[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.

[Chris Männik]

Yes, I read it through once and noticed it myself. Anyway the output format is just a pure AVI with no compression.