Vegas doesn't play well when going back to film. It was never really designed for that. But when you are finishing in video, there's not too much you can't do with it.

Has been used for TV. Yes.
Has it been used for network commercials. Yes.
Has it been used for music videos. Yes.
Has it been in NFL and NBA arenas. Yes.
Has it been used in bigger than theme park rides Yes
Has it been used for Broadcast documentaries. Yes.
Has it been used for Documentaries in theaters. Yes.
Has it been used for Independent films. Yes.
Has it been used for Hollwood films? No. not that I know of. Audio work from Vegas has been used in big hollywood films, but I don't know one that has been cut in Vegas.

Of course, unless they are citing certain features in Final Cut that they need for their work, they are probably just trying bask in Walter Murch's reflected Glory.

I never could figure out why anyone cares that X people use "P" and X people use "A" and X people use "FP" or whatever.

The acid test is you can see in THIS forum how many people have come from competing products and I'll wager you won't find many shifting from Vegas back to the others.

The bottom line that's been put to words in many ways in this forum is while Vegas does some things differently, most agree it allows you the user to be more creative and worry less about the 'how do I' and focus on 'how can I' meaning in the long run, the work flow is smoother, faster and that results in you being more creative, which after all it what's it all about. To put it another way, Vegas rarely gets in the way of the creative process. The others mentioned frequenly do resulting in much down time hunting for how do I in the manual or ranting in their respective forums or required multiple and often clusmy steps to accompish what Vegas does much more smoothly.

Skibumm, what format did you deliver on?

There are no big examples that quickly come to mind. That is not to say that it has not been used...I just can't think of any known and touted examples.

If I were Sony......(I would be filthy rich)

Seriously...I am a musician and have been for a long time. One of the biggest things in selling music equipment is Artist Endorsement.

" I want a new Yamaha drum kit because that is what Carter from the Dave Matthews Band plays. ..and he is my favoritist player ever."
- not me

Final Cut includes a number of examples of major productions that its products have been used in. I would be willing to bet that at least a couple of them didn't pay for the software either.

In the music world, Yamaha gives drums to Carter Beauford (Sp?) and then thousands of young drummers buy the kit because he plays it. They don't go try DW, or Ludwig, and compare other brands. Tthey just buy the Yamaha because that's what Carter plays. Could this work with NLE software..? I bet they would sell more copies to people who have never worked on an NLE before and are choosing their first one. Just my 2 cents.

That being said, I love it and will continue to use it even if it never gets used in major productions, whatever that means.

Al

My company just did five films/documentaries on DVD. They're selling well on the net. I just had an offer from the president of a major film company to market one of my titles. If a deal gets done with that famous company, at least one of my titles will be a major title. All of our titles were done with Vegas.

what are these five films for those of us that would like to check them out?

Oue deliver medium is DVD.

When I read the posts on Premiere, Avid and Vegas I remembered a program called "Lumiere" that Corel had about 10 years ago that I used.

I did a search for it and stumbled on

http://www.lumierehd.com/

Which linked to another page that they insisted you read before buying the product.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=38145

explains the convoluted workflow needed to edit HD in FCP using Imovie.

Not using FCP or HD I don't know if all this is necessary, but for those who do know, it might be interesting.

If you’re just editing home movies or you’re a small production house, obviously, it doesn’t matter what you use as an NLE. However, if you ever want to work as an editor for a large studio or post production house, you will need to know how to use whatever they have standardized on, which is probably NOT Vegas. They may be using FCP, Avid, Premiere or some ultra expensive “pro” product, which is not necessarily “better” or more efficient. They don’t want to support an environment with a hodgepodge of software. Sony doesn’t seem to be making any attempt to position Vegas as an industry standard. As a matter of fact, I can’t even find it when I try to look for it from Sony’s own Website.

We all know that the best products are not guaranteed to become the standards for the industry. As history has demonstrated, almost the opposite is usually true. It’s all based on marketing and hype and relationships. The guys making these kinds of decisions are often several layers removed from any hands-on experience using the actual software. The vendor with the best demo and expense account often wins.

Exactly. Thats why I find some fault with Sony on this aspect. Honestly, I dont feel Sony does enough to push its product to the industry. Its great when the Sherly Crow video was cut on Vegas. They could have gotten more exposure out of it than they did but chose not to.

Even Premiere pushes it's products as a professional standard (IMHO its not) but its being used on a prfessional level.

But as you said, as an indie or a small production house, Vegas is perfect. For the real world jobs, Avid, etc... is the standard. Hence, thats why Avid, Adobe, etc... have a plethora of plugins for their programs and Vegas has very little.

While Vegas may be easier and more stable to use, its NOT gonna land anyone a job as an editor in an Avid production enviornment.

Its sad really. I would put Vegas up against any of the NLE's and I bet you could get so much more done more quiickly with half the hassle. But unfortunately, you wont capture the masses or even make a dent until something big is done on Vegas. While it may seem trivial for Avid or FCP to trumpet when someone uses their product to cut a film, you cant blame them. They are showing real world usage by people making serious money on their products. Sony has failed in this area of their products.

As long as you are going to work for yourself or someone with a Vegas studio, then Vegas is fine. Until Sony gets more recognition for Vegas among the industry masses, the Avid's, Adobes, and FCP'ers will continue to sweep in all the major projetcs because most just follow the industry standard lines regardless of ease of use or quality of product.

I just finished editting a promo for a feature length movie on V5. Looking over my shoulder was an editor with impressive credentials, including "The Sopranos". Her experience was completely on Avid, and it took quite a sell on my part to convince her of using v5, since she'd NEVER heard of Vegas. I must say, after 80 logged hours of work(more including my own investment in editting time), she's not so skeptical as she once was. It's incredible how much impact industry conventional experience has on these kind of choices by producers and directors. Considering the financing at risk by using a less than professional NLE, it's no wonder. Making inroads into professional arenas is critical to gaining acceptance. I suppose the question is really, "does Sony expect Vegas to be a pro app?" Or do they want to reserve that for XPRI? Unless vegas is used by well known editors and successful features, it will always be relegated to second string.

On a different tack, the biggest complaint this editor had of Vegas was the lack of real time hardware support. Professional systems support real time previewing. I showed her render to RAM and this had a minor impact. Real time hi quality previewing of transitions is pretty important. I suspect near real time previewing will get pretty ugly when HDV is being editted.

"They don't want to support an environment with a hodgepodge of software."

Funny you should mention that. I've been looking around at Media100 forums, 844 forums, XPRI forums, and Avid forums lately because M100 has been looking so shaky lately that I wondered what was out there to compare to the 844.

One of the comments from an XPRI user was that it wasn't a hodgepodge of hardware like an FCP system is (once you've added hardware support).

There's a lot to be said for integrated systems-or even leased systems-if as part of that integration you get great customer support and the vendor is willing to land a complete and running system in you hands when the current one dies. At least in 24 hours, preferably in 6 hours.

As far as Vegas' use in "high-end productions" goes, be realistic. Currently, Vegas outputs DV to the monitor. Can it output SDI or RGB directly out of Vegas, even just for monitor preview? (Maybe it can, I don't know).

Vegas is a great product for home, vanity pieces, for industrials, for short subjects, docs, etc. It could improve quite a bit to cover feature length projects, and I think it will. You just have to read the forums to see what people are asking for. It's going to have to have some level of hardware support just to be able to output HD, Component, SDI etc to a monitor. This is aside from getting any sort of processing muscle from cards.

Does Vegas need to have any feature film credits? No, not really, except perhaps as an audio tool.

Vegas is a great workhorse in the segment of production it can work in. It could be part of a very nice set of applications, with Studio down at the bottom for logging and aquisition (jobs for interns), Vegas as a tool for the web, DV, HDV and DVD, and some hardware based middle product (maybe like media100HD, BTW, the company sold last year for less than what Sonic Foundry cost), finally ending up in the XPRI range, or perhaps at a hardware compositor similar to 844.

But remember that Vegas and XPRI are owned by two different divisions of Sony.

Of course, Vegas isn't currently part of any sort of post production chain. It is what it is, a great tool surrounded by a shallow moat. This last round of releases (Vegas 5) was during a period when SoFO had been on the ropes and then was finally sold to Sony. Not exactly a great time for product development. I'm hoping that we see a lot of useful improvement in the next round, with a real push to address long form issues and also a push to support even just basic hardware issues like SDI and deck control-with a reminder that we'd need higher performance disk systems for some of this stuff.

Rob Mack

" what are these five films for those of us that would like to check them out?"

I don't really want to promote them on this board, some may consider it spam. The films/documentaries are related to major paranormal topics. I run over 300 content sites and some of them are the busiest paranormal sites around for their topics.

If you really want to see them, use Yahoo and start looking up major paranormal topics like

Nostradamus
UFOS
etc

You look at the first few sites listed and when you see links to new movies on those topics you'll find us.

I would just give direct links, but I don't want anyone saying I'm spamming here.

The sites all get thousands of people every day to them since they are all top ranked sites by the major search engines for those subjects.

I don't need a few extra people going the sites and have some say I was spamming here.

Oh, if you search for emovies we rule the search engines for that term too.

WBLU TV in Lexington, KY edits just on Vegas, nothing else (all audio & video work).

I guess I'm one of those people who don't go around bosting my editor unless people ask. I mean, what's more important: what you produce or how you produce it?

There are two weaknesses with Vegas in terms of "high end" production:

1. Lack of support for real time full resolution transitions hardware.
2. Lack of ability to spit out that string of fram numbers that film editors can take to the lab to order edited film prints.

Now that Sony is at the helm of developing this software, both these weaknesses could be addressed if they so choose.

I have a friend that uses a hardware accelerated "Speed Razor" system and writes the video directly to a standalone DVD-R burner. He was checking out my Vegas system and was quite impressed until I told him we had to "stop now and let the project render". He's a hobbiest like mysel,f but had never experienced "waiting for the render" until that moment! He had always just worked away, seen all his transitions at full quality from the get go, and watched the completed project immediately as it copied itself to the final DVD stage. He couldn't believe that I spent so much time waiting.

Now I'm a busy guy outside of my hobbiest video editing. I only get a small amount of time each day to work on my projects, and the long renders don't interfere with my workflow at all. I break to work, eat lunch, or spend time with my kids. When I get back, the render is done. No problem. If I did this full time and was constantly working, I can see where a hardware accelerated system would be a neccessity.

Also, I don't mind previewing the transitions at reduced quality. Still, I can see where this would be a problem for somebody with a producer standing over his shoulder saying "why does that crossfade look so grainy!"

I remember several years back on this forum, reading a post from a film editorwho had discovered Vegas and loved the layout of the program. What he wanted to do was load a capture of his film into Vegas along with the frame numbers, edit the film, and output the string of numbers that he could take back to the lab to order the edited film print. There was no way for him to do this so he had to use another editing program.

These are the reasons why the hardware accelerated systems like Avid and FCP have been more accepted by the industry.

For hobbiests like myself working on video projects, or for professionals who edit video "among other things", Vegas is ideal. If you have other things to do while your projects are rendering and don't mind previewing transitions at reduced resolution, the beauty and efficiency of the Vegas workflow is wonderful. The final quality once it gets done rendering is as good or maybe even a little better than the real time systems. I love working with Vegas and can't imagine using anything else. It's easy to see though why many professionals make a different choice.

i just print the standard reel and time code and frame data onto a vegas proxy file ..

edit it and conform the film to it ... ok - not as neat as avid methods, but gets the job done easy enough ...


always work with frames through out the proccess...

we use a lot of these proxies to keep the 35mm , 70mm , HD , DVD and other systems all in sync with outboard DTS and motion programming ..

> " If I did this full time and was constantly working, I can see where a hardware accelerated system would be a neccessity."

Not so - it's funny, but rendering time seems to be a big factor for either hobbyists or "same day" professionals such as news gatherers.
I have used Vegas full time professionally for more than three years, and never have problems with renders.
Firstly, as you mentioned, there are always many other things to be getting on with, and secondly its easy to plan ahead for large renders, including while I'm out or while I'm sleeping. Rendering is a comparatively rare occurence - most things like transitions or supered titles are fine to preview without rendering, and there's always RAM preview. Like you, I love using Vegas, and rendering is not a deterrent, just another thing to think about and organise.

edit - if you haven't already seen it, here's a great article on Vegas being used at pro level:

http://www.creativecow.net/show.php?page=articles/duncan_timothy/stellars/index.html

Many of my projects are on sale in shops in Australia, can't say much more as the client is very sensitive about promoting commercial enterprises, I can get my name but not my business name on the credits.

But all that aside I think we all need to be a bit careful about getting what we wish for. Just stop and think it through. At the moment no one could argue that Sony doesn't hold a dominant position in broadcast. There's only one link in the chain that isn't 90% theirs (well maybe two if you include vision switchers). Now how would the marketplace (or even ourselves) react if they controlled every part of the process? Look at the flak uSoft cops, and all they sell are an OS and a few apps.

The ONLY think that makes a NLE professional is the formats that it'll handle, even though DV25 is broadcastable it's not broadcast standard. Once Vegas breaks through that glass ceiling all the rest really doesn't matter much, if you want RT there's plenty of products on offer so I wouldn't get hung up on that one, what does matter is the quality of the output, the rest is really up to you and what you're comfortable with. Personally it has zero impact, I'm not cutting news or current affairs, if I was I doubt I'd be using an NLE anyway, I'd be doing it online and that's very much an environment I never ever, for any amount of money, want to work in.

Bob.

"But all that aside I think we all need to be a bit careful about getting what we wish for."

Sony has it's XPRI system for the high end customers. Why would they want to cut into the enormous profit margin of their XPRI system by adding more professional features into Vegas?

Thanks, that's a cool article I hadn't seen yet.

I mentioned before that Vegas doesn't play well with film, but as BJ_M mentions upthread, there are ways of dealing with this, but it's not out of the box functionality. The article makes a good point about going from Vegas to Avid|DS by using CuiBono's EDL tool.

Typically, I output OMF from the Avd|DS then mix everything in Vegas. I use a program called EDL Convert from CuiBono that can convert to/from just about any audio format: OMF, AAF, ProTools, Vegas, just to name few. Vegas can read the Avid AVI or QuickTime reference files with no issues so I can see the Avid edit and mix the audio in a program I feel is better than ProTools

Also the Convergent Design tool mentioned in the article is a big step for Vegas.

Seems like XPri comes to its end. Sony editing systems never were rather good in the race before. ES-3 failed, DNE-2000 failed, XPri did a bit better but ...
I'm curious what will happen now. There are some good reasons to build kind of pro-version of Vegas - kind of missing link. There is not that much missing in Vegas ... ;-)

Marco