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Real Time Editing?
I’ve been a faithful Vegas Video user for, I dunno, since it’s inception.
After so many years of using such an intuitive interface it has become difficult for me to understand why anyone would willingly choose to edit with any other system.
This bewilderment has only been worsened by my appointment to Production Manager of the TV station I work for. Until then, my exposure to the Avid Non-linear editing platforms employed by our production department was limited to the many instances in which Avid would crash and burn, or require other maintenance. Now that I have had the opportunity to really use the Avid based systems, both a Meridian Symphony and The Xpress HD Pro, I have to say that I’m even further confounded.
When I was the station studio engineer, I was privy to the conversations that led to the decision to go with Avid, and the subsequent $80,000.00 capital investment that came with the purchase of our Avid Symphony. I made it known that there were alternatives like Sonic Foundry Vegas, but it was decided that it would be too difficult to find people competent enough to edit on anything other than Avid, because it was the industry standard.
Maybe that’s the problem? Perhaps, being the industry standard allows Avid to get away with the distribution of sub-par software and hardware packages?
Here’s a little known and less understood secret about Avid. It’s not truly a realtime NLE. In fact, it is closer to a media player with a playlist. The problem lies in the way that Avid handles media. In order to play back media in ‘realtime’ it has to first import the media, a process that involves transcoding or recompressing the media into a format that Avid can play back in ‘realtime’. This process can take quite a while. I imported a 20 second Quicktime media file into an Avid project bin, and it took well over a minute just to transcode the file. How effecient is that? Realtime, my ass.
Once you’ve got all of your media transcoded adding text and effects again requires pre-rendering in order to view the results during ‘realtime’ playback. The folks at Avid maintain the illusion of realtime playback by asking the user to render an effect or text event before exiting the text or effect edit mode. That’s right, if the user chooses not to pre-render these effects, Avid won’t play them in realtime at all.
In addition to all of this, the creation of these pre-renders while editing uses up an enormous amount of space. One of our editors produces a 10 minute real for transfer to our On-Air video servers once a week. All he has to do is open the existing project, and change the text caption on about 30 10-20 second clips, then export them to tape. On a Vegas system this process is stream lined and doesn’t require any pre-rendering at all. The text instances don’t exist as an actual video file until they are exported to tape. The user can see exactly what they will look like during real time playback without creating a pre-rendered video file. The editor in question, using the Avid Xpress HD, has to render the text to a video file in order to view it during realtime playback. He then has to go back and render out any unrendered sections before he can play out to tape. This leaves behind about 1.3 GB or more data every week, of material that will never be needed again. Over time this leads to loss of both hard drive space and performance, as the media drive becomes more and more fragmented with worthless data with cryptic names. I just deleted about 60 GB of *.omf files that weren’t being used, and never would be again!
If Avid were to be completely honest, they’d have to admit that their offering is far from a true realtime system. Like I said, utlimately, it’s more like a media player with a playlist. All it does is take each of the pre-render and pre-transcoded files and apply a list of play actions to them, telling the decoder which section to play next, there is little to no realtime processing going on, other than the process of decoding the video files for playback, which is exactly what windows media player does with it’s playlist.
I won’t even go into the other issues I’ve seen with the interface. Let’s just say that the implementation of the user interface is absurd at best, and nearly unusable at worst.
Anyway, these are just a few of my observations, and a venting of my frustrations that Avid is getting away with producing a piss poor system, based purely on the fact that they are the industry standard.
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4 Replies
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[kosstheory] “I’ve been a faithful Vegas Video user for, I dunno, since it’s inception.”
That means you get religious about your tools, right?
[kosstheory] “After so many years of using such an intuitive interface it has become difficult for me to understand why anyone would willingly choose to edit with any other system.”
It’s because one-size-fits-all is usually a recipe for looking oddly dressed…
[kosstheory] “my exposure to the Avid Non-linear editing platforms employed by our production department was limited to the many instances in which Avid would crash and burn, or require other maintenance.”
Congratulations on your advancement. With your understanding, you shouldn’t be there long, so not to worry about having to deal with Avids for long…
If Avids were unreliable, they wouldn’t be used to edit nearly every major motion picture and the lion’s share of television series out there. Oh, and the ones that aren’t, are edited on FCP, not Vegas. So again, you should be removed as a square peg in a round hole fairly quickly — so don’t fret ‘bot dem Avids (you aren’t likely to be around them long).
[kosstheory] “Maybe that’s the problem? Perhaps, being the industry standard allows Avid to get away with the distribution of sub-par software and hardware packages?”
What a moron. How many national Emmys or Oscars has Vegas won??? Oh, none? Now that’s a track record that will instill confidence
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1.why are you on this forum, I think you may have mis directed your post.
2.I,m afraid many nle’s need to import media before they can edit!(p2, firestore etc are changing this process though it often adds the process of media archiving) The media supplied with Vegas may be more comprensive than the avid goodies folder and may include exclusive drama rushes, current documentary material, and up to date news footage, while us dinosaurs are still having to load media real time off tape! Surprisingly a lot of sd/hd material is still acquired on tape and doesn’t arrive as a quicktime file, but luckily a broadcast spec Avid can load this material uncompressed, accurately in real time!
3. If you want to see real time see if you can find an old hand working tape to tape without an undo button against the clock, a process I think you may not have followed since its inception and then you might understand what real time really means in the BROADCAST WORLD. Either way you should maybe understand that a symphony offers a little more bangs for you buck than an express sytem, I think even Avid quote educational and corporate use on their web flyer, on which campus is your station
4.Now please go and look for the Production Managers or Vegas forum and leave your grandmothers to suck their eggs.
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What’s a Vegas????
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This kind of fanboyism is not anything we want on our boards and so I have locked this thread and made it read-only.
Best regards,
Ron Lindeboom
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