Back to Vegas from FCP

[Martin Phillips]

Greg, my tip is to move to 64but win7 and the 64bit version of Vegas 9. That way you can benefit from all you installed ram. I have 12 gb ram and Vegas uses all 16 cores when rendering. For multi layered HD editing I would recommend this.
Martin

[John Rofrano]

I started with Vegas in 2003. In 2008 I switched to Mac and Final Cut Pro. Now that I’m using HD exclusively and want Blu-ray disks with a professional menu, I’m back to Vegas

Welcome Home! (…is it true that Mac’s never crash?) 😉

1. Which training DVD should I buy to bring me up to speed?

I work for VASST but we do have training for lots of topics in our Absolute Training DVD series. FASST Start Vegas might be a good refresher course but may be too basic. The 3 disc Absolute Training for Vegas+DVD Beginner Bundle Volumes 1-3 goes into a lot more depth.

2. Is AVCHD limited to the bit rate of the camera? With FCP and roRes 422 I was able to achieve 35mbps. The camera is a Sony HDR-CX520V, it rate 18mbps. The BD plays about 16 mbps.

I don’t care what computer you use… you can’t make something out of nothing. If your camera shoots 18Mbps AVCHD, then ProRes wasn’t giving you anything. It just used 35Mbps to represent the same 18Mbps stream. All it did was waste disc space. I would use the Blu-ray 16MBps templates. That’s as high as Vegas and DVD Architect will currently support for AVCHD.

3. What plug-ins should I look at?

That depends on what you need to do. A productivity plug-in like Ultimate S Pro or Excalibur is strongly recommended. (again I work at VASST and Ultimate S pro is our product so I’ll let others tell you how much time it saves) 😉

4. Is there anything like Apple Motion for Vegas?

Boris RED is as close as it gets. Otherwise use After Effects but that is not integrated with Vegas like Boris RED is.

5. Will Vegas 10 be released soon? I know this is just a guess.

Sony just said that 9.0d will be announced at NAB this month. That’s not a release date but an announce date. So 9.0d will be “released soon”.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Greg Barringer]

Thanks Martin. Sounds like a good plan.

[Greg Barringer]

John, Thanks for the advise. As you probably already know, yes Macs crash. I had mega problems with a recent upgrade to Snow Leopard. I finally did a clean install and everything’s been stable since then. The main reason for the switch was Trojans attacking Windows. Now with BootCamp and Win7 I don’t email or surf. I do that on the Mac side.

In Vegas4+DVD I bought VASST training with Douglas Spotted Eagle. He’s a talented teacher and well organized. I’ll be buying the Absolute series.

I’ll look into the other products you mentioned.
thanks again,
Greg

[Greg Barringer]

One note about ProRes. A clip imported from the camera using FCP and ProRes 422 was 4.09 GB. The same clip in Vegas was 321 MB, over 12 times less disk space.

[Bruce Hildebrand]

Re: Vegas training, you could also check out: https://www.vegastrainingandtools.com/

Bruce Hildebrand
204 475-1618
gbhildebrand@shaw.ca

[Ed Mellnik]

I have HD files on FCP 6. My mac is a quad G5 which means I cant even get the limited Blu-ray functionality if I buy the FCP upgrade.

I have Vegas 8.5 and DVD Architect which has Blu-Ray authoring.
I am fighting with finding a codec I can encode to so I can bring into Vegas to render for Blu-Ray Authoring.

ANyone have any experience on this? Some Quicktime files dont even allow you to see the video in Vegas on my machine (XP)

My FCP files are 8 bit HDCAM files. Was trying to find a way to export in FCP as something manageable size that Vegas could work with.
My program is 47 minutes long.

SOme have mentioned Toast for the mac but I dont know the workflow on that and it would probably mean not being able to use DVD Architect for authoring.

Ed

EMA VIDEO
Portland Oregon

[Greg Barringer]

Thanks Bruce I’ll check it out.

[Greg Barringer]

Ed,
Toast 10 can burn a BD using FCP files. The menu is not very professional looking, I was not impressed. I’ve tried for weeks to find a format that is compatible with both FCP and Vegas. Sometimes a codec would work on a clip from the camera but when I tried with a 30 min project Vegas would not recognize it. Apple Quick Time was updated several times recently and that seems to be the problem. Reverting back to early versions didn’t help me. I did have it working early with an Export using QT-ProRes 422 720P. That quit working after a QT update. Maybe things will work again with future update but for now I’m tired of wasting time trying to make it work.

[Ed Mellnik]

Thanks for the reply. SOunds like you have the same problem.

If I update my mac to an intel chip and update FCP I understand that there is a simple Blu-Ray authoring in FCP?

Do you know anything about that? and what kind of menus are possible?

ed

EMA VIDEO
Portland Oregon