What’s the big deal about Vegas Pro 11?

[Mike Kujbida]

This is all we know so far.
https://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro11

[Ron Whitaker]

Yeah, I read that, too.

Frankly, it doesn’t sound like a BIG jump. Sounds like maybe a few bug fixes, but based on that list on Sony’s website, isn’t that pretty much Pro 10 as well?

I guess there’s supposedly an accelerator of some sort, but that’s really all I see. Maybe I’m missing something.

[Mike Kujbida]

I thought so too until I read what they put into Movie Studio HD 11 Visual Effects Suite and now my hopes are a bit higher.
We’ll just have to wait until next month (I hope) to see what they did put into it.

[Ron Whitaker]

Yeah, that’s another question: what is Movie Studio HD 11 Visual Effects Suite all about. I have SV Platinum 11. Did Sony add some new features to Platinum 11?

[Mike Kujbida]

Take a look for yourself.
https://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/moviestudioves

[Dave Haynie]

From the description, the big deal is GPU acceleration. While perhaps not a new “feature”, the idea of making my workflow run 2x, 3x, 5x faster than it currently does, particularly on native AVC editing, is more generally useful than anything I can think of in terms of features at the moment.

Thinking of this way: one AVC decode of a 1080/60p video takes my system about 60% CPU, just using the CPU. Using the GPU, this same decode takes about 8% CPU… that’s all six cores in both cases. Just for rendering, Vegas is going to be doing that same kind of work, and currently, it’s all done on the CPU. If they see a similar performance boost just on video decoding, I would expect that just rendering an hour’s worth of 1080/60p on a 2-stream project, I’d see more than an extra hour’s worth of performance… that’s just factoring in a decoding boost I’ve already seen in the real world.

Another point of reference here: Adobe Premiere CS5.5, which has extensive GPU-based rendering improvements… folks claim AVC editing feels more like DV editing, with a decent GPU.

So anyway, I’m really excited about this, if they meet the potential.

Ok, it also supports RAW photos, but via the Microsoft interface stuff, which isn’t usually all that up-to-date. Other things: a new synchronization feature, and some new plug-ins (improved text tool, improved image stabilizer). Nothing there that would of itself justify the upgrade. Looks like improved stereoscopic video handling… probably AVC-MVC across the board (input, output). Not interesting to me just yet, but if you’re doing “3D”, I suppose. There is now an AVC-MVC spec for camcorders, based on the AVCHD 2.0 stuff.

-Dave

[David Shirey]

GPU acceleration is huge. When Adobe Premiere finally came out with the CUDA-accelerated preview, I was able to get our entire office (except me who was already on Vegas) to switch from FCP on macs to Premiere on pc’s I built myself for a lot less money. If Vegas 10 had GPU acceleration, we could all be using Vegas right now instead of just me. So Sony was behind the curve on this one and we’ve spent too much on Abode software to switch over to Vegas now, but at the very least I can use this as an excuse to beef up my work PC to take advantage of it.

I already bought a GTX 560 card at home in anticipation of Battlefield 3 this fall, so it’s nice when my work and my hobbies can fall in line in terms of hardware demands 🙂