Moving to Vegas from AVID

[Mike Dalton]

No replies?

[Mike Kujbida]

Mike, my apologies for the lack of responses.
My guess is that there are few Avid users (or former users) here which is why the lack of replies.
I can tell you that Vegas depends solely on the computer’s CPU for playback purposes and there is nothing like Mojo to speed things up.
While some of us may wish for boxes such as this, our fear is that we would become dependent on it and then the manufacturer would discontinue it, thereby leaving us hanging in mid-air.
If you don’t think that this can happen, talk to Premiere users who invested a lot of money in the first generation hardware accelerators only to have a new model come out.
This meant that the old model was no longer supported in any way, shape or form 🙁
If your buddy is experiencing “very, very poor real-time monitoring quality”, it could be that his computer is underpowered.
It also depends on the type of footage that’s on the timeline as AVCHD puts more stress on a system than plain vanilla standard def DV.
The type and quantity of FX are another reason for slowdowns on Vegas .
Once again, Vegas with an i7 processor, Windows 7 and lots of RAM will work quite well.
I’m personally running an older quad core and have no complaints.
If I have a timeline with a lot of FX on it, I can do a RAM render or pre-render that section to see what it looks like in high quality in real-time playback.

All I can suggest is for you to download the trial version of Vegas 9 Pro and see for yourself.
I’m certain that there will be things you can’t stand about Vegas but I’m sure that there will also be things you will thoroughly enjoy.
Most importantly, understand that Vegas is not like other NLEs, especially Avid, and you’ll need to re-think your editing style.

[Mike Dalton]

Thanks for this detailed response – this is just what I wanted to know. Good stuff.