Dave's answer is quite correct of course, people are buying into the FCP hype, and it is as common as Avid these days. However, the comment about quality from your friend or the salesman is far out to lunch.
Just for comparisons, render a page curl in both. Vegas wins. Vegas is also a bit slower on rendering, but that time is made up in speed.
So, if your friend is planning on freelancing from place to place, FCP is the politically correct answer. If your friend is more in the "need to make great video fast" world....Vegas is the functionally correct answer.

Firstly in the world of serious editing, the issue isn't Mac vs PC, there's only one word Avid. However for those with not such deep pockets consider this. Buy a Mac and the editing choices are:

FCP, Media100, CineWave and Avid.

Buy a PC and the choices are:

Vegas, Premiere, Avid, Edius, Pinnacle, ULead, Newtek and many more serious systems to say nothing of a host of low end systems such as MGI and WMM.

Technically, best video quality has been proven many times to come out of Vegas, even beats Avid systems for rendered image quality. I spend a LOT of time fixing technical issues in video and audio, all of which has come out of FCP, need I say more.

Several years ago Apple and FCP were pretty dominant, that situation is changing, Adobe have pulled Premiere for Mac, BlackMagic announced they will cease support for their products on the Mac platform, at the moment Apples main income stream is from iPod sales.
Bob.

Just remember that there's substantially more profit in a Mac/FCP sale than a PC/Vegas sale.

The argument that you need a Mac to edit is just flat-out, plain-false.

The first thing he needs to do is get that fact into his head. The salesman was lying or ignorant.

Then he can go about choosing an NLE. I wouldn't start at Mac vs PC either. For editing, the best option is to compare the software not the OS's. Does he currently own a MAC or a PC? If he has a PC, he can download many, many demo products or he can play with your version of Vegas. You may also want to show him this about the Sony Connect in-flight concert. To promote the Sony Connect music service, they had Sheryl Crow do a concert on an airplane. They did a five camera shoot. An hour after the concert began, Tim Duncan had edited a video from the 5 cameras using Vegas and a laptop PC. After the plane landed on the way to press party, he color corrected the video and made a DVD also on a PC laptop.

http://news.sel.sony.com/pressrelease/4793

Used a mac and fcp the other day for about an hour. That whole 2 window 3 point editing thing is weird to me, but I could probably adjust. Their cross fade thing is very stange as far as I'm concerned. In vegas you just join 2 clips and however long they're joined is the length of the transition. In fcp, you actually tell the thing how long the cross fade will be and it adds the material for you part of the 2 clips that you cut before. To me, this is kind of inaccuracte. fcp also didn't seem to be able to name markers and I'm not sure it could make regions. I make notes all over the place, so this would piss me off. The render script for regions is something fcp doesn't have and really needs. Then there's the fact that you can't copy and delete the unneeded parts of a project like vegas can do. That's inexcusable at this point.
But, this dual g5 could render SO much faster than anything I've seen Vegas on. ALso, when it renders a clip, you can move it around and what not. Vegas NEEDS that big time. I'm talking about rendering something more for the sake of previewing. I've learned the hard way that lower res preview renders just don't do it at times and can get you in big trouble. So when I'm doing a project that needs something fairly complecated, it's waiting all over the place for Vegas to prerender. Then, once the project is done, there's another render. The mac didn't need this final render.
Vegas is so much better with audio than fcp, but maybe mac's pro logic and the addition of sound soap may end up matching Vegas/Sound Forge/Noise Reduction/Acid.

ALso, when it renders a clip, you can move it around and what not. Vegas NEEDS that big time.

========================

Very Good point. Hopefully this will be addressed in future versions, but it probably isn't possible.

Spot has commented on this topic (Mac vs PC and FCP vs Vegas) several times and one point he always makes is to make a comparison between Vegas and FCP output on certain effects, or rendered output in general. Take his comments seriously and have your friend or you do a comparision and you will see that Spot is correct. Vegas always wins.

FCP does have some nice things over Vegas, the converse is also true. But when it comes to audio Vegas leaves both FCP and Protools way, way behind.
I had a call a few days ago from a Protools user, he was over it BIG time. 22 hours of audio in his project, he told me it would take 22 HOURS to render out. He was going to have a serious look into Vegas after I explained even on my far from top line rig the job would take more like 22 minutes to render out.
And I don't know why but from FCP users I've had seriously clipped audio and sample rate conversion errors that sound HORRIBLE.
And my Macolite mates say "Oh well, yes you see you've got to process it through this first and then do that do it and it works fine, they just don't know how to use FCP or they're not using the latest version of FCP".
Last bit read as also buy a new G5!
All that just to get audio off a CD!
Bob.

Its the EDITOR (person) not the editing software. So don't expect to be good right out of the box. Like most things worth learning, it takes time and lots of it. I'm talking hundereds of hours minimum.

Next pick a platform. If you pick Windows, its hard to beat Vegas for an all purpose video editor. One key (my opinoin) is invest the time to learn whatever application you select backwards and forwards. I have spend hundreds of hours just fooling around with Vegas FX filters. The journey is well worth the effort.

Vegas is a excellent application after using it for just a few days. It becomes amazing if you invest the time learning all it can do and there is little it can't do as well and often better than anything else and I mean ANYTHING else no matter what it costs.

When I went from FCP to Vegas I noticed that rendering was slower but better quality. Rendered mpeg2 files in particular were much better in Vegas. In FCP you could tell a rendered mpeg2 file by just glancing at it. With Vegas, I really don't see a difference between the DV and rendered MPEG 2 files. I really like the quality of the Vegas DV codec as well. After a straight capture the difference is hard to see, but do a couple of subsequent renders and the difference is really stunning. The Vegas DV file looks about the same but the FCP one has really deteriorated. The FCP interface makes sense to someone who was editing video the old way: dubbing between pro tape decks. If you've never worked that way, the Vegas GUI is a lot more intuitive.

On the other hand, the lack of real time accelerator hardware is a big deal to some people, especially those with producers looking over their shoulders. Also, FCP systems with accelerator hardware can print to tape with no render time whatsoever. For a production house that can be a big deal. For me it isn't. I always find myself having to break for lunch, to pick up the kids from school, to talk to my wife, to sleep - finding adequate rendering time has never been a problem. If it is, you can always buy a second computer and network it, or buy a dual CPU system so you can render and work simultaneously on the same PC.

Hey, my broadcasting teacher only lets us use fcp3 and it sucks, i did a workflow type comparison just for the heck of it and it took me two hours to make a short movie in final cut and only half an hour in vegas! Sure the render times for vegas are slower but they look better and that's what usually counts.

Tell him to go the MAC route. I heard the same arguments of MAC vs. PC probably close to 7-8 years ago now, when I was looking for an alternative on the PC side to replace the Pro Tools/MAC software that I had been using in studios. Right at that time, I had grown accustomed to using Sound Forge on the PC and along came Vegas Pro v1.0 to suit my multitracking needs. I haven't looked back since. So I guess my point is, if I had listened to the same B.S. which was even more rampant at that time, I would have never discovered a more affordable flexible product like Vegas. If your friend is going to be convinced by an uneducated, misinformed sales person who probably brings home a salary just over minimum wage and doesn't use the software in a professional environment anyways....thus his job title "salesman", then I say let him go the Mac route. This forum would not benefit from his presence.

To answer your other original questions:

"Vegas be run on a Mac?"
No

"Are there any drawbacks to going the Mac FCP route"
Yes, all choices in life always have pluses and minuses, you need to way them out by being informed about both choices.

...but I see the reason to switch to fcp. Vegas has it beaten in almost every way except what I mentioned earlier. But, FCP is becoming an industrusty standard. Vegas isn't. The no EDL is a valid point though valid for a number of platforms. Things don't talk well together. It's been the case since they intentionally made basic not cross platform.
But, as for fcp not looking as good as vegas- I'm a Vegas person (if you haven't noticed) but fcp often uses 3rd party stuff. Some is better, some is worse than Vegas. But some stuff can't be done in Vegas and has better integration in fcp. Try doing corner pin tracking. Boris Red rocks at this, but even using it after rendering uncompressed in Vegas is faster than using it as a filter in Vegas.
In a perfect world (again please don't yell at me, especially Spot who has helped me countless times of desperate need) Vegas would be able to do evreything fcp can do. Matchback and 10 bit included. True. many of us will never use it, buy it provides an incentive if we ever want to. That means more potential buyers and a more widely accepted platform. That means also more help with instructional dvd sales as well.
The advantage as far as I can see is that fcp can offer a lot of stuff (albeit slower in typing into your computer than Vegas) that most pc programs can't. They don't sell a $500,000 Avidesque system and if you spend around $12,000 that's their top of the line. This is why the Xpri is a scarely option to me. Don't know how t use it and it costs too much per hour to rent (if you can find one to rent).
This past summer a friend of mine made a feature (http://www.crewless.com/hideandcreep/home.php) that benefitted from a lot of color correction and special effects. This was easily done b/t him and another fcp system that was owned by a professional post production studio (http://www.fullresolutiondesign.com/). At some point I hope to make a feature and I'd like to turn to people like them to help me as well. Right now I don't see that as possible, which is a damn shame.
In a perfect world, fcp wouldn't even exist and Vegas would have its market share. That's what I want.
I know they'd have to charge more for all this stuff, but wouldn't the added users bring the price back down?
Again, please don't yell at me. I think I can see a great future and see no reason why Vegas can't take ahold of it.

Just buy more ram, that'll solve your render problem... a bit.

What makes you say FCP is becoming an industry standard?
From my view of the world it seems to be on the wane. More and more people are getting into editing video, we've got clients who turn out passable stuff that fills their needs on their office PCs using WMM. Would you believe you can finally render to WM9 on a Mac, if that's not an admission of QTs shortcomings in the marketplace I don't know what is.
It's simple math really, 96% of the world computers are PCs. Gone are the days when you had to buy specialised hardware to edit DV.
Probably one of the most knowledgable Mac people I know (used to work in the US for Apple) predicted this would happen sometime ago. He'd just plugged his camera into his new laptop running XP and up pops a window asking what you wanted to do with the video.
Sure it's twee, but as he said, that's more Mac than Mac can manage, they'd better watch out.
None of this might be good news of course, the number of jobs available is going down, corporate work that used to be the bread and butter for many videographers has declined dramatcially, it's all done in house by the mail boy (SHUDDER!).

PS, don't understand your comments re EDL, I've just written a program that writes an EDL that Vegas can read, wasn't hard, throw me an EDL from FCP and I reckon I could turn it into a basic Vegas EDL in a day.

The real point I think isn't EDLs, they're just edit points, no much in the way of FX info. And that is where Vegas and XPRI has it over the lot. An EDL doesn't carry enough data to replicate a project fully, that's where Vegas / XPRI shines by using XML.

Bob.

Whichever platform you go with, you need to remember that it's the competition between competing platforms that spurs them on to the relatively high level that they all are at these days. It's kind of like Democrats and Republicans: each is stronger because of the other.

Look through any job listing for Editors or freelance editors, you will see a large increase in the demand for FCP editors. Right after AVID, this is probably the most required software for a job.

Vegas cannot control VTRs, which is still the delivery and storage of choice, Vegas has no hardware control for more realtime previewing at full resolution and Vegas does not export (easily) or import industry standard EDLs for online or offline use.

I like Vegas, but until some of these things happen, it will always be a one man type of editor. Not an industry standard.

Dave T2

Another limitation, VEGAS cannot Insert edit into a tape, so if you have a minor change to a 1hour program, you don't have to output the whole 1hour again. This is essential in a house where time is billing.

Dave T2

<<<Vegas cannot control VTRs, which is still the delivery and storage of choice>>>
Of course it can. www.convergent-design.com is not only a 422 converter, but it also is an SD/SDI box for Vegas. It's hardware, just like anyone else uses. No software can control a Beta deck without hardware, and this is the least expensive, and ONLY frame accurate route that actually works.

As for the rest of it, for Vegas to not have a hardware partner for decoding 4:1:1 or 4:2:2 streams will always keep it back somewhat. The EDL issue is so minimal, it's not worth talking about. XML is the right way to do this, even Avid's own system doesn't work across the board.

Farss, I gotta say that while I don't know exactly what's happening in Oz, FCP is replacing AVID quite quickly as THE standard here in the US and Canada. Unfortunate at a certain level, but true indeed.

Thanks for the corrections. In my area of work EDLs are very important. We are constantly moving projects from SD to HD, offline to online and into a DaVinci based color correction suite.

Dave T2

I used to work in a not dissimilar industry, process control, for a HUGE US based company. Everything was either custom built or very esoteric. tens of thousands employed in the business accross the board.
Today it's pretty well all gone. Any kid with an interest in electronics could clobber the bits together from a mail order catalogue to control a power station.
Now the company I worked for, most never saw the writing on the wall, all they were looking at was market share but their view of the market just included what they saw as the competition, the kid down the street wasn't even a blip on their radar. Same goes in this game.

You've got to look at the TOTAL throughput of video and what it goes through. Even if FCP replaced every Avid system on the planet it's still small change in sales. If at the same time 100 times more video is being edited on office PCs whoever supplies THAT market is the winner. uStuff aren't fools, they know how to make money. It isn't by by having the best product technically, it's by having the most accessible product.
I can see this coming in this industry, most of the production houses that were focussed on the corporate market are gone or going, if they used Avid, FCP or whatever doesn't matter much. Anyone today can make a passable DVD, don't even need a computer. If you do want to do it on a computer which hardware platform has the biggest market share by a HUGE margin?
You see the danger is we think this is an industry, well coppers and cobblers used to belong to an industry too but perhaps a better example would be typesetters, how many of those are there left? I was close to the coal face when that industry died, the poor bastards were negotiation with managemnt over meal breaks while their linotype machines were being pushed out a 3rd floor window and picked up by the scrap metal merchants.
Bob.

Farss:
As I read through this thread, I was formulating my own response, and your last reply pretty much took the words out of my mouth. I'm of that ripe (but not old) age that allows me first-hand hindsight into the development of computers, and can remember how fascinated I was to achieve communication (I think to the "Source" or some similar "ips") on a 300 baud modem, saving to my 1 something mhz cutting edge Apple IIC's 128k floppy drive.

In those days, at my business, I had a cadre of secretaries banging away on state of the art electric typewriters to produce everything from invoices to advertising script - payroll was keypunched on some 7-foot long machine (don't remember who made it, probably IBM, but I can't remember).

I used to take three-week vacations, and rarely worked at home or on the weekend.

Many of my printing needs were handled by outside printers who had really high standards. Today, with the aid of such wonderful packages such as Pagemaker (already displaced by Indesign) and Word, we rarely print anything outside the office. Our standards are not nearly as high as those pro's we used to rely upon, but the output is "good enough." The message reaches its intended audience, and sales as well as "efficiency" is up, employment, unfortunately for those affected employees, is down . . . so is cost. My time at work is up - owing to this marvelous new computer tool - at the office and away from the office. My secretarial staff has diminished to just two highly computer-literate gals.

My involvement in Video/Audio is peripheral enough that I can't comment on where the "industry" might go in terms of software packages - but I agree with your view that the market will (in many ways already has) dictated which of the software packages will become most dominant - and, as you say, the quality of the software is only one - and probably not at all the most dominating - factor as to which will prevail.

Look at the fierce struggle for market share that is being waged over still photography. Everyone from film mfr's to printer mfr's - the dominant big box retailers to the corner pharmacy is trying to figure out how to capture a piece of the revenue produced by folks who, not long ago, simply sent their film away to have it developed (and paid a little extra for Kodak processing!).

The same sort of struggle will continue in the video market.

My daughter's significant other is a music student at one of the conservatories here. We have shared many a discussion on this topic. His professors all use FCP and swear by MACs. It's what they know, what they've bought into. The young man, a composer, respects my work (in music and also audio/video), but purchased a MAC (that he can barely afford), has no video/audio editor and no music notation software (the debate there is between Finale and Sebelius - both cross-platform notation packages), because he can't afford them right now. But he went with MAC's top of the line because that's the guidance he received from his teachers - and MAC-related tools are their tools of choice. For what he spent on his MAC, he could own a top-shelf PC with all of the software he would need to start exploring from his own personal computer. . . but he needs to learn how to use the tools in use at his school. Unfortunately, by the time he can afford the software, both it and his computer may be obsolete.

Personally, it bothers me that his teachers immerse themselves and their students in the use of just one set of tools instead of offering an overview of most of the legitimate packages available - but, who am I to judge.

I do know that it pleases me to be able to achieve passable results with my PC-based software - and, that I'm able to do so without having spent a fortune on either hardware or software.

If I could afford it, I would own both a MAC system as well as a PC system - I just love playing with these things and learning various packages. But, I gave up on Apple a long time ago because, for me, software choices were too restricted, costs for both software and hardware too high, and the PC platform was far more user friendly to my "backyard mechanic" style of learning the computer - and, in that perspective, Vegas fits right in. As part of my PC system, it compares favorably with systems costing far more, and allows me to achieve excellent, passable results that translate into real income for me, real satisfaction for my clients.
My nephew is into pro videography, started out some ten or so years ago on a MAC based, dual screen AVID based system with a big BETA cam and all. His mother invested a ton of money to help him get started. I don't know what he's using today, but he runs his own successful production company, produces for MTV and the like, and I guarantee that his work far surpasses mine - but my system works for me, and I make real dollars with it, and, in that sense, my stuff is good enough - and, unfortunate as it may sound, I think there is a real possibility that this digital age in which we find ourselves, will tend to level the field in many disciplines - level in the sense of lowering and at the same time raising standards - in many fields/disciplines that were once the exclusive province of learned professionals.

If I couldn't do my own audio/video work, I'd be hiring someone like my nephew - and, every time I manage to get by with my stuff, someone like my nephew, who could do it better than me, has to struggle a little harder to find work somewhere else.

It's a sad and wonderful thing.

Caruso

"...I've just written a program that writes an EDL that Vegas can read, wasn't hard, throw me an EDL from FCP and I reckon I could turn it into a basic Vegas EDL in a day."

Well, that's the problem, isn't it? A readable EDL shouldn't require a day of coding. I love Vegas but the lack of an EDL does create problems for me. In a short form project I can work around it but in long form it's a kiss of death.

I think Xpri is the culprit that holds Vegas back. If Sony was smart, Vegas would become Xpri. Then Xpri could go away and no one would notice.