Vegas 8 + Gateway laptop

[Steve Rhoden]

Well then, welcome to the vegas family Bruce,
Indeed, that is ok to start off with..but beef up on the system memory.
As for me , iam not near ready to go over on the Vista side of editing
as yet.

Steve Rhoden
TNX EFFECTS STUDIOS.

[Danny Hays]

None of my machines are running Vista but I know Vegas 8 is compatible with it. Are you talking uncompressed HD or HDV? You should have no problems editing HDV m2t files, Tape based Sony and Panasonic cameras uses this format. Vegas has several preview options. I don’t think there’s a CPU based NLE that’ll give you 30 fps preview HD while editing. Vegas will give you less frames per second of full quality or more frames per second with less quality. You can also pre-render crucial sections to see full at full frame rate. I have played with CPU only Media composer and it won’t preview 30fps with several tracks and effects. Oh by the way, Congrats on switching to Vegas. I can’t even begin to tell you how Vegas is better, at least for the prosumer like my self. Now if you need many editors on the same project at the same time with file permissions and that sort of thing, Then Avid with Unity (I think thats what it’s called) may be the right choice. The ease of Vegas is unparalleled in my opinion. Vegas used to be audio only back when Sonic Foundry started it and it can be used as an audio editor as well. It supports direct-x and vst pluggins. You can put almost any different audio and video formats in the same time line and edit and render without having to convert the files to the same format before rendering. Every time I start playing with Avid, I run into tons of things That Vegas will do faster and easier. I run Vegas on a 3.4 core duo 2 gig ram and it works flawlessly with HDV. You can also re-render to Cineform avi which is more efficient and comes free with Vegas. Just hang out in the Creative Cow Sony Vegas forum for all your answers. There are some great people posting here. Welcome to the Vegas world!! Danny

[Bruce Quayle]

Thanks for the quick response guys. Yes, I have been researching my move to Vegas for some months and believe that it suits my purposes in the field. I will be shooting on the Sony PMW-EX1. BTW the Gateway is loaded with 4 gigs of ram.
Although a lot of my work will be completed on Vegas, some will be simply offline to be finished later on an Avid. I am working on the belief that Vegas 8 will put out an EDL that will be compatible with Avid.
One of the features that turned me on to Vegas was indeed the excellend audio capabilities available.
Thanks for the welcome and the advice. I will be reading these forum posts voraciously and will probably be back with some dumb newby questions. Please bear with me and my new learning curve.
Cheers,
BQ

[Steve Rhoden]

None of your questions can be dumb Bruce,
And as i mentioned earlier about beefing up your ram..4GB is
excellent, you are set to go.
Yes, vegas is an incredible audio editing application also, most
times i really dont have to open soundforge while iam working on
projects in vegas. Have Avid Media composer also in my arsenal
…but use it only to handle offline work.

But take note about Vista…vegas works well, but if you want to
partake in the plugins for vegas along with countless companion
softwares to have a complete and fluid editing experience, most of
these apps are not yet compatible with Vista.

Steve Rhoden
TNX EFFECTS STUDIOS.

[Danny Hays]

I’m not sure about EDL files from Vegas working in Avid. The Sony Vegas manual says their EDL’s are not the same as traditional NLE’s and are not intended for a project interchange with other editing apps. Vegas will however save as “Avid legace AAF” .txt file and with the media files in the same folder, Avid should open it. Since you have Vegas now, a simple test will show you. I’m curious now and if I gete a chance I’ll try it and let you know. Danny Hays

[Bruce Quayle]

Steve, I have always used Nuendo for my audio production, but this of course requires the rest of my studio to go with it. Field production is a whole different ball of wax and working on a small boat makes things even more complicated…so enter Vegas.
Yeah Danny, I was concerned that the EDL might not be totally compatible. I’d sure be interested in the results of your test when you get the chance. As the production will be a documentary, I doubt the offline will consist of anything much more complicated than cuts with the odd disolve, mix and slo-mo… And as long as I can include all the audio tracks I’ll need – I doubt I’ll ever need more than about 6 tracks.
I’m in a bit of a quandry as to the OS. Obviously XP seems to work, but will I be restricting myself by not moving up to Vista – future upgrades, 64 bit, etc?
So I’ll keep an eye on the forum from now on.
Thanks again to you both for your comments and help.
Bruce

[Ron Shook]

Danny,

[Danny Hays] “I’m not sure about EDL files from Vegas working in Avid. The Sony Vegas manual says their EDL’s are not the same as traditional NLE’s and are not intended for a project interchange with other editing apps. Vegas will however save as “Avid legace AAF” .txt file and with the media files in the same folder, Avid should open it. Since you have Vegas now, a simple test will show you. I’m curious now and if I gete a chance I’ll try it and let you know.”

I think that this is very good advice, if the Avid Legacy AAF works decently. The Vegas developers were never hot on taking the time to make a relatively bullet proof EDL functionality because they figured that broad Industry acceptance of AAF was always just around the corner. Trouble is the other NLE manufacurers kept proprietizing their AAF schemes and AAF functionality between systems has always been a moving target in multiple directions. That’s why it takes a $500 3rd party program to translate between Avid and FCP AAFs.

Bruce, you really need to run some tests with a typical project and see what translates reliably and what doesn’t from Vegas to Avid via AAF. Make sure before you go too much further, i.e. buying a laptop, that the functionality you need is there between the two systems. For example, find out how far beyond cut editing you can go before translation anomalies make the enterprise too goofy? Do dissolves and wipes, opacity settings and other simple compositing, audio level and pan mixing, etc., etc. translate properly? You need to find out whether Vegas will do the job you need to get done before committing to the max. Perhaps Danny can help get you some quick answers.

Ron Shook
Shoulder-High Eye Productions
CreativeCOW Forum Host for Discreet edit*

[Ron Shook]

Bruce,

[Bruce Quayle] “2×160 gig ata hdd in RAID 0 format”

We’ll see what others think, but I’d be leary of such an arrangement. Sure it runs faster but if you save internal drives for the operating system and programs, you don’t need a lot of speed for that and a safer arrangement would be to use the two drives mirrored, so that if one goes hinky you can keep going with the other until the bad one is replaced. It’s a bad idea to mix your programs and source files on the same drive or drive system as it’s not only slow but runs a danger of loosing everything in one fell swoop.

If you put your source files on external drives and save your project files to a mirrored system drive, you’re never far away from recovery in case of a hardware failure. You’d probably want an external, two drive, raid 0, e-sata drive to work well with the EX1 files and then could use large/cheap USB drives to back up the source media, preferably more than once. Remember you have no tape to archive with the EX1 and you have to be certain that you organize and wrangle the data with utmost redundancy before wiping the SxS cards for further recording. This cannot be emphasized enough.

Ron Shook
Shoulder-High Eye Productions
CreativeCOW Forum Host for Discreet edit*

[Bruce Quayle]

Hi Ron,
Sound advice! Thanks.
I have researched the archiving issue related to EX1 files and decided to do just that: Duplicate external hard drive copies of the material.
Your advice on the internal hard drives is interesting and enlightening. I need to keep my mini suite down to manageable proportions as space and power consumption are both key issues. Although I would prefer to offline on location, this is not essential. I can do this when I get back to civilisation if necessary. However I do need to be able to produce DVDs on location as will as have the ability to upload video to the internet occasionally. I believe that Vegas should be able to do this for me.
So perhaps I need to keep the drives separate and use one for the programs and the other for the media. Do you think that this would work? I gather that 7200rpm drives are essential, correct?
Thanks again for your very helpful comments and sensible advice.
Cheers,
Bruce

[Ron Shook]

Bruce,

[Bruce Quayle] “I need to keep my mini suite down to manageable proportions as space and power consumption are both key issues. Although I would prefer to offline on location, this is not essential. I can do this when I get back to civilisation if necessary.”

I think that we need to have more specific info on what you are about inorder to zero in on the best advice, not necessarily the doco subject matter, but how long are you on the road, how much crew, how tight a schedule, how well you know your new camera, how isolated you are liable to be from power for how long, what sort of housing, etc? The fact that you can put off to a large degree off-lining is a big help and may be the saving grace of this project. You may find the time to do some off-lining but obviously the first priority is getting the source material in the can, backed up properly, and communicating as much as possible with home base.

I’ll assume that it’s pretty imperative that you keep to schedule and I’m a firm believer in redundancy when ever possible, particularly when dealing with a pure file based workflow. For example: You’re out in the sticks and your computer goes south, and if your computer goes south your whole production goes south once you run out of limited, expensive SxS cards. What do you do? Maybe the best bet is to have 2 inexpensive laptops rather than one honkin’ laptop capable of near desktop editing performance. You can pick up 2 Ghz, dual proc AMD laptops with express card slots and DVD writers for about $600 now. They’ll get you by for cut editing and keep you running if one goes down. Just an example.

Ron Shook
Shoulder-High Eye Productions
CreativeCOW Forum Host for Discreet edit*