[John Rofrano]

[Stephen Crye] “how long did it take to get used to the Final Cut workflow? I’ve looked at it, and it is very, very different.”

I got use to it in an afternoon with training from Ripple Training. Seriously, coming from Vegas Pro helped a lot because people who use other NLE’s are use to 3-point editing and Vegas users don’t have that approach, we are use to just dropping stuff on the timeline and working it from there and FCP X is great for doing that, more so than Vegas Pro even. The magnetic timeline is brilliant and once you understand how it works, you wonder why anyone would want to edit video using tracks? The magnetic timeline is “ripple edit” implemented correctly. Yes the approach is very different. The approach is based on your primary storyline and secondary storylines. It’s all about the narrative (i.e., telling the story) and not about which track do I place this on. Different yet refreshing. ?

[Stephen Crye] “If I do move to Mac – I’m thinking of it – how well does Vegas 12 run on it?”

Vegas Pro 12 & 13 ran extremely well on my Mac Pro 12-Core with AMD Radeon HD5870 GPU. Rendering MainConcept AVC works great. I was using it with Windows 7 Professional and it worked fine. The “red car” benchmark played back at full speed 29.97 fps without a single glitch or dropped frame. As I said, I don’t use it that way anymore but Bootcamp allows you to run Windows natively so everything works just like any other Windows PC.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

Yes, that’s exactly what I was suggesting. This is how I work:

After a shoot, I load the camera cards into my Mac and use the Create Archive feature of FCP X to create a Camera Card Archive. These all get stored in two places. 1 copy on my 12TB RAID 5 and another on a 1TB backup drive (of which I have many). I firmly believe that if you don’t have 2 backups, you haven’t really backed it up.

Then when I’m ready to edit, I create a new Library on my SSD, open the Camera Card Archive from either the RAID or backup, and import the footage I need into the Library. I do all of my edits with the Library copy of the footage and when I’m done, I copy the Library onto a different 1TB Backup drive and also onto the 12TB RAID. I then delete it from my SSD to make room for the next edit.

So I have a 12TB RAID with everything. A set of 1TB Camera Card Archives Backups, and a set of 1TB Library Backups. (three sets of drives) This works for me because I all of my edits fit onto my 512GB SSD. If I had a long-form project that needed more room I could edit off of the 12TB RAID 5 instead.

At this point I have 1 copy of the footage in the Camera card Archive and a second copy along with the projects in the Library. (one on the backup drives and one on my RAID array which is actually 4 copies). I could delete the camera card archives and still have everything I need to redo an edit because the Library has all of the footage that I used. It sounds like you would not keep 4 copies but you get the idea. Even if you left yourself with just 2 copies of the Libraries you would have a good enough backup of everything unless there was something on the original camera card that you needed (which is why I keep both)

The bottom line is that the Library is the “one folder” that holds everything just like you were doing except that FCP X keeps track of everything for you.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

It sounds like you want to use a Library in place of your “one folder” (because a Library actually IS one folder under the covers). I would use a separate Library just like you did a folder and I would use the option to copy all media into the Library. This way everything you need is in one place. When you want to archive, just drag and drop the Library onto your backup drive and delete it from your work drive. When you need to work on it again, drag and drop the Library back onto your work drive from your backup drive and open it and continue working.

This is essentially exactly the way you worked in FCP 7 and one of the reason’s I love FCP X (i.e., Libraries make organization very simple).

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Tobias von Brockdorff] “Now I think about to invest in a PNY Quadro M … But I’m not shure, if there will be any realtime performance increase with Vegas 14.”

Hi Tobi,

I don’t use Vegas Pro anymore and have no real experience with 14. I moved to the Mac and use Final Cut Pro X and it takes complete advantage of every ounce of power my Mac Pro’s GPU can deliver. I don’t worry about hardware and software incompatibilities anymore because Apple makes both my hardware and software. So I really don’t have any advice (other than buy a Mac and use FCP X) to help with your hardware dilemma.

My understanding from what I’ve read is that Vegas Pro 14 hasn’t done anything to improve GPU support and, in fact, doesn’t support CUDA with newer NVIDIA cards so a newer Quadro will probably perform worse than my Quadro 4000 did which was supported back in 2012.

If you want to get good GPU performance from Vegas Pro you should invest in an AMD GPU, not NVIDIA!

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

I would go with either the Mac Pro 6-Core or the new iMac 5K Core i7 4-Core. I don’t believe that the refurbished iMac Core i5 would be as good as either of them. Intel themselves recommend that Core i7 is for content creators and the Core i5 for content consumers. As a content creator you will be happier with the performance of the Core i7 or Xeon’s in the Mac Pro.

I went through the same decision last year and I chose a 3rd option: I bought a used 2010 Mac Pro 2.93 Ghz 12-Core, 24GB memory,  1TB boot drive with 3x 2TB Apple RAID, ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics card for $2475. That was a year year ago so they are slightly cheaper now. OWC has 6-Cores starting at $1100 and 12-Cores starting at $2000. I added an SSD drive to mine and responds like any modern Mac. So you also have the option of buying an older 2010-2012 Mac Pro as well.

I guess the question you should ask is how will the dual D500 GPU’s in the new Mac Pro improve your workflow? I don’t know the answer, but that would be the big advantage to getting the new Mac Pro, but the D500 is not as good as the D700 so you really want a new Mac Pro 6-Core w/D700’s. If you are working in 4K or plan to work in 4K, the Retina 5K display on the 27″ iMac is absolutely gorgeous. I went to see it at the Apple store and really fell in love with it. The new iMac Core i7 might be the most “bang for the buck”.

It’s a tough decision. Hopefully more people with experience with both the new Mac Pro and iMac 5K will respond.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Steve Jacobs] ” I noticed that with El Capitan, you now cannot use Disk Utility to stripe a RAID array. “

What was Apple thinking? Why would you remove a features used by most of your professional users? This boggles the mind. Yes, you can still get t the feature from the command line but why make it so hard when it use to be so easy. It just makes no sense at all… but that’s Apple. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[George Dean] “As you have already filmed at 23.97, then render at that same speed and send it to YouTube.”

+1

Solid advice. It is what it is. Don’t try and make it something it isn’t. Render the same format as your source. That’s the best quality you have to offer.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Amanda Duffield] “Can anyone tell me which render template in Vegas 13 Pro is closest to this or, how I can make my own using these settings? I’m wondering if some things are labelled differently, I couldn’t replicate exactly.”

Hi Amanda, You will need to create a custom template. To do this go to File | Render As… and under Windows Media Video V11 (*.wmv) select the 512 Kbps Video template as a starting point and press the Customize Template… button.

Then make the following changes assuming your project is correctly set to 640×484:

On the Video tab change:

• Mode: Bit rate VBR
• Format: Windows Media Video 9
• Image size: (Keep Original Size)
• Frame rate (fps): 10.000
• Average bit rate (bps): 388 K

Give the Template a new name and press Save to save it to your list. This should give you the original video specs.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Don Cobble] “But no I did not even know of that I will check it out and see if thats what I am looking for. “

Yea, look up Secondary Storylines and Compound Clips. Two different grouping mechanisms and I’m pretty sure that Secondary Storylines is what you’re after but it’s also good to know that you can make Compound Clips to tie multiple clips together as if they were one (e.g., video and external audio, or complex stacked composites).

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Jon Muro] ” I guess JVC has it’s own codec inside that .mov wrapper? Anyone else have this problem with JVC .mov files and vegas ?”

This is very typical of JVC in general. They tend to go off on their own and use proprietary formats that no one else does which makes them incompatible. I’ve seen it happen for years now and for this reason I would NEVER buy a JVC camera. If you gave me one, I’d sell it on eBay and buy a Sony or Panasonic. JVC will tell you that they are being progressive, leading the industry in new directions, but they are just causing headaches for their consumers leading them in circles by being incompatible. So I’m not surprised at all by this. As I said, it’s been happening for years. JVC = non-standard.

~jr

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