Why Vegas?

IBEJohnson

IBEJohnson

Well-known member
Let me say that I'm an FCP guy since v2 (I can already feel the loathe building toward me). :Drogar-Evil(DBG):

Anyway, I've been out of the scene for that last couple years and I no longer have a Mac. I'm ready to get going again and my knee-jerk reaction is to buy a Mac and FCP Studio. But, since I here so many good things about Vegas, I was hoping all of you Vegas junkies might try to make a believer out of me before I blow $3000 on an editing system. My question is simple, why Vegas? Why not FCP? For that matter, why not Adobe Premiere?

Oh, and please, no Apple haters. I'm honestly looking for an objective comparison of the two editing systems.

Thanks!
 
FCP is a great program. You'll get no hate from me.

However, Vegas has all the power of FCP, yet I'm running it extremely efficiently on a 4+ year old PC (AMD Athlon 1.8Ghz). That's a huge plus, if you ask me.
 
I used to be a Premier user. I can’t say much about FCP as I’ve only had very limited experience with it. When I looked for simple editing for home use I didn’t want to spend the money on Premier, so I started with Video Factory (Used to be Vegas’ little brother). I finally upgraded at home to Vegas and was impressed with how much it does. In fact, I soon found I was doing everything I was doing at work in Premier, and doing it faster and more efficiently. I love the intuitive work flow, and the depth of power. I finally switch from Premier at work to Vegas about 2 years ago, and continue to be a very happy Vegas user both at work and at home.
 
saturnin said:
dont do it.... if u familair with vegas swtich to the Adobe suite, Prmiere pro 2 etc
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I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. I'm only familiar with FCP, neither Vegas nor Premiere.

Eric
 
Vegas 6d sells for $99.

Vegas is super easy to use

Vegas run on anything and is very stable.

It's powerful.

It has the best audio features of any NLE around.

It has a cool name.
 
I started editing 6 years ago on a real time Canopus DVStorm/Premiere 6 system. Though my system was stable with nearly every other program, I got my share of crashes with Premiere.

I did a number of projects on that system and used other, interim solutions for MPEG encoding and DVD authoring. I never found the system particularly good nor particularly bad because of my limited experience with alternatives. The interface looked and behaved reasonably similarly to the Media 100 system I'd had brief experience with at a friend's studio. So I just accepted that Premiere is how NLEs work.

When I could no longer escape the need for AC-3 audio encoding because of the length of projects I was authoring to DVD, I looked for cheap ways to get it. One of the cheapest turned out to be Vegas, then at version 4, which was being offered at a special discount at the time with DVD Architect. So I bought the package, not really intending to even use the editor so much as to use the AC-3 encoding from DVD Architect.

What a revelation I was to have. All of a sudden, I'm presented with an editing interface that makes complete, total intuitive sense. Contextual menus, tool tips, outstanding use of mousewheel shortcuts to zoom in and out and perform other tasks, intuitive use of arrow keys and modified arrow commands, slip editing that's a breeze, grouping of related functions in tabs, and on and on. I can only tell you that I rarely had need to consult the manual because everything was so well laid -- and thought -- out.

Not only that, but I never experienced a single crash during the entire summer that I spent editing dance videos. Can you say "stable"?

Full-featured, powerful audio was at the time one of Vegas' most distinguishing features and remains a great strength.

Admitedly I never got to Premiere Pro, which came out shortly after all this, so I can't compare that product. But its improvements, I'm willing to wager, were due in no small part to the excellence and burgeoning reputation Vegas was gaining at the time, forcing Adobe to completely rehaul its arcane interface and offer a competitive product.

Vegas has remained a joy to work with right up until version 7, where I am now. There are excellent and cheap add on tools that take advantage of Vegas' scripting engine, like Excalibur for multi-camera editing. Use that and you'll never want to edit multi cam any other way.

DVD Architect also does everything I could want to do for DVD authoring and does it with an interface that's every bit as intuitive and easy as Vegas. When you get this bundle, your learning curve will be very gentle.

Vegas has obviously been behind other products in integration with the HVX200 and other DVCPro HD cams. And it still has resolution and color-space limits that make it unsuitable for certain very high end projects. But my understanding is Raylight has ridden in on a white horse to offer the needed HVX support, so even that is not a deal breaker.

All this just goes to show that Vegas and DVD Architect probably would be even better products today had Sony not bought out Sonic Foundry, but, well, you can't have everything.:-) As things stand, I can still unqualifiedly recommend it for anything in the HD and under realm of video editing and DVD authoring/mastering. I think you'd have a hard time finding a better value in that type of product.
 
eclaire, that was a pretty amazing summary of Vegas you gave. I went ahead and downloaded the trial version. Man, is that interface different from FCP! Everybody says the Vegas interface is very intuitive, so I guess I should give it chance, but as it is nw, it's like I've never edited in my life. I don't really know where to begin.

Any suggestions on where I should get some training?
 
There are lots of folks are there who can help. http://vasst.com has lots of training stuff - right on the site, plus training DVD's.

As for the different interface, here's the story I was told. Avid was the first out of the box. Then the software folks broke off and did premiere. After that, they moved on the FCP, so all 3 have a similar look and feel. Vegas came from an audio program originally (Sound Forge) and has a whole different look and feel.

I used Premier for a while, but could never really wrap my brain around it. I've used Vegas for about 4 years and frankly love it. I've never used FCP, but I watched a guy doing some work on it once, and was surprised at the number of steps that he had to go through to do what I was doing by dragging and dropping. Now with Vegas 7, and the new color shifts when you move things around, it's even easier.

Give it a chance for a day or two - you might check out another site that has a very very active Vegas forum - http://dvinfo.net. Doug Spotted Eagle hangs out there - although I believe he hangs around here too. He works with both FCP and Vegas, and I think Premiere too - having written books on all of them, so he's a good one to ask about the comparison. I find it very very fast, intuitive (for me) and very stable.
 
Here's a bit of info from another 4M. It's a paraphrase off the top of my head. Vegas is great because you can complete a project from digital acquisition to digital distribution. However, if you need match back capability as when working on a film project, it lacks this capability. Hope this helps.

LHB
 
LUCAS_HITCHBERG said:
Here's a bit of info from another 4M. It's a paraphrase off the top of my head. Vegas is great because you can complete a project from digital acquisition to digital distribution. However, if you need match back capability as when working on a film project, it lacks this capability. Hope this helps.

LHB
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I guess you are talking about the colorspace limitations that Eclaire also mentioned. Out of curiosity and desire to understand the current state of what's out there, would one of you guys care to point out what these limitations are.
 
I'd also be interested in knowing these limitations...I'm looking at cams and NLE's now for a future project, and as with most indy things, it's going to be fairly low budget. I'm looking at the Canon HX A1 right now. Any users with this cam/edit with Vegas? Looking forward to the replies :D
 
ZephyrStar said:
I'd also be interested in knowing these limitations...I'm looking at cams and NLE's now for a future project, and as with most indy things, it's going to be fairly low budget. I'm looking at the Canon HX A1 right now. Any users with this cam/edit with Vegas? Looking forward to the replies :D
Click to expand...

Vegas is limited to an 8bit color space. Other programs can work in 10bit and higher. This is really more important of you are matching color from different high end cameras or doing a project going to or coming in from film.

If your are working with DV, HDV or the DVC PRO HD and not going to film then its fine.

The XH-A1 records in a 4:2:2 color space but outputs 4:2:0 and DV is 4:1:1. I have used the Vegas Chroma Key and Secondary Color Correction with clips from my A1 with excellent results, in spite of the fact that you will hear that HDV is not good for Chroma Key work. The software works very well with HDV and the Canon A1.

To work with HDV or the DVC PRO HD you need Cineform Connect HD or Raylight from DV Film. The native recording format of HDV is Mpeg 2 (M2T). These add on programs convert the M2T files into high quality Intermediate AVI's that can be edited much more easily.

With Mpeg 2 you are rerenedering multiple 15 frame GOP's each time you edit or color correct a clip. This puts enormous strain on your CPU.

I started with Vegas 7d on a 3.06ghz P4 with 3mb or ram and the program runs very well but render times for HDV footage run between 3 and 4.5 times the run length of the finished project depending on the amount of FX, and CC that was applied.

I just added a 2.66ghz Core 2 Duo with 4mb of ram, a 512 mb video card with 500gb internal raid 0 SATA drives, and an external 1TB raid 0 hard drive for clips and rendering. This set up improves renders by 30% and makes my projects much more enjoyable.

There are many good NLE's out their with different strengths and weaknesses. Being realistic about your purpose and matching the equipment you need is the first step. Technology is changing rapidly and there will always be a "better/faster camera, computer or software" to think about. The A1 and Vegas work very well together. So will the Panny HVX 200.

I also use Premiere Pro 2.0 and Encore DVD, which I like for certain features while Vegas and DVD Architect make most tasks very simple yet its a powerful and capable program.

You can download the demo version of Vegas and DVD Architect for a test drive.

EDIT: Raylight now lets you drag and drop MXF files into Vegas directly .

S Cannon
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Good stuff. I was aware of the 10 bit vs 8 bit issue, but since starting out I definately won't have budget to go to film it doesn't matter. Vegas sounds like a dream and a well priced one at that. I'll take it for a test drive soon, just ordered a digital 8 cam to play around with (and for a project). Thanks for the info :)
 
I've been using vegas for 2 years or so. The ups are the well integrated workflow. Things like pan and scan bezier masks are atributes of timeline events or the lines themselves, rather than seperate entities that must be added. This seems to be more intuitive and quicker. The downside that I struggled with for quite a while was the render speed. On my 4-5 yo PC, rendering was 5x-10x the footage length. Now that I just picked up a Core2Duo 6600 and a rockin graphics card, render speeds are more like x/3. Real time rendering at last!!! The reason I stuck with the slow render times was that the quality was excelent, the price was right and the workflow nice. Add-ons like Bezier masks are icing on cake!
 
Some of the posts really hit the nail on the head in regards to Vegas. The thing about Vegas is that is is not just an NLE, if you have ever worked with a paint program you can bring in that experience to Vegas. If you ever tinkered with a paint program you'll find that Vegas can fufill in that respect with surprising results.

Also, the Vegas engineers don't sit around and wait for the complaint box to be full in regards to the development of the program. This product is constantly being improved to the point that the 10 bit issue will be resolved one day. I've used it since Version 3 and I can't believe the **** people can do with that program. I have also used Premiere and I'm gonna hold back on the cursing...it was not stable to say the least. Oh...God how I hated that program!
 
I just wanted to mention that Video cards don't play a role on preview or renders with Vegas since it is a 2D program. The best place to put your money is on the CPU and a bit more on good RAM. Good video cards are actually very bad for your productivity... (you'll spend your day playing video games :kali:)

Thanks for the posts!

Perhaps you guys could add a bit of info about 8.0's possible release and features if you know anything?
 
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