Vegas (Windows) vs. Final Cut Pro (Mac)

[Dave Lozinski]

Totally agree. Vegas is soooooooooooo much fun to use. It’s easy to use.

And it just works.

I know I love this software because I get excited reading the user manual. 🙂

I have never loved Sony products (hardware or software) until I stumbled upon Sony Vegas 9. Have now upgraded to 10.

Would recommend it to anyone over any Mac program. I suspect the Mac person mentioned in the original post who swears by FCP has never even looked at or tried Vegas because if they had, they’d be a convert too. 🙂

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[Shaun Yee]

I agree with everyone above (I have both Vegas Pro 9 and FCP), but I have one problem with Vegas that I would like to voice.
I have a PC system that has 8GB of ram and a ATI Radeon HD 4670 with 2TB of HDD space.
However, Vegas, when rendering out, especially in an HD format, will always say “System Low on Memory”.

Final Cut has never failed me once with 4GB ram and same graphics card on an iMac with Low Memory problems.

It is not just me who has had that problem with Vegas. If you search the faux-low memory problem on Google (or even here on Creative Cow), there are numerous accounts of this problem happening and no fix has been available, for both the 64 bit and 32 bit versions.

Overall, especially with Vegas’ extensive compatibility with various audio and video formats and easy interface, my opinion is that post-production would be greatly improved for many companies if they switch to Vegas, if not for the annoying problem I mentioned in extensive detail above.

[Andy Phillips]

this is kind of a late post, and I don’t want to get off topic, but this is addressing the low memory problem: sony vegas is not the only one. I’ve been browsing around other forums, and it seems that adobe premiere gets it the most, then sony vegas, then the other sony creative softwares. however, Pinnacle Studio (the hoe-editing version of avid) gets it a lot too even though projects in there rarely require much RAM or hard drive space

[Rahul Harit]

Well, I have been using FCP on Mac & Sony Vegas Pro 8 on PC. I have found that Sony is far better than FCP if we consider speedy edits. FCP is quite popular with its Templates which Sony does not have and are bought in a set of plug ins.Quality wise I have delivered results almost same from both the softwares without any hardware. Final Cut Pro have some issues with the Text Editing and not up to the mark. On the other hand Sony Vegas Pro delivers and renders Texts crystal clear as it is without using any other plug ins. Track Motion feature in Vegas is quick and superior to that of FCP. Another powerful feature of Vegas is that you can apply Effects and chain you effects in THREE modes, On Event, On Track and Finally on the Master Video. This is the most amazing feature which Final Cut doesn’t have and one needs to copy Fx attributes to all the events.Another point is that every event, needs rendering in FCP whereas Sony Vegas is Real Time and rendering is required only when you are finished with your edits. At last I would say that Sony Vegas pro and Final Cut Pro both are good softwares to edit on but my preference still goes with the Vegas pro. If a good hardware and a good machine like i5,i7 is with Vegas Pro then I would always want Sony on my Edit Table. I wish Sony comes out with independent MAC version which could work without bootcamp and windows. I would love to have it at my workstation.

[Pankaj Mattu]

This is Pankaj Mattu Hare, I m using Vegas at least from last 10 years and i also uses many other softwares like Pinnacle, Canopus, Premier. i have some probplem with the vegas that when we render the project it loses the generation and takes huge time. if any one have some great settings please send me on my E-Mail “pankajmattu@in.com”. Now i m using the premier pro CS5 and i have great experience with this. it hardly takes few minutes to render or Exporting the project at any format. But i want to work with Vegas so please send me the settings for HD, MPEG1, MPEG2 and AVI format.

Thanks

Pankaj mattu

[Chris Männik]

Regarding the low memory error in Vegas – there are some things that you can do to prevent it. Change Dynamic RAM preview in preferences to 0 MB and rendering threads to 1. This should help and no errors should occur any longer.

I’ve worked with Sony Vegas since the version 6 came out. I’ve also worked with FCP 7 for a year. It’s hard to describe my feelings for the these two. Vegas seems to be quick and clever, easy to use and even when sometimes it has some bugs in it, I still love it. FCP reminds me more like a old man with a lot of knowledge but slow reaction. You can get everything done in FCP but it takes more time and sometimes you can’t figure everything out yourself. Every time I have a question I look at help (haven’t found anything useful there, yet) and then Google. Sometimes I get an answer but sometimes not because the info I’m looking for is so sophisticated. The learning curve for FCP is really shallow. A year later and still I don’t understand everything about FCP. Most frustrating is that my MacPro should be the fastest and best on the market but still FCP is much slower than Vegas on my weaker PC. The audio waveform rendering just drives me crazy and also the fact that some video files cannot be directly previewed which makes everything MUCH slower. My conclusion is that though Vegas might have some minor bugs, it still is faster and less frustrating than FCP 7. Ofcourse it has some great features too, so if you’re looking for something specific you should look at the features list carefully.

And Vegas 11 is out and also Final Cut Pro X 😀 . If you have to choose between these two then you don’t have much choice. And I really wonder what will the industry do when FCP 7 isn’t supported by Apple and new OS X versions? FCP X isn’t useable on a pro level, will the go for AVID systems, Premier or PC and Vegas? I’ve heard that FCP and Premier users have converted to Vegas after they’ve tried it.

If I’d have time, I could write a novel about FCP’s deficiencies, seriously.

[Koss Thiery]

I am the Creative Services Director for a TV station, and I currently run 3 Vegas Pro 10 workstations for all of our production requirements. It just works 99.9% of the time as described for SD and HD production.

We had 3 Avids, and 2 Final Cut Pro machines, but I finally decommissioned everything else, and still manage to whisk through all of our work for the 4 stations that are transmitted out of our office.

My staff can simply get more done with Vegas than they could with Final Cut Pro in the same amount of time. The ability to preview everything in real-time is invaluable, and has been a part of Vegas for as long as I can remember. Of Course, it doesn’t hurt that the cost of owning and operating a Vegas system is also considerably less.

Our most expensive workstation has 6 cores running at 3.2GHz each, 16GB of RAM, a GTX480 GPU, and Two Solid state drives for under $1,300.00; it runs like the beast that ate the champ with Vegas.

As far as I’m concerned, Avid and Final Cut cannot compete at this price point.

[Michael Najarian]

I have 2 AMD HD 4670 in crossfire mode with Vegas 11 Pro, I can’t seem to find help from the Vegas or the AMD people but my AMD GPU does not help with vegas, and vagas has allot of issues with loading files and rendering.

So HOW did you test out your HD4670 with Vegas – Its incompatable as far as I can tell?

I would like to know if I can get my gpu to help with encoding I could save some serious time here.

Duftopia

[Dave Lozinski]

Simple questions but need to be asked:

1) what are you trying to render to? GPU accelerated encoding is only for mp4/h.264 encoded files. Either the Main Concept or Sony codecs.

2) In the options menu under video, how much memory do you have set for the Dynamic Ram preview? If you have anything higher than 256MB, try reducing it to 128MB and see what happens.

3) Also for rendering options you should see a drop down on whether to use CPU, or GPU. What do you have set? You need to set this to GPU.

4) Lastly (I forgot where this is, but I think it’s under Options and then the Video Tab), you need to make sure your cards are selected from the dropdown menu. If the cards aren’t listed, then Vegas isn’t recognizing them. This could be because they don’t have the latest or supported driver version.

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[Michael Najarian]

Yes I know I waisted my Money on Vegas 11 pro, But I had to try.

1) I am trying to render to a blu-ray format typically m2t, Files encoded with SONY system products like Tivo cannot be read, encoded by Sony HD studio 8,9,10,11 and Vegas 10 cannot be read, many times recognizing the audio but not the video.

2) Preview works fine WHEN I am able to load a file into the program, I did howver lower it from 200 to 128.

3) Options Video GPU Acceleration option does not allow me to select any GPU cards, I was greatly disappointed at version 10 when I had AMD HD 4670’s and wrote sony asking them to support the card now they say that I need an HD 5700 and upon installing version 11 they crippled any GPU accelleration I got with vegas studio 11 Platinum as well as being able to read most .mpg files, the crippling goes as far back as verion 9, BUT version 8 WORKS!

4) I have the latest Catalyst drivers but to no avail.

A Note for upgraders: Version 11 pro will cripple MOST older versions of Vegas and HD Studio from reading .mpg files and using even the meager %20 GPU it was, and System Restore Checkpoits cannot recover this crippling effect.

I sent a Screen capture of Vegas 8 reading and editing a file right next to Vegas pro 11 NOT being able to read the file into th eprogram about a week ago, but they now seem to be ignoring customer complaints completly.

I was better off NOT upgrading apparently