There are downloads lurking around the net if you look for them. Who knows what has been done to them or added though. I signed up a while back and they sent me an email with a download link as well as a key code. It is nice, but on the computer I installed it on, it ran rather sluggish, although I was able to utilze the glass theme and the window animations. Also, since I downloaded the 64 bit version, I did not have all the drivers I needed to make it work with some of the hardware.

j razz

Don't let the fancy desktop in Vista fool you. Vista is only 40% the OS it used to be. 60% of features were stripped out because of delays. Under the hood you are getting better security at the price of usability. They did good there, but years late. Other than security, the Vista engine is much more like XP than it was supposed to be. It really is a light upgrade compared to original plan. The more you use it, the more you will realize it is the same.

Same file system, nearly the same DirectX, same overall performance on everything.

Anyone compare Vista to Linux distributions such as Ubuntu? Ubuntu seems like it's ready to take off... its open source nature means that (arguably):
A- Low cost.
B- Faster rate of innovation. Open source applications arguably tend to move at a much quicker pace than proprietary software.
C- Better security since the source code is available and open to inspection. This is opposite to the "security through obscurity" philosophy.

Currently, Windows is a good choice since so many 3rd party applications only run on Windows... especially games. But Linux is getting better and better every day.

Too bad All of the SONY apps are programmed so heavily with M$ centric code (.NET, etc) Imagine the speed and efficiency of Vegas on an optimized Linux box??? Literally, the only thing that has kept me from even going with Ubuntu is no video editing apps. The closest it comes is Apple's Shake compositing application coming in at a paltry 4999.00.

The day a fully commercial application is released for a solid distro of Linux, GAME OVER in my book.

1- Linux doesn't necessarily give all that much speed and efficiency... you would likely get much more gains from moving towards GPU acceleration first.

The OS overhead on a Windows system is not necessarily that great compared to Linux.

2- Shake is like $500 now, although it isn't an editor. And there are many high-end packages running on Linux (Discreet Flame, Inferno, Smoke, Matrix Compositing, Mistika) although they aren't exactly cheap! (And they aren't offline editors either.)

There's Cinelerra (open source Linux NLE), although it's supposedly very buggy.

You could argue and I do as an ex-M$, that SteveB is happy 60% of the features got stripped. So he can add them back in a few every 12 months call it an upgrade and charge for it. That is not speculation that is his stated goal, a new OS every year. That will have the people complaining about the price of the V7 upgrade having kittens.

Konrad

Wow, quite a tangent we've got here. Vista isn't featurific enough and Linux needs Vegas. I remember writing quite a rant on this, since Sony could dominate the Linux market if they merely attempted to make the shift. It's probably not worth the coding to them, they'll leave it to Reaper aka the clone child.

I think this photo summarizes my thoughts on the matter.

LOL!

Poor little BSD.. ;-)

Well, I really would like to do everything under Linux and I also do most things under Linux except video editing. I think there are some reasons why there will probably not be a Vegas for Linux in near future. (These reasons are only personal opinions and not proved to be correct)

1. As Vegas makes many uses of Windows specific things, there would be much recoding necessary.

2. There is not really a standard way for video codecs in Linux, almost every library implenting a codec has other interfaces were in Windows this is standarized (VFW). Well there is libavcodec, but now take as example the Cineform Codec. There would be the possibility for Cineform to implement an own libary, where Vegas and other applications would need to have special support for it, or to make it simple for applications it could be included in libavcodec, but therefore it must be open sourced (meaning no more money for Cineform). Even libavcodec isn't that great in the sense that lot of applications supply their own version of libavcodec, so after an inclusion in the main libavcodec, it could take years until it would also be available to other applications.

As someone pointed out, you have Cinelerra which I also tried some time ago. Even without considering the numerous effects and transitions Vegas offers, I needed twice as much time for my edit in Cinelerra due to the fact that lots of things that happen automatically in Vegas need to be done manually in Cinellera.

Considering this I have to say I love Vegas, and if I have one machine to edit on, I want to edit on Vegas, not on Linux or on Windows, so I choose the OS my editing system needs.

However there are lots of other task linux takes care of here:

Fileserver for storing video files
PABX (telephony system)
Firewall
DNS server
Web and mailserver
Mythtv server for watching TV
The presentation machine for showing edited videos to customers also runs Linux.

Ubuntu is just great. Linux is so much better now than it was when I tested 3 or 4 years ago. I use Windows for very little these days at work. Will soon convert my secondary home PC to linux as well. But we need apps!

I have a theory that the old heavy software establishment is going downhill fast. The pace of innovation is slowing with all the big corporate software products that I use. I can smell it coming. We'll all have linix core systems with all our apps used via Firefox and all our data in a remote data center. I suppose we'll keep our power CPU's and hard disks for video encoding though...

True that Windows is begining to feel big and bulky from a code point of view and apparently hard to make updates to. And yes, Linux is finaly starting to look much easier and simple. However Apple seems to be doing a pretty good job at inovative design and thinking with their OS.

If Apple would open up the OS to all PC manufacturers or evne select companies that could pass a strict test, I think they could take over the Windows world. Microsoft has definitely had some internal problems going on that they need to resolve. Now would be the perfect time for any alternative OS to make it's move. If they want to.

At least that's what I think.

I don't think there is any chance Vegas will ever run on Linux or MacOS given how dependent it has become on .NET. The Win32 API is hard enough to emulate - .NET is another whole level of complexity.

As noted here, there are even some difficulties in running Vegas on other variants of Windows (Win64, Windows Vista, etc.)!

Cheers,

Randy

What we need to do is find a couple unhappy Sonic Foundry developers and convince them to start an open source NLE project for Linux. I am sure they could surpass the previous attempts. I would spend more than $149 to help.

Now that last suggestion is a great one. Imagine an open source video editor as good as firefox, open office, or some of the others.

I'm considering switching some of my desktops to linux and see how they go. I'd love to get away from the bloated ms code and $$$ upgrades.

Sean

"I'd love to get away from the bloated ms code and $$$ upgrades."

In theory this works... until you need to be able to do something that you guys working for less than what a $$$ upgrade costs aren't willing to do. I'm also sure that Sony would probably make them sign non-competition documents, as well as more NDA's than you can throw a book at.

Dave

It does seem like the NLE is the only lacking Linux app out there. There's Blender for 3D and Jahshaka for video compositing. But no NLE. Weird huh?