New Competition for Ulead & Adobe

[Jerry Jones]

Sonic Foundry enters the arena with "Vegas Video":

http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/H...ndry_vegas.htm

[cjyo~]

There is a beta available to try out:
http://www.sonicfoundry.com/download/default.asp

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Please visit http://spincycle.n3.net - My System: Celeron 300a(@450/2v),Abit BH6, 128mb RAM, Win98SE, Marvel G200TV, Diamond MX300, Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 20g system drive, DiamondMax Plus 40 capture drive, IBM 8g Deskstar program drive, Adaptec 2940UW SCSI, 9gb Barracuda UWSCSI video drive, Hitachi GD-2500 DVD-Rom, UltraPlex CD-Rom, Plexwriter CD-recorder, Viewsonic PT775, Soundworks 4.1 speakers

[fluggo99]

Which I have already downloaded and am staring at at this moment. I hate to admit it, but this program is pretty nifty.

So far, I've done some keying that looks a lot nicer than MSP's keying (with more controls), re-arranged filters by drag and drop (!), done some high-potential motion paths (which can be rotated around an arbitrary point!), discovered that filters can applied to the output as well.... and, it manages to do a lot of this in real-time preview. Haven't figured out how to get it to display on my TV yet...

[This message has been edited by fluggo99 (edited 15 April 2000).]

[DrMordrid]

I'm not sure I like the workings of the Vegas interface, but it sure does look nice.

It certainly has support for those who use music a lot. You can even set the timecodes to measures & beats! I guess that's to be expected from the creators of the Acid 2.0 music software.

Other nice features are the compositing engine, motion blur and the deinterlace optons. They've been listening to someone....

A bit of work here and there and some of the usual beta tweaking and this will be a real-nice editor. Since this is a public beta the more the merrirer ;-))

Dr. Mordrid

[paulw]

Are thy for real when they say Win98 and higher?

I use Win 95 in my video partition because I dont want the bloatware of Win98.

[DrMordrid]

They're for real. There were several changes in Win98 & Win98SE that some editors depend on, especially those that support DV. Win95 has no intrinsic IEEE-1394 support.

Dr. Mordrid

[jeff b]

Even though capture and print to tape is disabled in the beta 2.0, this looks like it'll end up in a lot of people's NLE arsenals after a while. Like Doc mentioned, it's a steep learning curve. There's a lot of control over every aspect of a project, and the more controls you have, the more mistakes you can make... The real acid test of this software, however, will be its price.

[Don Morgan]

I would suppose that SF has others testing the capture / output functionality and I am glad to see this otherwise fully functional piece of software. I think not supplying these feature no way inhibits my ability to make a judgement about the capabilities of the program.

I'm already familar with this user interface from having used the Vegas Pro for audio software and find it very useful.

< guessing mode on >
The audio only version lists at 599 usd, one would suppose that the audio/video version would go for more.
<guessing mode off>

The only thing I don't like so far is the very long time it takes to place a large clip on the timeline. The building audio proxy step takes forever.

regards, don

[DrMordrid]

The slowness was something that bothered me too. This isn't too uncommon in beta-ware as there is usually a lot of diagnostic code in there that will disappear in a final version.

I don't know if anyone caught my other post on Vegas but the thing that knocked it off my main system is that one or more of it's beta audio codecs crashed MSPro6 when it starts. Looks like a stack problem.

Dr. Mordrid

[jeff b]

I was also a bit put off by the 'creating proxy audio file' step taking so long. I also found that if I set my project to have NTSC DV with 48khz audio, and tried to load in a long (17 minute) clip with 32khz audio, the program couldn't create a proxy for it, but only after having tried to do so for several minutes.

I'm a bit chagrined over the Vegas Pro audio version being so steep in price, as it doesn't bode well for the video version at all...

[wkulecz]

With capture and print to tape disabled, I don't see how anyone can take this seriously as a beta. I mean, most of the problems happen when you capture and/or print to tape, with these two key features disabled, a whole lot of problems are simply going to remain hidden.

--wally.

[Don Morgan]

I don't think that MSPro6.0 crashing on startup is a problem that is specific to the installation of Vegas.

MSPro6.0 has some problems with DirectX pluggins from a variety of sources. I was unable to start MSPro6.0 right from the very beginning when DirectX support is enabled. Only by removing the Ulead supplied DirectX filters from the DXAudio folder of MSP was I able to start the program. A number of people have experienced this same thing.

regards, don

[DrMordrid]

I dunno....maybe. But it sure is highly suspiciod that removing Vegas fixed the problem.

Dr. Mordrid

[Don Morgan]

What I was trying to say is it's the DirectX pluggins that caused the problem, not Vegas . If you installed the DirectX pluggins without Vegas you'd still have the same problem.

don

[jeff b]

...yabut: my system's running just fine with VVideo and MSP6...