[John Rofrano]

Yea, MAGIX seems to have substituted Sony with VEGAS because their site is called https://www.vegascreativesoftware.com and if you look at where the software gets installed, it use to be in a folder called /Sony/Vegas Pro 13.0 but now it’s in a folder called /VEGAS/VEGAS Pro 14.0 (not MAGIX as you might expect and quite redundant) so they don’t seem to want to brand the software as being from MAGIX at all.

I guess they didn’t want to confuse their existing video software customers?

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Martin Szucs] ” Which one would make bigger difference? More Ram or an SSD?”

An SSD will make it feel like a new computer. My wife has a 2010 MacBook Pro 13″ and when I put an SSD in it, it was like buying her a new computer. Honestly the speed improvement was like night and day. I couldn’t believe how much your hard drive slows your computer down but adding an SSD will definitely make everything respond faster than adding more memory would.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Scott Francis] “My understanding is that Vegas has not had an update support for Nvidia cards in years. I have been using AMD cards since they have been the only one’s that are recommended for newer card support.”

There are two places that GPU acceleration comes into play. One is FX and timeline playback. Vegas Pro uses OpenCL to accelerate FX and timeline playback and AMD has always had the edge over NVIDIA because NVIDIA pushes their proprietary CUDA API. Vegas Pro does not use CUDA but NVIDIA also implements OpenCL and I have read that the newer NVIDIA cards do as good a job as AMD these days. Vegas Pro will use the latest GPU’s in this area.

The second is for rendering. Many people deliver MPEG4 and this is where Vegas Pro falls short and only supports incredibly old (6 year old) graphics cards. Hopefully MAGIX will fix this but no one knowns when or if they will.

[Scott Francis] “I would LIKE to get newer Nvidia cards to work with all my Adobe software and actually have better preview (not really as concerned with render times) of 4K in Vegas.”

Adobe use to only support CUDA but Apple is shipping their new Mac Pro’s with AMD cards so Adobe was kind of forced to support OpenCL better so I’m not sure how much better performance you will get with Adobe by moving to NVIDIA. I would look for some benchmarks that clearly show that the current Adobe suite runs better on NVIDIA. It may still work better, I just don’t know.

If you want to buy an NIVIDA card I wouldn’t let Vegas Pro stop you. The OpenCL support should be just as good as the AMD cards now. Look around for benchmarks unless someone here has had both cards and can testify to one being better than the other. Remember that back when a lot of Vegas Pro editor switched to AMD it was because AMD was a lot faster than NVIDIA at OpenCL. I’m not sure that is still true with the latest batch of cards.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[john bolton] “I expect John has seen me in the Sony Vegas/Magic forum from time to time…. ☺”

Hi John, Yea, WOW that’s an original Intel Mac Pro 1,1 introduced in 2006 with 2 dual core CPUs. Not much you can do with something that old, although it’s a testament to how well the Mac is built to still being used 10 years later for production work. FCP 7 was discontinued 7 years ago so I’m guessing that your friend firmly believes “if it ain’t broke… don’t fix it”. ????

That Mac Pro came with OS X 10.4 Tiger and can run the last version of OS X 10.7 Lion if upgraded to at least 2 GB of RAM but that’s as far as it goes. I’ve also read of “hacks” to get OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion installed but the problem is that the older Mac’s have a 32-bit EFIs while the newer OS’s need a 64-bit EFI to boot and checked for it. That’s why you would need to hack the boot loader. Unlike Microsoft that to this day still releases 32-bit versions of Windows causing all sorts of problems and extra work for developers, Apple simply cut over to 64-bit and never looked back which, IMHO, was the right approach.

Bottom line: While your original statement is true that FCP X is a much better platform to use, early versions were lacking important features and the later versions require more modern hardware to run. I’m running it on my 6 year old 2010 Mac Pro so it doesn’t have to be incredibly modern but more modern that 10 years old. lol ???? I would stick with FCP7 until your friend is willing to buy a new Mac. It doesn’t have to be brand new, it could be a used 2010 Mac Pro 5,1 from eBay, but it has to be at least as new as that.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

Have you tried importing with Create optimized media checked? This will create full resolution ProRes files in your Library instead of copying the MXF files and should be much easier to edit. Then just work with the ProRes files in full resolution.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[john bolton] “I am sure I read somewhere that this particular version was at its highest OS X version of 10.7.5 but I will check the serial number and look up the details.”

You are correct. What Roger was suggesting is that if you had at least a 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 you could install OS X 10.11 El Capitan on another partition or external drive and boot from it and install FCP X 10.3 and get the latest features. I believe his point was that 10.0.8 was not worth using and I tend to agree with him. If you are going to use FCP X, use the latest version.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Frank Tomlin] “It’s the DVD, not downloaded.”

Try the latest download. I would never install the DVD version because it’s usually very old by the time you get it.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[John Carlton] “”24p Seattle Dolly”, “30p Perpetua Dolly” and “30p Sunset Handheld” aren’t imported correctly. These footages’ thumbnail are greenscreen(which seem to mean error) and preview is also. “60p Snow Handheld” and “60p Waterfall Handheld” seem to be imported correctly, but it doesn’t play correctly.”

I’m seeing the same thing in Vegas Pro 13.0. Just green for the 30p & 24p and stutters for the 60p (even in a 60p project).

I also imported them into Final Cut Pro X and all of them imported correctly. The 60p footage plays back smooth but the 30p and 24p footage stutters badly. If they are from the same camera, something is wrong with the way those files are written.

It looks like Vegas Pro needs to fix whatever is wrong with how they handle the 60p footage though because I had no problems with it in FCP X. I even applied the built-in Panasonic Log-V LUT and it looked great!

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Ted (TR) Wilkinson] “So my understanding is, I could actually give them a DNxHD render in an .mov wrapper, though it isn’t H.264 – but FCP7 should be able to read it with the codec installed – or at the very least they should be able to run it through compressor on their system to turn it losslessly into the ProRes file they want.”

I would ask them if they can accept Avid DNxHD before you go through the trouble of creating it and sending it to them. If they don’t have the codec already installed, there is probably no chance that they will install it just for you. If they are still using the 7 year old discontinued FCP 7, they might be using an equally old version of Mac OS X which means they won’t want to make any changes to it.

Ask them if they can ingest XDCAM in an MXF container. If they can, render to Sony MXF using the HD422 1920×1080-60i 50 Mbps template. This is how we deliver broadcast material to PBS and the quality is outstanding. I’m using using macOS Sierra on my Mac Pro and it supports this natively with the Pro Video Formats package but as I said, if they are still on 7 year old software, your options may be extremely limited to what FCP 7 could ingest 7 years ago.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[John Rofrano]

[Angelo Mike] “I’m curious about how people’s render times are turning out and if anyone can attest to whether Vegas is faster or slower than rendering using FCP on a Macbook.”

First, it’s important to be very precise about the Mac hardware that you are asking about. There is the MacBook and then there is the MacBook Pro. The entry level MacBook is NOT designed for editing video! So if you really mean the entry level MacBook then forget about it. The MacBook Pro, on the other hard, can edit 4K video like butter in FCP X so thats a whole different story. The MacBook Air is somewhere in between.

The question itself is difficult to answer as well because there are two parts to rendering: (1) processing all of the FX and tracks into a single video stream and then… (2) encoding that video stream for output. The number of FX and whether they are GPU acceleration or not will affect the outcome. Without knowing what they are, it’s impossible to say. You would have to do a very controlled experiment using either the same 3rd party plug-ins or similar FX on both videos in Vegas Pro and Final Cut Pro X to be able to measure. Then both projects would need to be rendered with the same or very similar parameters to the same format.

FCP X makes generous use of the GPU in the Mac. Vegas Pro has very limited GPU support, so the MacBook Pro with FCP X might actually be faster because it supports the hardware better. If your friend buys a new PC with a new GPU that Vegas Pro doesn’t support (because Vegas Pro only supports 6 year old GPU’s for rendering to MP4) it might not perform as well as you might think. This is one of the reasons I stopped using Vegas Pro (absence of modern GPU support).

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com