faster the render, than FCP. The editing is less complicated, no need to pre-cut in viewer. You can do this on timeline.
I'm working on 3 videoclips actually. The only thing what's missing, the motion. I can't found simular and cheap solution to solve it. I also use a Vista 64b HomePremium with Vegas. The system is going choppy, when the render goes. It isn't very bad, but You can't work on any other projects. The price could be a half to compare to the Mac&FCP solution.
I never used Edius, but I had experience with Premiere. The Vegas8 is my ultimate choice...
(excuse for my poor english)
 
funny

funny

I've been thinking of jumping to FCP,

I'm sick and tired of Vegas instability, I have it on my 'Sony' vaio 2.2Ghz laptop with 2Gb Ram, and I've got it on my quadcore desktop, and everytime you open something over about 600mb in trimmer it stalls and more often and not does nothing, forget right clicking on the file, under the explorer tab.
I keep on saying it'll be ok, just got to hold on until 8.0c to fix it. And here I am about to launch a TV series and I'm thinking, there's just no way I can use this on a series project. Beyond DVDs under an hour, because over that it falls over as well, which I accept now that its prob because 2Gb of RAM is not enough. And also how it can't handle simple jpgs without a ram leak as well. And then you have basic titling, and I haven't forked out another $60 for a training DVD to use it yet I must admit, but it's far from user friendly and crashes all the time.
Ok i'll get back in my corner now

sorry
 
For what its worth I went the other way. Had high spec. home build PC with Vegas (and others) running with the HVX.
Moved over to mac with quad core Mac Pro and FCP. Sure it takes a while to learn and get around some of the odd interfaces but I find it is extremely stable (has not crashed yet!) and for the money you pay for FCP you get a system that can provide just about everything you need. Invested quite a lot of time with Color and this program alone makes the whole deal worthwhile - you can go from great footage to amazing footage with this system. Can't think of anything close on the PC for that money.
OK hardware upgrade is not cheap, but I recon from my experience you recover the cost delta very quickly. You have also invested your time in learning a slightly more industrial norm with much wider support and flexibility.
 
For what it's worth, Vegas Pro v8.0b has been absolutely stable on my Intel QX6700 Quad-core running an Intel motherboard. I use Vegas each and every day for primarily HD projects, some for network broadcast. No problems whatsoever.
 
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doumm said:
I've been thinking of jumping to FCP,

I'm sick and tired of Vegas instability, I have it on my 'Sony' vaio 2.2Ghz laptop with 2Gb Ram, and I've got it on my quadcore desktop, and everytime you open something over about 600mb in trimmer it stalls and more often and not does nothing, forget right clicking on the file, under the explorer tab.
I keep on saying it'll be ok, just got to hold on until 8.0c to fix it. And here I am about to launch a TV series and I'm thinking, there's just no way I can use this on a series project. Beyond DVDs under an hour, because over that it falls over as well, which I accept now that its prob because 2Gb of RAM is not enough. And also how it can't handle simple jpgs without a ram leak as well. And then you have basic titling, and I haven't forked out another $60 for a training DVD to use it yet I must admit, but it's far from user friendly and crashes all the time.
Ok i'll get back in my corner now

sorry
Click to expand...

I'd look into hardware problems -- you're describing behavior I've never seen out of Vegas, on many different machines, all with under 2 GB of RAM. It should be rock-solid stable.
 
brianluce said:
Yeah this must be the first time I've heard Vegas bashed for instability. That's usually considered a forte.
Click to expand...
I felt some problems with vegas7, but those are eliminated in vegas8. For example:
I captured some HDV footage, the program had a crash while importing files (after pressing stop capture). I restarted the program, it won't read some of the files. Clip must be re-captured. When I moved to vegas8, I never taste it afterwards.
 
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Out of curiosity is anybody using XP SP3? I'm wondering how much instability is due to this, also Net Frame 3.5?
I spent about 15hours on a project that crashed 12 to 15 times in the last 6hours, and then on top of that, when I render crashes to desktop, and this project is a career making one that I was upto 3am this morning trying to make it work.
In other words, not happy
 
I switched to Vista (64bit homepremium) since July. I used XP w SP3, before that. I never experienced any issues between Vegas and XP.
If You have an empty harddisk, I recommend to You a clean install with vegas only. You can check: is it stable or not?
 
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I have both a 2 Gig Intel Duo Core laptop (HP9060) and a workstation that I builit with 4 Gig / Quad core / Nvidia Quadro 1500FX card and since I worked out some of the setting's for rendering and stopped using giant size JPEG'S and PNG's I've had very few crashes. And I work in SD & HD, HDV and P2 natively with Raylight; I also open multiple instances of Vegas, Boris, and other programs at the same time. And I still rarely have problems. And one last thing, I use Boris Red as a plug in and using 3rd party products seems to cause everyone problems. I find it runs great even with the MXF files. And as a titling /effects / compositing package it sure makes it easy to get nice looking results.

Just my .02 cents. Hate to hear Vegas get a black eye when it sounds like you've got machine or other problems.
 
I found my computer locking up completely with 8.0b, so I went back to 8.0a and it never happened again.

If you buy 8.0b, you can still download and use 8.0a with the same license. Add Raylight into the mix, and DVCPRO-HD is a cinch to work with.

In fact, if you use Raylight Red and create proxy AVI files, any system that can play back standard-def SD footage at a decent frame rate can be used to edit HD.

I recently bought a $650 Dell PC with Vegas for editing at home, which I much prefer to the $2,899 Mac Pro with FCP that I use at work!
 
I've asked this before but never rec'd an answer. What is the issue with 8b? I always update immediately and haven't had a problem with either machine. Any ideas?
 
>I recently bought a $650 Dell PC with Vegas for editing at home,
>which I much prefer to the $2,899 Mac Pro with FCP that I use at work!

Same here. $600 Hp laptop, raylight, vegas 8.0b

I was able to take a commercial that was edited on FCP, take the P2 footage home, install Vegas, Read a bit in this book: "Vegas Pro 8 Editing Workshop by Douglas Spotted Eagle" and in 8 hours I not only figured out Vegas, I had a fully recut commercial burned to tape (at home!) ready for the client. (and the paycheck!) The commercial aired on all local network stations the next day.

Is it all things that FCP is? Dunno yet. Is it a killer deal for the money. Yes. It'll get the job done for sure.



BTW, thanks to this forum for finding the answers to my vegas/raylight questions before I even asked them! Couldn't have done it w/o DVXuser.
 
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