To upgrade, or not to upgrade. What's the answer?

Rogueone wrote on 4/21/2004, 7:28 AM
Now that people have had time to experiment with the real deal and the demo version, I have a question to all that have used it. I am trying to decide whether or not to upgrade to V5. I downloaded the demo last night, and I spent a short time with it. So far, I have not seen much in V5 that would give me incentive to upgrade to it. Now, I'll be honest, I spent all of 15 minutes on it, so I could have easily missed things. All I'm looking for here is people's opinions on if they think it's better, and what those improvements are. This is what I've found:

1. I dislike the overall look of V5, I agree with previous posts about it. It does strike me as cartoony and toyish. However, I do like the idea of an update with choosable skins for it.

Other than that, I really didn't see anything that was an improvement over V4. Now, I didn't get the Boris part, so that in itself could be a substantial adddition. Has anyone experimented with Boris, or what exactly can it do to improve the project?

2. DVDA2 could be worth the upgrade. If only Sony sold it separately, I might easily jump to it. It does look like DVDA2 has more control; I like the hierarchial DVD layout on the left window. End actions, of course, make a good reason to upgrade. Subtitles maybe. But other than that, is it worth the expense? I do congratulate Sony on their wonderful Upgrade prices to current Vegas/DVDA users, however can another program like DVDLab do all that DVDA2 can do? It is a cheaper program.

Sorry for the long post here. I'm just trying to figure out all the improvements and enhancements of the new bundle before I jump to it. Any comments would be appreciated!

Cheers,
Ben

Comments

BrianStanding wrote on 4/21/2004, 7:48 AM
May depend on what kind of work you do. For me, subclips alone are nearly worth upgrading. Certainly if you're doing any serious compositing or effects work (I don't), the track motion tools, 3D space and nested tracks look pretty amazing. Audio tools got a major boost, too. Vegas Regions to DVDA subtitles, support for multiple DVD audio and subtitles (hello, international market!), end actions and preview to an external monitor made V5 / DVDA2 a must-have for me, too.

I haven't had a chance to test it out, yet, but the network rendering feature looks very promising. One bummer is that, due, I suppose to licensing restrictions, MPEG-2, AC-3 or MP-3 rendering won't work on network rendering (or so the help file says). Still, I've been doing a lot with some film look presets (jetdv and filmy's, not Magic Bullet yet), that are very render intensive. I look forward to being able to get two (or maybe three) machines working in tandem on this to cut down rendering time.

People have been hankering for hardware rendering support for Vegas for some time, but I think this idea has more potential. Consider this: a Canopus DV Storm costs $800 or thereabouts. For that price, you could get two new P4 machines and set up a networked render farm, with far more flexibility than a dedicated video render card.

riredale wrote on 4/21/2004, 8:52 AM
I suspect you'll be kicking yourself six months from now if you don't jump on the special pricing right now. Besides, isn't it worth something to know that you can now produce DVDs as sophisticated as your buddies with Apple or Adobe can do? Everyone agrees that DVD-A v1 is/was pretty basic.
johnmeyer wrote on 4/21/2004, 9:43 AM
MPEG-2, AC-3 or MP-3 rendering won't work on network rendering

Is this true??? I haven't gotten my box yet (due Friday).

What is the point of network rendering if you can't do MPEG??? Let me see, what takes longer to render, DV AVI, or MPEG? Also, I understand you can't use it for prerenders. I'll reserve final judgement until I can try it myself.
SonyPJM wrote on 4/21/2004, 9:54 AM

I want to make sure everyone is clear on this:

MPEG files CAN be rendered using network rendering. However, those
encoders can not be used by render-only machines. But they can be
used by a machine that has a "full" installation. So what you do is
choose a different video segment format (typically you'd choose YUV or
DV) in the dialog that comes up after you select "Render using
networked computers" in the "Render As" dialog. The video segments
will be rendered in the alternate format and, during the final
stitching phase, they'll be encoded as MPEG.

I think for MP-3 and AC-3 it is even less of an issue because, for
audio-only renders, the main thing network rendering really gives you
is a render queue... you can still just queue them up on the machine
you're editing on.
Cheesehole wrote on 4/21/2004, 10:24 AM
>the main thing network rendering really gives you
is a render queue..

I hadn't realized that. Now I'm a lot more interested in Network rendering... A render queue would be awesome.
BrianStanding wrote on 4/21/2004, 10:39 AM
SonyPJM,

Let's say I have a DV project from which I'm making a DVD. I've put color curve and level filters on the entire project to simulate a film look. This means, of course, that every frame has to be rendered, then encoded. I want to use network rendering to speed things up.

If I understand you correctly, I'd be doing everything in two steps:
1) rendering FX and Filters first into DV with both networked machines sharing the work, then;
2) encoding the results from Step 1 to MPEG-2, using only one machine?

So, Step 1 will be faster, but Step 2 will not. Correct?

Is there any way to split up Step 2 (maybe doing MPEG-2 encoding in DVD Architect on one machine, and in Vegas on the other) to save more time without breaking my license agreement?
SonyPJM wrote on 4/21/2004, 11:24 AM
Yes there's two steps but there's still only 1 step that you need to
manually perform... it is pretty much the same as starting a normal
render except there's an extra dialog that gives you some network
render-specific options. What you'll probably want to do, since your
source is DV, is choose an MPEG template in the "Render As" dialog and
then choose a DV template for the segment format in the network render
dialog.

The two-step process is done automatically by the network render
service. First it will split your project's video into segments and
all the renderers will go to work on them. The renderers will spit out
DV files. When they're done, your editing machine will "stitch" the DV
segments together in the background. While it stitches the segments
together, it will also encode to MPEG.

In terms of speed, step 1 will be faster than a normal DV encode since
the work is split up among multiple machines. Step 2 will also be
pretty darn fast since all the effect processing has already been done
in step 1... step 2 will be a straight encode.

I guess you could do the MPEG encode in DVDA but, it won't save
time... you'll still need to wait for the Vegas to finish rendering
before you can bring it into DVDA.
BrianStanding wrote on 4/21/2004, 11:42 AM
OK, I think I got it. Thanks for the explanation.