The usual upgrade question

[Edward Troxel]

What version of Vegas and what version of Excalibur are you using? For example, there were lots of changes between 4 and 5 and a lot more changes between 5 and 6. Any version of Excalibur for Vegas 5 will run in Vegas 6. However, once again, Excalibur 4 adds many new features over the prevous versions.

Edward Troxel

[Steve]

Well, that was stupid of me, wasn’t it?

I assumed you would guess I was refering to upgrading from the penultimate version to the latest version.

You know what they say about assuming.

Same questions, though.

What do the new features in V6 gain me (real world examples, please, because I honestly don’t see $300+ worth here) and does it require an Excalibur upgrade as previous versions have?

Thanks again,
Steve

[Edward Troxel]

Any version of Excalibur that will run in Vegas 5 will run in Vegas 6. If you use less than version 4, you’ll have to manually copy the files over to Vegas 6. Naturally, Excalibur 4 has more features. So, no, an upgrade to Excalibur is NOT required.

As for Vegas, I guess I’ll do some assuming now and guess that you are currently running Vegas 5 (since you still haven’t said and I don’t know what YOU consider the “penultimate version”. Things that really jump out at me:
New A/V out of sync indicator
Nested Timelines
Track Motion Presets
DVDA 3 – huge changes here and worth the price of the upgrade alone.

See the April issue of my newsletter where I talk about the new versions.

Edward Troxel

[Stephen Mann]

Actually, it’s $200 until the end of May.

[Steve]

** Beware – Negativity below **

> New A/V out of sync indicator
> Nested Timelines
> Track Motion Presets
> DVDA 3 – huge changes here and worth the price of the upgrade alone.

This is precisely the type of answer I hoped to avoid. I cut-n-pasted them, too.

I would like *examples* of what these features are good for. I’m not asking you to give away your competitive edge. I don’t need a step-by-step proceedure. I’m looking for system level info only. Plain talk.

I’ll start it along. Here’s why I don’t care much about what you’ve posted so far. Perhaps I should say, what sony has posted so far.

> New A/V out of sync indicator

Under what circumstances would I need this? If I have to ask, I don’t need it. But who does? And why? I read the ads and the web page. I still don’t know why I need it. Am I stupid, or what?

> Nested Timelines

This saves memory, right? Helps manage big projects? Never had a problem with this. Can’t imagine why you would need it. Unless you’re a suffering artist.

> Track Motion Presets

This should have been included long ago at these prices. This is one of my major beefs. I would think that even sony would rather make money with new, quality features, rather than holding back useful features in order to justify future upgrades.

And don’t let them give you the “difficult to provide patches” stuff. My company releases “upgrades” for BUG FIXES within a week. Of course, we don’t need to very often. (Our software is as complex as vegas. Heck, I’ve written a basic video editor with DirectX9 and VC++. The hassle in video editing software seems to be mostly about licensing formats, hardware interfaces and protocals. That and paying the executive’s outrageous salaries.)

> DVDA 3 – huge changes here and worth the price of the upgrade alone.

Compared to what? Lot of room for improvement here. At least, compared to other products. This has always been a weak link in the chain if you ask me, which you didn’t. In my opinion, the GUI for DVDA could use vast improvement. It’s not at all inuitive in layout and really kludgy in execution. I see this upgrade as upgrading to what I thought I was getting in the last upgrade. Upgrade, upgrade, upgrade. Where’s the value!

When I upgraded from Vegas 4-point-whatever-the-last-downloadable-patch-was to v5.0, I got a expensive-licensed-video-processing-software which I have never used and a *bunch* of bugs in the basic editing features.

See some of my other posts.

Thank you for your time. 🙂
Steve

[Edward Troxel]

[Steve] “New A/V out of sync indicator”

Suppose you have accidently done something that moves the audio or video but not the opposite. Suppose you accidentally turned on “Ignore event grouping” or Ripple edit went ary. Now when the pieces get out of sync they change to a pinkish color giving you an immediate indication there is a problem.

Some other things I didn’t mention: when overlapping clips, the length can now be shown. When creating a fade, the length can now be shown. This helps give you a much more precise fade/dissolve.

[Steve] “Nested Timelines”

Now you can actually create a project that contains OTHER projects. Suppose you are editing a project that consists of 4 sections. You can edit each of the 4 sections separately and then create a 5th project containing those 4 projects. This will let you eliminate intermediate renders too.

Also, you may create a series of projects that are titles or lower-thirds. You can now simply apply them straight on the Vegas timeline. You can do anything to these projects that you can do to any standard event too!

[Steve] “Track Motion Presets”

Track motion presets WERE in Vegas 4 but got removed because of the additions of 3D track motion in Vegas 5. Now they’re back INCLUDING the ability to save 3D track motions presets.

[Steve] “DVDA 3 – huge changes here”

It would be much easier if you just read the April 2005 issue of my newsletter (link under my name) where I talk about all the new stuff in Vegas 6 and DVDA 3. You can also go back to the April 2004 issue where I talk about all the new stuff in Vegas 5 and DVDA 2.

Edward Troxel

[Seatlanta]

Hi:
After reading your questions and the various replies, my conclusion is that you may not need to upgrade. I’m happily using Vegas 5 and older copies of DVD Architect, Tsunami, and Excalibur.

I’m a traditionalist–straight cuts, few effects, simple text menus, etc. I don’t care for glitz, and so far, Vegas 5 has really met my expectations. And I have not scratched the surface.

Keep in mind that I’m also an old guy who learned editing by cutting and gluing film, starting in the 1950s with 8mm. So non-linear editing is wonderful to me, and so simple that I can’t ever understand why anyone complains. It’s like using a word processor instead of an old typewriter (or quill pen).

As mentioned above, I have an older version of Tsunami and Excalibur and have found them to be quite helpful, and certainly worth the investment. The recent upgrade seems worthwhile, but I don’t like the upgrade price (incentive) because I haven’t owned the package for very long. The upgrade came out not long after I bought my version, so I guess I’ll just hang on for a while.

Best wishes, and good luck with your decision.

James (seatlanta)

After reading Ed’s descriptions of some of the Vegas 6 improvements, I may have changed my mind about a Vegas upgrade. I think that project nesting and out-of-sync detection may make me go ahead and buy the new version. Both sound like real time savers.

[Steve]

Thank you all so much for your responses. They are appreciated.

I am also of the “less is more” school. While I do a lot of animations, I do almost no graphics processing. About the only image processing I do is to lighten or sharpen poor video.

Sometimes I think I must be the only amature videographer that thinks these “movie colors” actually detract from a film. In “The Matrix”, the coloring was simply irritating. In “Three Kings” it was downright distracting. Indeed, I suspect these processing programs were developed to cover defects rather than enhancing the viewing experience.

I rarely have need for emergency functions used in case of accidents. Not being a “professional”, I have no time constraints and can afford to start over – or plan ahead, which is easier. One of my “secrets” is to save my work as a new version “very” often. Those .veg files aren’t that big.

There was another very useful feature (to me) which was removed from DVDA2. It was the ability to set your button thumbnail with a click on the timeline rather than the klunky slider/manual entry in DVDA2. Is this feature back in DVDA3?

And for me, 3D motion was not worth losing the ability to save track motions.

Multicam wizard alone is worth the price of Excalibur. I’m sorry to say that I’ve never had the need to use any of the other features.

There is one feature I’d like to see. I mentioned above that I do animations. I recently animated a cricket by taking some clip art, going into paint shop pro and spliting out all of the limbs to different .gifs (because .gifs contain transparancy info). I took the resulting pics back into Vegas and set rotation pivot points at all of the joints (elbows, knees).

I could move the entire figure as a unit by paranting the body to the limbs but because the front limbs had to appear in front of the body and the back limbs behind, I couldn’t use the body as the parant since the forced parent placement on the timeline (hint, hint) would’ve put the body on top of everything. No problem. I used a media generator “color” on a higher track, set it to transparant and parented this to all of the cricket parts.

I then looked carefully at the musical soundtrack and found the “beat” by looking for regularly spaced peaks (hint, hint) and placed a marker on each. Then I did some motion keyframes at each of the markers but different for each limb. I ended up with a dancing cricket playing the fiddle in time with the music.

Of course, this proceedure was made more difficult by the fact that you can’t open TWO motion or FX windows at_the_same_time. Perhaps we’ll see this in a future upgrade. For $250.

I can now say without reservation that to me, the upgrade is not worth the money. Instead, the fact that sony previously removed two very useful features makes me want to move to another product.

Mactel anyone?

Again, thanks for your time.
Steve