follow-up to FCP vs Vegas (wondering about QUALITY)

[Al Bergstein]

Oh good, a chance to vent on my favorite subject…
Like many here, Gabrielle, I use both Vegas and FCP. I have one monitor, and have run both on two separate machines into that monitor. I’ve edited hundreds of hours on both Vegas 9 and the current FCP. There is much to like about Vegas, but to be clear, the arguments about ‘industry standard’ are true. It’s like the arguments about Windows years ago, against the Mac, ‘everyone uses it’. All the videographers in my neck of the wood use FCP, and think I’m a little odd for liking something other than the dominant paridgm. So when I work with them I religiously transcode to ProRes, though I don’t ever need to do waste that time in Vegas, unless I am doing a shoot with multiple camera formats and want to ease huge project rendering, by using Cineform, a much better way to transcode, IMHO.

In video production, you are much better off going through the pain of learning FCP. Believe me, I’ve never been as mad at a software package as FCP, given it’s stupid user interface, inability to do a cross fade as easily as Vegas does, and the abysmal media management. But yes, it’s “industry standard”. Takes me right back to dBase programming. Vegas does many of the same tasks *vastly* faster and better. But, *everyone* is using FCP, except numerous production houses that don’t..somehow they are making money…(G). Some flaws with Vegas: it has a hard time real time playing AVCHD clips, from what I’ve seen. Their lack of use of independent graphics card processing offloading is really criminal, and their supposed fixes for that have never worked for me. Oddly, or not, they have just issued fixes for their AVCHD playback, they claim in 10, as Sony launches support for the AVCHD standard, which they wrote with Panasonic years ago.

So I prefer FCP for it’s flawless playback of my HD, and it’s white balance and color correction over Vegas, though believe me, I’m no expert in grading. But I see distinct color improvement when correcting *the same footage* with FCP. Why? I have no idea. No one on the Vegas boards can clarify.

For many simple jobs, interviews, etc. I just do Vegas, and then go back to FCP. But I have had the luxury of buying both. If I had to buy only one, it would be FCP. And get FCP Power Skills to learn what the stupid documentation doesn’t tell you.

I’m looking forward to being able to try out Adobe at some point. But their track record doesn’t make me think they can do better than Apple. At least I’ll have my choice of lower cost hardware. If they offer a decent competitive upgrade,I might just dump Apple hardware. It seems the new SE folks in SF are doing a lot with Adobe these days. And yes, Avid is out there. But I’m not that kind of pro.

So, yes, if you want to play well with others, learn FCP, drink lots of wine at the end of the day and take walks to vent the anger of dealing with a substandard user interface, and put up with it so you get jobs when they come your way.

I think we are a good 10 years off from getting the interface we deserve, the power we need, and a product that runs on cheap industry standard hardware. Neither of these products are it yet…well back to work..

(G)

Alf

[Scott Sheriff]

Frank
“So your comment about disgruntled users at forums, was that a joke or have you actually read some. If so, any particular forum I should check out? Any links perhaps?
”

Sorry, I should have included a link, here it is:
https://forums.creativecow.net/sonyvegas

When viewing this forum in the 1 month view I saw about a dozen flames on the first browser page. Could be op errors, or real bugs, I don’t know. We get the same thing here in the FCP forum. Just saying asking FCP folks about Vegas may not get you all the info to make an informed choice.

I used ‘crashing’ as a search term in the Vegas forum and got about 700 hits.
https://forums.creativecow.net/search.php?q=crashing&f%5B%5D=24

Not trying to bash Vegas. They all crash. But if you are thinking about making a move to this platform, this is something to check into.

Scott Sheriff
Director
SST Digital Media
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com

[Frank Black]

Scott, thanks a lot for the links. I’m looking into this now.

[Frank Black]

Stephen and Alf, thanks guys. In this thread and from other research, I have learned a lot about both FCP and Vegas and a lot about how editing systems must re-compress when changes are made, thereby resulting in a lost of quality, and for this reason a higher quality codec will eventually result in less of a loss. Also that it is better for system performance and finished product to work in one codec, especially if you will be jumping from system to system, such as Color.