We weren't asked, but I voluntarily submited countless product suggestions through the "Product Suggestion" page over the past year. One of the things I suggested was the bezier curve masking. Very cool.

Another thing was the real time envelope adjustments. Another cool feature.

JBJones

Uhm, okay, here's a few:

Better media management. Here's an enlightening excerpt from a thread on this forum (seems Vegas 5 can learn a lot from FCP4):

Media Mgt: In FCP I can "log" my clips by annotating them with markers (which function as both Vegas markers and regions). These markers persist and are visible IN THE MEDIA POOL hierarchically under the clip. It's as if the clip were a bin. I can drop these markers in the timeline and they become "events" named after the marker. I can also "tear off" these markers to make subclips that live in the media pool but are no longer children of the original clip. However, it's always easy to:

The above workflow is what should be implemented with subclips in Vegas 5, and I can already anticipate some of you saying there are workarounds, but for large projects having fewer workarounds would be welcome.

Otherwise, there's general media management flexibility that seems to me, admittedly a casual onlooker where code is concerned, puzzling in its omission. Some things seem necessary, like the ability to reorganize bins and rename them. Others seem like icing that would be nice to have, but for some closer to the necessary department -- like "storyboarding." Again -- yes, there are workarounds, but... how often is it that you accept that as an answer when you're money's on the line elsewhere?

Better capture tools -- i.e. more comprehensive organizational/logging/annotating tools within the capture application. I think this is something Vegas can learn a lot about from Scenealyzer -- once the above issues are addressed, it should be the goal to marry better media management with better capture tools, so that clips can be gathered to, and arranged in media bins with greater flexibility.

More robust EDL import/export -- I’m holding out hoping this will come but in other areas in life it’s never the case that I’m a betting man with my money – why should I have to be with Vegas? If nothing else, get this done to show Vegas, and more importantly, Sony’s plans with Vegas’s future, as capable of stepping up to the plate. AAF support seems to be the next wave to catch – where is it in Vegas 5? I’m not someone who needs OMF, but if that were added it wouldn’t hurt anyone.

Sensible Pre-renders -- I’ve gotten away from using these altogether because they’re all but entirely worthless. Now, if network rendering can function as a “workaround,” I’ll eventually care less, but… since it’s there why not make it actually work? The way Vegas handles a defined region as pre-rendered and how ridiculously sensitive it is to even the slightest change is pretty aggravating.

Nested Sequences -- I could see how this might work in Vegas, and could really help the workflow. It would be great if the same temp .veg file structure that is used for network rendering could be exploited here. How it would work would go something like – you’d be able to drag and drop veg files into an instance of Vegas, and there they would be placed as locked regions of the timeline (you could move them around from track to track or across a track like an event, but you could not edit them).

If you needed to edit them, you’d open the same veg in another instance of Vegas, edit there, and when you close out and the info is save to the veg file, the region as it appears in your other instance of Vegas is updated. Somewhat like how you can open a copy of media in Sound Forge from the Vegas timeline, edit it, and when it’s saved it appears in Vegas as a new take. Keeping the veg region locked on the timeline should help make this possible, and it would be a wonderful way to address this “issue.” Since Vegas can play and preview a timeline, I can’t see why playing a timeline from within a timeline would be impossible (hard, but not impossible.)

That's it -- really, if the first three points were addressed properly I'd gladly pay twice the cost of the $199 upgrade offer :D

- jim

It's time to start assessing dollar values. I don't know if I'm going to upgrade but I want to give people an idea of why I'm not upgrading right now.

Simple Nested VEGs/Sequences---Define a special region in one veg file and save it. Now in the parent veg file you can just drop the previous veg file on the timeline. The new event is the length of the region and has a grouped video and an audio component representing the output of the child file. Simple and sweet. After Effects has had this capability practically since its inception. This functionality would be worth $150 to me.

Useful Network Prerendering---If would be nice to be able to farm out pre-renders (visualizations) to the network so I could get on with editing/compositing quicker. This functionality would be worth $75 to me.

AAF integration, EDL and better capture tools--- How about $100 to me.

No updates to the compositing/effects system---They had their fun this update. It's time to address core editing functionalitity and media management.

I write my own noise reduction plugins (wo hoo physics degree) so I don't have to worry about that, thankfully.

Yes but if you had put in some feature suggestions on the suggestion page they would have been looked at. I know this because in both 4 and 5 I've seen thing I had described there in detail.

Maybe the audio people needed to be asked because they weren't speaking up.

Rob Mack

I really don't think the advice about submitting feature requests is relevant with regards to discussing features like better media management, better capturing/annotation tools, and more useful pre-renders. As potatophysics suggests these are core editing tools, and have been screamed about, asked politely, yelled, murmured, suggested, prodded and nudged all over this forum for well over a year now (ever since version 3 was released -- and perhaps before then...)

- jim

Yes! I played with the real time audio volume envelope thing last night. Very cool (and something Media100 has done for quite a while)

Makes me want to have a control surface (which M100 doesn't support)

Thanks for submitting those ideas!

Rob Mack

I think that the requests made in potato and vitamins lists have been made already on many occasions.

I'm pretty convinced that you've got to subit this stuff on the feature suggestion page.

Now, I agree with just about all of this except maybe the specifics about FCP markers (not the principle, mind you)

I'd like to add to it that nestable sequences could have a good effect on pre-renders. Once you've locked up a sequence into a nested region it seems like it would be pretty easy for Vegas to pre-render it, in the background, and keep the pre-render tied to the sequence.

Rob Mack

Well, I can see your point but I know things do happen as a result of submitting a clear request.

I work with someone who's been beta testing for another NLE product for the last 8-10 years. Listening to the conversations, the one thing that stands out is that the developers sometimes can't see what the big deal is about what you're asking for. So you really need to spell it out in a forum that they can pay attention to-and given the amount of traffic here I'd say your voice is going to be much louder through the feature request form.

I think it's pretty obvious that there were some feature initiatives that were very appealing to the Madison folks and that they probably have been working on them all year. They have to have a development plan after all. The thing is, to get some of these longer term initiative going they probably need the year, at the very least. So get those suggestions in now.

I think it's also pretty obvious that a few of these features were off-kilter interpretations of what people asked for. The whole implementation of Bins has been one of those things. Frankly, it's always seemed half-hearted. Nesting is another flub-not the feature provided, that's actuallly quite cool, but to call it "Nesting" is going to actually cost the company money in terms of support calls, returned merchandise, and really bad publicity. It's an unbelievably bad blunder.

And finally, I'm sure there's an overall plan. All the apps need to be similar, they need to look alike, they need to have similar widgets, similar layouts. There are some design philosophies-like Vegas will use existing Windows components and it will be hardware independent. And that Vegas will be as good a multitrack audio tool as it is a video tool.

My biggest fear as this release was approaching was that the Madison folks would try to implement so many user ideas that Vegas would just end up sucking bad. Well, it doesn't. In fact, the more I use it the happier I am. But, yes, they really do need to focus on core project management. Maybe there are some almost-finished projects in the wings that can be folded into a bugfix rev like 5.0b, c, or d. I'm pretty certain that Decklink and RS422 will be added to one of these. RS422 has been a big request.

Look, if you can't do what you need to do in Vegas then of course you have to look elsewhere. That's very reasonable. If you haven't sprung the 200.00 for this version, wait for a bit and see what develops. Or go get another system if you need to get to work on the thing that Vegas can't handle.

Rob Mack

I'm just saying that you're pissing in the wind if you only make the request here in this forum. And that you really have to spell it out. People champion different initiatives only some of them get to be included.

All of this complaining is probably going to allow some people in Madison to say "I told you so"

Rob

I write my own noise reduction plugins (wo hoo physics degree) so I don't have to worry about that, thankfully.

You've written noise reduction plugs for Vegas? Care to share? :-)

7.1 surround? I suppose they should incorporate IMAX also so maybe
50, no 100 people could benefit.

JJK

New computers with Grantsdale chipset will have 7.1 sound based on Dolby Prologic yada yada.

It's actually a reasonable request.

Rob MAck

Yeah, I'd love to see those....

Sheesh.... I'm still working in mono..... ;-)

Me too---speaking of which, how many video people really utilize the surround a sound thing regularly in their work???

My audio card does 7.1 as well, but I would put that a lot farther down on my list of feature requests.

It seemed to me like it wouldn't be much more difficult to add two more channels since the infranstruction for surround mixing is already there. Obviously there isn't a standard encoding method for 7.1 yet other than Dolby Pro Logic IIx, but there is Dolby Digital EX which is 6.1. I'll bet with the proliferation of new 7.1 recievers, it won't be long before Dolby releases a 7.1 encoding method.

We have HiDef capability in Vegas. How many people use that every day. But when you need it it's there. Keeps those advanced occasional users users from having to run 5-6 different setups, learn 5-6 different interfaces, and spend 5-6 as much money on duplicate systems.

So, maybe 7.1 mixing would add quite a bit of extra programming, I don't know. I would have thought that adding folders to the timeline would have been simple to do also. It couldn't be much different than the concept of a minimize button. It should basicly be nothing but a hide method for the tracks inside the folder. The hard part would be trying to figure out how to visualy represent on the timeline a sum of what was in the folder. I'm kind of surprised they didn't add that

There's a few other improvements that occured to me before 5.0 was released but I can't think of them now. I need to start writting this stuff down.

JBJones

Don't get me wrong, I want to see everything, in fact I am thinking of getting
a Yamaha 7.1 but couldn't figure out where all the extra speakers went. I know where the sub-woofer goes and the center channel and the two rear
speakers but that adds up to 6 speakers and that means there are two channels missing. Where do they go?

JJK

Seriously? You want to know where the speakers go?

I assume you are familiar with the 5.1 setup. You can get a basic idea by looking at the new movie panner in Vegas.

Well with a 7.1 system the two surround speakers each slide more around to the side and the two new surrounds go behind the viewer on the left and right. I remember seeing a diagram on the web somewhere. Let me see if I can find it again.

JBJones

Ah Haaaa. I found it.

A nice little flash animation on none other than Dolby's site.
http://www.dolby.com/Consumer/Technologies/PLIIx/

JBJones

Well that explains things. Now maybe two more built into the seats.

JJK