Vegas Pro compared to hardware based NLE

[Rob Mack]

My employer was a long time user of Media100, had a short tryst with their 844X system, and moved to PPro with AXIO cards. We’re now using an FCP system for a long form doc.

All except the FCP system could be considered hardware based. The FCP system just uses a Kona card for I/O. Vegas ought to be in the same boat there but you should REALLY get a cast iron guarantee that such a card would work before making any plans around it.

The advantage of Vegas or most software based systems lies in their flexibility. You can work with many sorts of media in the same timeline. Hardware based systems tend to have very strict limits on what you can do with them. That’s the tradeoff for the system’s render speed.

Many people think that Vegas is very fast to work with but your editors may be disturbed by the apparent lack of control. Vegas is pretty freewheeling. Vegas can do a lot of multitrack comp work and it can also do a lot of audio work. Generally, Vegas is fast to edit with but then you had to render in the end.

Vegas also usually plays nicely with other NLEs, so you could have it installed on an edit system along with something else.

We had to install an FCP system for the doc we’re working on because the PPro/Axio systems had huge memory problems and just couldn’t handle large projects (more than 10 minutes)

I’d say that if you have a very well defined workflow using just one type of media then a hardware based system would be faster. If you’re in the market, I’ve heard nice things about Edius…

Rob Mack

[Chris Blair]

Rob,

Thanks for the reply. Your view is pretty much what we’ve concluded in interal discussions. Final Cut, Premiere, and Vegas provide flexibility with formats and codecs, and allow you to do a lot of compositing and layering directly in the timelines, which saves time on the front-end of editing, but on the back-end, you have to render your final movies.

We’re so used to that instant, real-time feedback, in terms of video layers, effects and critical NTSC monitoring, that moving to software based systems is a tough sell. Even with hardware cards like Blackmagic and Kona installed, Final Cut is still a slower system to edit on (in our eyes) than our VelocityQ systems.

We’ve also come to the conclusion that the Edius turnkey systems are about the closest thing to our current setups. And we’ll never buy a Matrox based system after some really bad experiences with their hardware and drivers a few years back. I’ve never had much confidence in their products and it seems they always have some nagging problems with their systems.

It’s also hard to adjust to having a lot of different formats and codecs on our video drives. To us it makes keeping track of things very difficult and just opens up a big can of worms when it comes to quality control.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[David Shirey]

I started out with Media100 in the late 90’s and it was great having so little to render before you ran your project to VHS or Betacam for the client in real time. Then DVD came along and we got set-top recorders which had pretty much the same workflow except for having to finalize the DVD’s when complete. Nowadays all the dvd’s have to have custom menus, or they need things rendered out for internet distribution or to play from a pc. Back in Vegas 4 my pc was pretty slow and rendering a 2 hour project to mpeg2 was a lot more trouble than the real time output of my Media100, but these days it’s plenty fast.

I wouldn’t say Vegas or hardware based NLE’s have superior workflow, it’s just what kind of work you do and what you’re going to need. With CPU speeds these days, you can render mpeg2’s faster than realtime, but now we have HD to worry about, and in time CPU speeds will catch up with that I assume. If hardware based works best for what you do, I’d say stick with it. Although in terms of entry costs for trying out Vegas, you couldn’t ask for a better value. Slap together a PC with a $200 CPU and give it a whirl.

[Chris Blair]

We’re testing it now on our Decklink HD Extreme based PC. It’s an HP xw series (one recommended by Blackmagic on their site and it has (2) dual-core CPU’s…so 4 computing cores.

In a few hours of testing with Vegas, the speed isn’t the problem, as it plays back most things in real-time or near real-time…it’s the output to NTSC that’s harder to get used to. With the codecs it can’t play back in real-time, it naturally reduces the resolution, so we’re constantly looking at the output and saying, “why does that look like crap?”…or “why does the motion look so weird on that?”

Then we render it out and say, “oh…that’s why.” It’s just a different way of working and I guess you get used to it. But I agree that whatever works best for workflow is the direction to go…and for us, hardware based, real-time systems are our bread and butter.

It’s just that with Harris discontinuing the Velocity line (for post-production houses…they still make a line of editing systems that use Velocity software for news operations), we need to be evaluating which direction we’d go down the line.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com