Every time I indulge myself into "CNC" 3 axis machining software I marvel at what Vegas Pro does and I "assume" Catalyst will slowly add all the goodies. Remember Vegas Pro has about a 15 year start over catalyst.
JJK

The last thing that Catalyst Edit was designed to do is mimmick or replace VegasPro.

It will never do that, it was not the purpose of the design team, and it will not evolve into that.

On the other hand comparing Catalyst Edit to Resolve from the standpoint of an evolution of company with software might be fair. Resolve is certainly something more than it was at first. But the market target is very very different.

Please stop comparing apples to oranges. Most people will not have any use of Catalyst edit, but a few will. Same goes for Resolve.

"[I]Please stop comparing apples to oranges.[/I]"

Noted. I've got to get me a hobby.

The word edit should not be following the word Catalyst...love to see a project done with it...anyone have one please post,,I am open and try many edit programs...cat may evolve, but it is a joke at this point in my opinion, but I'm sure sony and everyone else are not too concerned about my opinion.

If Vegas Pro development has ended then it is very relevant to compare it with Catalyst Edit development. After all, what Sony NLE are we left with if VP is not longer in development? After years of using and upgrading VP is all that product commitment to be abandoned so easily for either the inferior CE or a competitors product? That's a disaster for my creative process as far as I'm concerned. I prefer VP over Adobe and other competitors products because editing film is not just about the list of new features that a product contains but how they're strung together.

Catalyst edit has a ways to go, for sure. I have been working on a project with 4k source material from a drone, Nxcam, Sony Nex and RX10ii 4k and HD with some slow motion. Mixed S-log2, Rec 709 and LOG. A workflow using Catalyst Prepare and Vegas 13 is giving me some nice results. Final output is 1080p. I'll be sticking with that for awhile. Really like the color grading in Catalyst Prepare. Even my AVCHD is looking pretty nice. BTW, B&H has a pretty good deal on Catalyst right now.

-- tom

again...anyone have an edit from cat...not cat to vegas but cat...just curious, cause I am not capable of editing anything ...at this point, not trashing it just sayin..too early in development in my opinion even to have released it...probably fairly bug free, cause it is so elementary no bugs could survive...oops think I trashed it.

I have found Catalyst Edit somewhat unstable and barely usable. Prepare works fine. Beyond stability my beef with CatEd is not having multiple monitor support and all the little stuff like zoom to timeline using mouse and all the other stuff that makes Vegas a breeze to edit.

-- tom

The way I'm thinking about it, is that Catalyst is for a RAW workflow, and Vegas is rooted in non-RAW formats. Catalyst appears to be influenced and in response to Resolve.

But no one can say what it will or won't evolve into.

The time of the SCS developers has been focused on Catalyst, not Vegas, based on the amount of updates recently for Catalyst, but not Vegas. The latest update has greatly expanded the Edit functionality. In the initial release, I was surprised they even released it, as it was so basic. It is still very unfinished, but the amount of important features added (for free) shows they are working hard, and the software can now be used for some projects.

If the Catalyst foundation of code can prove to be more stable and powerful for modern 4K RAW workflows, then there is certainly potential for SCS to build the creative aspects of Vegas into a Catalyst app. I have no use for all the legacy support of DVD, and AVCHD optimized for technology from a decade ago. Sony purchased Vegas in 2003, and the software isn't very usable anymore on my modern Windows 10 machine with newer camera formats.

I haven't spent much time with Catalyst, but it appeared to perform much better than Vegas with my GPU, and the GUI is easier to see on my UHD display, and should work much better for touch input.

With the amount of work necessary to significantly revamp Vegas, and the impending need for a significant change due to modern changes in technology becoming standard, it seems more likely to me that they will focus on Catalyst, and leave Vegas to the past from which it came.

For the people using Vegas for many years, with a considerable investment and library of older format video, the latest version of Vegas should work for them for years to come. But as the updates for newer formats slows down to a halt, and they upgrade their workstations to use modern computers, the demand will shift away from Vegas to something that works better.

The money and demand is what decides what happens next. Personally, I cannot pay for Vegas 13 because it is slower than 12 on my machine, and all the latest versions have crashed frequently so I don't want to pay for Vegas anymore based on the assumption that it's not stable. But I might buy Catalyst soon, to give it a chance, and invest in that path of development.

It would be interesting to see if the changes make it worth purchase now. Unfortunately, I downloaded the trial when it was first released and now it won't allow any further trials. I'm certainly not going to purchase it based on what I saw when it was first released. It was next to useless then - about what I would expect from a free NLE included with a consumer camera.
Sony should do what Apple did with FCPX. Every time there was an update, they made it possible for you to download a 30-day trial. I downloaded 3 or 4 trials and it eventually became good enough that I did buy it.
Catalyst will never gain market share with their current strategy.

A timed trial should count the hours you have it open. Sometimes I'll install a trial, then have to focus attention on something else, and when I'm ready to revisit the trial software, it no longer works. They act like when we install a trial we drop our lives and use it every day for a month, then are hooked and want to keep using it so have to pay.

I'd also like to try Edit again before deciding if it's worth buying now. But despite only using it a little, the trial has expired. But I've not tried DaVinci Resolve before, so I installed Resolve 12.

I was shocked to see just how similar things are. It really looks like Catalyst is a fresh start at trying to mimic Resolve. At the top left in Resolve is "Media Pool | Effects Library", and in Catalyst Edit it is "Media Browser | Plug-Ins". In the upper right in both it is "Inspector". Above the timeline are the same kind of tools buttons with zoom slider. The color wheels are similar, the way it plays the clip preview when you slide the cursor over is the same, some things about how the clips feel on the timeline are the same.

There's no doubt that whomever worked on Catalyst has seen and experienced Resolve, and used it for the template to copy. Except Resolve feels more complete and powerful. Edit is like an empty shell in comparison.

I just bought Catalyst Production Suite though. I have doubts about SCS programmers, and still consider the magic of Vegas to be from Sonic Foundry. I used to use it when it was first released, and I don't remember Sony really making it their own, other than packing in new features and bugs each year. I'm imagining that Catalyst is a better display of their ability to produce software of their own, assuming they didn't purchase the base or are reusing a lot of code from something else.

I'm going to try to spend more time with Catalyst and Resolve to see how they compare, and if SCS can produce something stable with smart design.

If Catalyst Edit offered an alternative to Vegas then I'd crossgrade but atm it isn't close in terms of editing capability. If Sony can't get CE up to speed soon then release an update to Vegas that fixes NVidia GPU rendering among other things.

so i've played extensively with the cat suite:

prepare is very useful, but missing a major 'preparatory' stage - the ability to add burn in time code. this, considering the market IT IS aimed for is a major oversight in my opinion.

edit, well it's developing, but certainly it has a VERY VERY long way to go before i'd even consider it a profession product - and that isn't in comparison to vegas, it simply isn't up to more than simple edting - not many plugins (as yet), those that i have for vegas don't work in edit and i'm NOT going to be spending big on replicating existing ones, limited audio, basic titling, and the list goes on, and on. frankly, as has been pointed out previously, it's surprising scs actually released it for sale - i'be most outraged paying for what is a work in progress.

as for comarison to vegas - again, if scs is intending it as a replacement then it's fair game, if they're not, well they need to clearly state whether vegas is an end of life product or not.

i've started using resolve alongside vegas - quick chopping and audio work in vegas, the rest in resolve. the purpose is to make a simple transition once i know vegas's fate and resolve meanwhile develops (hopefully) the areas i consider it weak in (audio for one!!!)

Hello everyone! Travis from SCS here.

There have been some very interesting remarks and comments in this thread, but one that really stood out to me is the product suggestion to bring Vegas projects into Catalyst Edit.

What we currently see with our user workflows is doing your organization and color grading in Catalyst Prepare, doing your fast and focused timeline editing in Catalyst Edit, and then applying your effects and final polish in Vegas if needed.

The workflow request of taking your Vegas project and bringing it into Catalyst Edit is not as common until very recently, and is one that would be interesting to learn more about.

My question are: What would your workflow consist of if you were able to bring Vegas projects into Catalyst Edit? What would you use Vegas for and what would you use Catalyst Edit for if this workflow was possible?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this topic and passing them along to our devs.

-Travis

Seems to me the most obvious reason would be future-proofing projects. If Catalyst Edit really is going to replace Vegas some day, folks will want to be able to still work on old projects. Just as Vegas 13 opens Vegas 12 and earlier projects, people looking at Catalyst Edit as the new "Vegas 14" will want to continue opening prior work.

Hi Travis, thanks for posing the question.

Vegas' lack of a defined workflow is the thing I appreciate most because I can choose the method(s) that work best for me and for the particular project I'm working on.

For my application (product videos and interviews), Vegas' Trimmer + Regions and Markers = Very Fast & Very Focused. I set Regions in the Trimmer and hit "a" to send them to the Timeline.

The ability to work with audio in the context of an edit is also an essential component of Fast & Focused because I have the ability to record, edit, and polish a VO and effects right on the timeline as I edit.

In terms of grading, I prefer to do my color work in the context of a finished edit and appreciate Vegas' ability to apply color correction to clips, entire tracks, and the final output.

The Catalyst workflow may be a good fit for some, but many have found Vegas' fluidity and user-centric workflows essential to delivering high quality results on tight deadlines. I know that many of us would hate to lose that. I hope that your marketing folks have been listening to what their Vegas customers have been saying, and I hope they appreciate the implications of a Vegas user base with a large number of Adobe CC subscriptions.

Guy

? He asked about why someone would want to import Vegas projects into Catalyst Edit, and you replied something that doesn't address that anywhere.

The original comment was, "I'm just shaking my head that Catalyst doesn't even provide importing an XML or Veg file".

Catalyst Edit and Vegas are not compatible with features. I would not want the developers wasting their time building an import function for .veg when the projects will be broken upon import anyways.

When I had the trial, I tried exporting a Catalyst project into Vegas, and I ended up with a useless pile of clips on the timeline. Why would I want to spend time using the creative tools in Catalyst, to have all that stripped away and have to start over with bare clips in Vegas? Likewise, why would I want to use Vegas to create a complex edit that turns into a stripped down version in Catalyst?

Forget about cross-compatibility, and build a separate application. There's no reason to waste time trying to make them work together, when you can create a new application that works better. If someone wants to use Vegas, they can use Vegas. When Vegas is officially deprecated, provide a crack for download that allows previous owners to activate their software forever long past when Sony's servers are down. That way they can always reopen their projects in a virtual machine someday.

I wouldn't give too much credence to the criticism people post here. There's a few old grumpy men who've been using Vegas since VHS, and they enjoy grumbling about how the tricks they learned 10 years ago might not be relevant soon and they have to learn something else. Being pissed because Catalyst doesn't open .veg is like saying, "Fords are stupid; there's nowhere to hook up a horse!"

There's a problem when a $1K video card doesn't enable me to edit 1080p smoothly in Vegas. There's a problem when for multiple years and paid upgrades the software crashes regularly. Either there's faults in the development process of SCS, or the legacy code is not conducive for allowing for the improvements needed to be easily made. Either way, it's not working. Maybe in the future consider open-sourcing Vegas, or parts of it, if legally possible.

But for now, making Catalyst and Vegas compatible won't solve anything, unless you plan on supporting Vegas for years to come. If not, why waste time bridging gaps?

The main issue right now is that Vegas has a specific UI style that was modeled after the audio MTR from around the year 2000. As I recall when I started using Vegas it didn't even have video support? I used it to record a song, not make a video. One of my favorite MTR interfaces was Tracktion, from Raw Material Software.



The reason why some of us prefer that style over the traditional video editing interfaces, is because it feels more loose and flexible, more like an interactive art canvas than a rigid machine for splicing A/B rolls. I imagine a lot of people who prefer Vegas came from a music background first, not video.

But Catalyst is a copy of the UI paradigm from Resolve, which is better than the old Premiere, but still isn't as flexible as the audio MTR software. To retain the Vegas market, you'd need to create a Catalyst Creative. This other stuff is obviously geared towards the more photography style crowd, and TV news broadcasting types. They're not being creative, they're just tweaking color and splicing clips together.

Vegas is for artists. The problem is, Sony bought an artist's tool, and tried using it as a utility to provide for video people buying Sony cameras. They started cramming it full of video features, which are nice, but not all that relevant to the original users of Sonic Foundry's software. An artist might hook up a MIDI keyboard in Vegas, controlling a VSTi, and recording a melodic soundtrack in realtime while watching their video preview, that is full of video effects.

But a video editor guy, for whom Catalyst is acceptable, is from a different world, where they're producing boring content on a schedule. I think a lot of the Vegas users were independent sole-proprietors, if in business at all. They had more creative license to work on their schedule, doing it how they want, and making the video an artform however they pleased. Basically Vegas is great for music videos, and Catalyst is not ideal for that.

The Catalyst GUI feels much less fluid than Vegas. I can move around the tracks in Vegas, zooming and resizing to get the canvas right for what I'm working on. It's still not the perfect interface, but compared to what Premiere was, it's way more freeing. To create a tool that would be preferred by the artistic Vegas users, it'd need to take its inspiration more from apps like Tracktion, and graphics software, not Resolve and other video editors.

I bought Catalyst in part because it seemed much faster for previewing than Vegas with my GPU. I thought I'd try it for simple things, where I just take some clips, arrange them with some cuts, add some fades, and audio track, then export for web. Something more like a YouTube unboxing video, than anything creative.

But if Vegas is neglected, I'm not sure what software will replace it for creative video. I guess doing more of that in something dedicated more for special effects, and then doing the final editing in the rigid app. The problem with that, was that you had to keep bouncing around clips, so you lost the overall feel for the complete video. In Vegas, it combined the basics of lots of software, so you could do it all at once in one application. That doesn't work well for a big movie, but for a single guy making a short music video or something similar, then it's better.

This whole scenario reminds me of Tracktion. It was originally created by one programmer. It had a following of users who recognized how much more flexible the GUI was than others. But then Mackie bought it, and was bundling it with their audio hardware. They packed in more features, but they didn't get the original reason why it appealed to people, so sometimes those features worked against that creative flow. After a while, the updates slowed down, and the forums for diehards were full of threads like on here where they speculated about its death, and wondered why Mackie wouldn't just announce it instead of staying silent. I think their rep even popped in now and then like here, where they said something to lawyerly reassure people.

From Wikipedia:

[ Although no official word came from Mackie officials, user understanding was that the project had been discontinued, as no updates, communication or announcements had been forthcoming from the company since January 2008. However, at the January 2013 NAMM show Tracktion was reborn through original developer Julian Storer, who announced that he had re-acquired control of the software and would be developing Tracktion with his newly founded "Tracktion Software Company" ]

Isn't that awesome? The original developer took back ownership, and brought it back to life! It lives now on tracktion.com.

I think some users of Vegas wish something similar could happen, where the original creators who got the reason why they like it would take it back and make it right again. But that doesn't appear possible in this case.

So you're going to have some people upset with you, SCS. They're going to complain and feel cheated by this whole affair. You took their nifty tool, added some useful additions, along with a lot of crap that wasn't relevant for the bedroom producer, and then when it was too bloated of a buggy mess to handle anymore for on-the-clock corporate devs, you ditch it chasing after the people flocking to Resolve, saying, "Wait, wait, Sony has something like Resolve too!"

It's a different crowd. Catalyst Edit doesn't do the same thing. Even if you add VST support, and some more features, it'll probably be built all within that rigid video paradigm, where it feels more like 2 cassette decks than a paint canvas.

So it's probably only a matter of time until the break-up between bedroom artist and Sony Creative Software happens. Right now they're too afraid to confront it, and are quietly avoiding you, so they don't cause a blow-up before they've finished packing and got set up with a new apartment and new lover. Then when it finally happens, there'll just be a few grumpy old men complaining in this forum, prolonging the inevitable of having to get up and go somewhere else to find a new tool to do what they need.

Notice how they even put the Catalyst forum on a different site?

Well, for goodness sake " the Reply by: SCS_Travis -Date: 12/7/2015 7:14:01 AM -
"Hello everyone! Travis from SCS here! "

Is this guy serious? Is he familiar with the market that Catalyst was designed for?
Apparently not! As others have suggested importing VegasPro XML into Catalyst is total folly and would be a waste of time.

The workflow should be: use Catalyst Prepare and Edit for early pre-production cuts and processing - then batch the files prepared into VegasPro for final NLE post production. This works now, and really there is nothing I can see that Catalyst developers can do to enhance that given workflow.

Fantastic post Jamon. Unfortunately no time to expand more deeply on your points raised.

I don't know if its just me, but I find the straightforward linear workflow of Vegas (not to mention the whole audio recording side which is absent in Catalyst) just so logical and easy. And powerful. Catalyst seems a mere subset of Vegas capabilities, and may be more sleek at some functions and be used in tandem with V. But certainly no replacement (yet ?).

I would like to see more effort put into fixing and fine-tuning the broken things in Vegas. Maybe this will be able to happen now that Catalyst is released and they resources become assignable....

geoff

Thanks for all of the initial comments regarding my question. It was just a curious suggestion and we wanted to get a little more insight in the reasoning behind it.

Special thanks to Jamon for creating that novel of a response. Very good points provided.

-Travis

Travis, I was the one who made the suggestion over in the Catalyst forum albeit as a different username: zigmono.

My suggestion was the ability to "nest" vegas projects on the Catalyst Edit timeline. This would work the same way as nesting a Vegas project on the Vegas timeline or a HitFilm project on the Vegas timeline. I'd simply ask, why not? You hit the nail on the head. I am one of those who find Catalyst Prepare very useful. OTOH, Edit is still a long way from Vegas. To me it provides a possible transition for Vegas users as SCS develops Edit's feature set. I know it wouldn't be perfect as far as workflow.

How about the ability to also open a clip on the Vegas timeline in Prepare?

At least you're giving Vegas users the rationale and a reason to possibly transition as their hardware needs evolve in the future (4k).

-- tom / monoparadox / zigmono

-- tom

Most important feature to me is multi monitor and multi cam.