Thinking of jumping ship from FCP to Vegas.

I have almost David's exact setup (slower quad core though) and just finished a 1080i 4.5 hour DVD project (long-form) and it works just like it should. My renders out of Vegas to a DVD-A compliant MPEG-2 were 2x realtime after levels/color correction being inside nested projects.
 
Thanks David; I would be interested in hearing back from you once you do some long-form renders. The longer I deal with this, though, the more I think the problem has been with my Asus P5N-E SLI motherboard. All the tech forums, especially Anandtech, report frequent memory issues with it. Given the number of people who report no problems with Vegas 8.0b, it certainly makes more sense.
 
Thanks William, so much. Are you running the exact same motherboard? And what specific processor? And could you tell me what kind of memory you are running? And, sorry, one more question; what OS? XP SP2?
 
It WILL run on anything. I've ran vegas4 on a 600 MHZ computer, it didn't even have a cd drive!

I run vegas8 on a 1.8 GHZ, 1.0 gig of RAM... it purrs like a leopard. (do leopards purr?)
 
DVXSanDiego (Mark Holmes) -

Have you adjusted your video settings under Preferences? Check your numbers there, I had constant lockups during render until I talked to Sony HelpDesk and they told me to adjust the Dyanmic Ram Preview to 512 Mb and #of threads to 3 (I have a duo core laptop with 2 Gb ram and a quad core workstaion with 4 Gb ram).

The basic recommendation is to up the minimum level of ram (I've gone as high as 728 on my workstation) and keep the number of threads to one less than total. This allows the machine to continue with other behind the scenes activities that might interfere with rendereing. But don't set ram too high or it will run out of ram for other operations....

I'd try that before I toss my computer!

Also, are you making sure to lower the resolution of any stills or 3D work to less than 2K? I do a lot of work that mixes photos in with video, and hangups are routine if I don't re-size the picutres to about 1K for most work. I also try not to use the stretch video checkbox on render settings if I don't need to. Instead I make sure all my picutres and video fill the frame using the event pan/crop tool and unchecking the source>maintain aspect ratio if the picture or video doesn't fill the frame properly

Don't know if anyone else has had these issues, but it works for me. My longest projects to date have been running an hour or so. I just finished an eight minute project with 14 tracks, green screen, color correction, multiple layers of Boris Red compositing for titles and effects (done in Vegas as a plug-in), plus an imported uncompressed QT render of a 3D effect, and 3 layers of audio. It rendered to MPEG-2 perfectly.
 
I've been a FCE and FCP user for years but the glowing remarks about Vegas have really piqued my curiosity. I'm most interested due to the affordability of the program itself and the fact that I wouldn't have to have a $4000 computer to run it.
I did read some posts, in another thread, which mentioned that Sony's acquisition of Vegas is unfortunately pushing the program into being a more proprietary app. Is it true that only Sony's breed of AVCHD is compatible? If it is, it's rather unfortunate and short-sighted of Sony and would definitely make me think twice before switching.
 
aramikvideo said:
Is it true that only Sony's breed of AVCHD is compatible? If it is, it's rather unfortunate and short-sighted of Sony and would definitely make me think twice before switching.
Click to expand...
No, not exactly. Sony, when they added AVC-HD compatibility, guaranteed it only for Sony camcorders. The attitude seemed to be "well, others might work, or might not, you get what you get." Since then they have fixed some aspects to allow better compatibility. Whether they'll offer all-encompassing support remains to be seen. It would indeed be foolish of them to perpetuate a "Sony-only" attitude.
 
Barry_Green said:
It would indeed be foolish of them to perpetuate a "Sony-only" attitude.
Click to expand...

Which makes me wonder why they do what they do.

On one hand, it makes sense -- we make cameras, we're going to support them, and that's our priority -- but the "eh, if it works, it works" attitude displayed toward everyone else's cameras seems foolhardy in the extreme.

Is it that they think they can get more people to buy Sony cameras if they get them hooked on Vegas? There are those for whom the editing the software is the #1 priority, but I have to think they're in the minority.

Whatever the reason, it's an approach I find to be exactly backwards and contemptuous of the customer.

Where exactly do they want Vegas to go? What market do they want? I simply can't tell. But one thing's for sure, they haven't given it the functionality it needs to increase its market share among non-Sony users.

For DV, it's still the best choice, IMO. But the DV world is shrinking very quickly.
 
aramikvideo said:
Is it true that only Sony's breed of AVCHD is compatible? .
Click to expand...

The Vegas 8.0c update has fixed some bad issues with AVCHD but it's getting better - probably not much worse than support in the other NLEs now. Canon AVCHD runs pretty slick now, better than it did in the last build.

Like David said though, I don't think Sony Creative has a detailed plan on where they want to be with Vegas - cater to the consumer? cater to the pro? it's such a hodge podge of both, they just can't make up their mind.

I also agree that for DV, no editor comes close to Vegas. If you're wanting to stay in one program for decent compositing function, color correction and audio tools, Vegas still wins well in that department too.

I will say with the new ProRes decoder, taking .m2ts and AVCHD into FCP, converting to ProRes and then bringing into Vegas is my best workflow yet, even though they both appear to be a bit better supported with the new Vegas build.

cheno
 
Ducatimark said:
DVXSanDiego (Mark Holmes) -

Have you adjusted your video settings under Preferences? Check your numbers there, I had constant lockups during render until I talked to Sony HelpDesk and they told me to adjust the Dyanmic Ram Preview to 512 Mb and #of threads to 3 (I have a duo core laptop with 2 Gb ram and a quad core workstaion with 4 Gb ram).

The basic recommendation is to up the minimum level of ram (I've gone as high as 728 on my workstation) and keep the number of threads to one less than total. This allows the machine to continue with other behind the scenes activities that might interfere with rendereing. But don't set ram too high or it will run out of ram for other operations....

I'd try that before I toss my computer!

Also, are you making sure to lower the resolution of any stills or 3D work to less than 2K? I do a lot of work that mixes photos in with video, and hangups are routine if I don't re-size the picutres to about 1K for most work. I also try not to use the stretch video checkbox on render settings if I don't need to. Instead I make sure all my picutres and video fill the frame using the event pan/crop tool and unchecking the source>maintain aspect ratio if the picture or video doesn't fill the frame properly

Don't know if anyone else has had these issues, but it works for me. My longest projects to date have been running an hour or so. I just finished an eight minute project with 14 tracks, green screen, color correction, multiple layers of Boris Red compositing for titles and effects (done in Vegas as a plug-in), plus an imported uncompressed QT render of a 3D effect, and 3 layers of audio. It rendered to MPEG-2 perfectly.
Click to expand...

Hey Mark,

Thanks for the input, and I think I'll try it, (maybe on my next system) but it is increasingly looking like it's the hardware. There was a burning electrical smell coming from the computer on startup today. I shut down, blew out the inside with compressed air in case it was dusty, and restarted. Still burning smell. I tried operating it, brought up the internet, just waiting to see what happened. The computer just shut down, no warning, like the plug had been pulled from the wall. I tried rebooting after a few minutes, and it seemed to start up fine, but I immediately shut it back down.

This is a packaged system, too, from Velocity Micro. Not happy right now. It's only about 18 months old...

Maybe it's going to be an HP workstation this time... with an extended service contract...
 
DVXSanDiego said:
Hey Mark,

Thanks for the input, and I think I'll try it, (maybe on my next system) but it is increasingly looking like it's the hardware. There was a burning electrical smell coming from the computer on startup today. I shut down, blew out the inside with compressed air in case it was dusty, and restarted. Still burning smell. I tried operating it, brought up the internet, just waiting to see what happened. The computer just shut down, no warning, like the plug had been pulled from the wall. I tried rebooting after a few minutes, and it seemed to start up fine, but I immediately shut it back down.

This is a packaged system, too, from Velocity Micro. Not happy right now. It's only about 18 months old...

Maybe it's going to be an HP workstation this time... with an extended service contract...
Click to expand...

Sounds like your power supply blew up. They are usually fairly easy to replace, and you can get a decent one from NewEgg for about $45. Usually with pre-built computers, they get cheap power supplies to keep the cost down. However, buying a new computer is always fun, too. :)

I've been reading this thread because I'm a PC guy. I have a small business building computers and doing networking, but the only editing I've done, other than just "playing around" has been with FCS2. Ironically, the biggest learning curve for me was figuring out how to use a Mac. I've been reading this thread because I have a computer that I built almost 2 years ago and it was a beast at the time and I wanted to see if there was a good way to do some editing on it. It's got a Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz with 2GB of DDR2 1066 RAM, 320GB SATA2 OS drive, 1TB RAID 5 array for storage and a GeForce 8800GTX video card. It sounds like this would be a pretty good setup for Vegas, and with all of the glowing reviews I've heard on this thread, I'm pretty much on board. I do SD projects shot on the HVX and an older Canon ZR45MC (I know, but 7 years ago it was an $800 camera) as much, if not more than HD stuff shot with the HVX. If I keep the HD stuff on the Mac, then I think I'll have a great little DV editing machine.

Thanks for all the great info and opinions in this thread.

One other thing. I currently dual boot with XP SP2 and Vista Ultimate 32 bit. Any idea which would be better for Vegas? I'm willing to do a clean install of either one, since I've just started getting a little bit of instability in XP and I don't have much installed on Vista other than a few games that I can alway re-install if I need them.
 
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Hey All,

I have been going back on forth on FCP and Vegas for over a year now and I found this thread very helpful and balanced. However, it raised a few questions for me:

Reading between the lines, I assume one can run Vegas on a Mac partitioned with say XP Pro? Any hardware issues? Or is it better to stay with PC based machines?

I have always directed /subbed out editors however two upcoming projects will absolutely require me to edit so it begs the question: Do I learn on FCP which seems to be industry standard (cult) or Vegas for ease and learning? Sony's lack of direction with Vegas and the increasing need for HD projects (not to mention Premiere Pro which Davids HD comments caught my attention) is something that has kept me at the crossroads.

Because I consistently run up against mac/pc issues with clients, it seems the choice is go with Mac and have the boot option to run windows.

Comments? Real world experience?

Thanks!
 
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If you have to work with the outside world, FCP is the way to go. I don't know of any industry professionals in my circle that have ever seen Vegas. I cut FCP at work and Vegas at home.
 
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