I agree, image panning using the zoom/pan tool in Vegas is great. In addition to what BillyBoy describes, you can also specify about 5 different keyframe properties such as linear, accelerate, decelerate, cut, and one other that doesn't come to mind right now.

Quality looks great if you set your project settings at Best, particularly for a high res image. Best will use a better resize on the image.

With keyframing, you can set up it to be as non-linear as you want. Circles, elipses, whatever you want.

I haven't done 24p editing so I can't give a definite answer.

Elipses! Wow, that would be great if they look smooth as silk. What about rendering times. I've got a 2x2.8ghz P4xeon. Do you think I could get close to RT? Vegas is a multi-threaded app, correct?

Vegas is slow in rendering (relatively speaking) compared to some other applications. How slow depends on how fast a CPU you got and how complex a project. I'm currently running just AMD boxes, but I think someone said that version 4 of Vegas supports multi-threading and dual processors well if you're using a P4.

Now you made me jealous. You got a 2x2.8ghz P4xeon?

I use Premier at work and I bought a copy of Vegas for myself. At first i had a hard time getting used to the different interface, but now I can't stand premiere! Things that would take me forever to do in premiere (motion of a clip, panning, SCREEN UPDATES!) move 3-4x faster for me in vegas. Vegas even supports motion curves (and displays them), and I'm sure you know Premiere has motions as straight lines.

I'm not sure what you mean by "realtime." There is a preview window that can display your video in RT. I don't use firewire so I can't preview on a external monitor. On the preview note, I have a p3-667 with 256mb DDR, and I actuatly have BETTER preformance in Vegas on my computer then at work on a AMD t-bird 1ghz with 256mb PC133 ram running premiere. I also haven't been able to freeze/crash vegas eigther. :)

Yea, 2.8's with two u160 RAID cards. data RAID 0+1,OS -raid 5 all with 15krpm drives, data storage speed is overkill for post production video, but I record live audio recordings of up to 8 channels of 24bit 96khz wav files, so I have to be extra sure that that I have no dropouts due to I/O bottlenecks. You only get one shot at a live recording to capture it all.

Also, Vegas shows real time previews (if your system's up to it) without rendering. You really don't need to render until your project's complete...

It will edit 24p also.

Well, I don't believe it has a preset for elipses, so don't expect it to be there. More I was just saying you could set that up with a couple of keyframes. It is very flexible. I have found the smoothness of the video to be very nice, plus with Vegas 4 and motion blur when you do add motion, it will probably look even better (with longer render time of course).

I may be wrong, but I believe the multithreading is only in the MPEG2 renderer (MainConcept). I am not sure if Vegas the app supports it for its part of the rendering. I agree, Vegas can seem kind of slow when rendering, but it isn't untollerable. I could certainly use extra speed though.

I believe that's correct. Vegas itself does not support multiple processors, however you can have multiple instances of Vegas open and copy / paste between them. So... open up one instance and start rendering, open up another instance on the other processor and carry on editing.

As Billy Boy said, the best way to discover how easy this all is, is to download the demo. Also check out DSE's tutorials on www.creativecow.net. I seem to remember there is a tutorial on panning there with examples. Its very easy. For some more examples, check out one of my videos here http://vegasusers.com/vidshare/textdisp?baylo-safaritrailer_wma9.txt The photo manipulation (panning, zooming) was done VERY quickly (maybe 2 minutes total?) using the pan / crop tool. By the way, the title motion was done using the same pan / crop and track motion tools.

Mark

I will definitely download the trial version and install on my DEV box and try it out.

I'll see if I can get a curved path to work. You could do this in premiere with keyframes but it would probably look bad unless you created a keyframe for every frame, I think. So, I'm not sure why Vegas are better if you still have to use keyframes for curves. Since there is some debate of this, I'll see if I can figure it out after I download the demo.

Thanks to everyone who responded. The fact that I received generally 100% positive responses thus far tells me that most people are probably happy with the product. If I had posted the opposite on the Premiere forum, I know that I would have plenty of users who would not urge me to switch to Premiere.

After several years and a lot of money, my Premiere 6.5 is quite stable and very usable and I do not have too many complaints. However, image panning is one of them as I am doing more and more projects with this requirement and the quality is not as professional as I think my projects need to be. The other BIG selling point with Vegas would appear to be a good integration with video and 5.1 sound mixes in version 4. Presently, I'm using Sonar to capture and add effects, then I have to edit the corresponding video in Premiere and lower the audio resolution, then to ACID to surround MIX the audio using the 16/48 audio that I had to dummy down to in Premiere. Then, I take the ac3 file from ACID and the mv2 file into REEL DVD for authoring. It sounds like SF is much further along in combining these features into one application with Vegas. I need to do more research on what Vegas does with audio and will probably ask for feedback from users on this issue later.

Thanks again

Just PLAY with Vegas for one month. You'll be baptized and sprinkled with holy water and you'll never go back to your sinful Premiere lifestyle! :)

Well Dvdmike,

I was like you yesterday. I just bought today VV4 after playing with the demo for the last 2 weeks. I used PREMIERE. You will like it, especially with all the processing power you got.! I'm still on my PIII 500M. The codec is better, image paning is better, every track is A/B roll. In fact, I editied my first project on VV4 today.

Gilles Vero

One other thing to note is that Sonic Foundry 'evolved'Vegas from a pro-level multitrack audio editor, Vetas Audio. Vegas 4 has audio sophistication which almost rivals SoFo's Sound Forge 6.

"Quality looks great if you set your project settings at Best, particularly for a high res image. Best will use a better resize on the image"

I've been trying to use the PAN function in various projects, but when mixing the footage with my regular DV footage, I notice a definite difference in res., almost looking out of focus. It doesn't matter what my project settings are set at, even if I apply filters, I still don't get as crisp/sharp of an image. I brought this up to S.F. and they weren't able to provide much more information...

Any advise would be greatly appreciated on this issue.

Mobetta

Yes, if you're panning video footage it's always going to look worse than full resolution video. 720X486 just doesn't allow much room to zoom.

Are you mixing panned stills with your video footage? What resolution are your stills? Are they much higher than your project settings? If not, when you zoom in, you loose resolution. Vegas can't help you there. If so, then I'm concerned that the Vegas panning may not be as good as Premiere.