[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.

[Koss Thiery]

This is just a question about After effects architecture.

I’ve been a long time Vegas Pro user, which has been at 64 bit for a couple of years now. I recently added After Effects to my weekly routine at the TV station, specifically for Key Light, and the Refine Mask effects available in After Effects CS5.

I was shocked to find that Vegas tends to handle AVCHD clips, with no GPU acceleration mind you, much better than After Effects. I’m just wondering what’s going on under the hood with AE that makes it perform so poorly. Literally the same clips will play in real time on the Vegas timeline, but they usually play at about 12-15 FPS on AE with absolutely no effects processing at all.

This difference, and the somewhat ambiguously defined Mercury Playback Engine led me to get a super clocked nVidia GTX 480 video card with 1.5GB of GDD5 RAM, similar to what this guy is doing, in hopes of adding it to the list of supported cards, and using it to speed things up in AE. Unfortunately I found out, pretty much the same day that this particular part of the MPE is not supported in After Effects.

So, I suppose the second part of my question is, “Why not?” It seems obvious to add Mercury Playback to After Effects, considering that people will probably be doing more effects processing with it than they will with Premiere. Is this a planned patch for After Effects? Similar to some of the Vegas plugins I’ve seen, which re-route some effects processing from the CPU to the GPU? Pretty please?

As a third part to this question, “What do I do with this monstrosity of a card, now?” I haven’t used Premiere in nearly a decade, but it was my first non-linear experience, and though I survived, I’ve never looked back for fear I would turn to a pillar of salt. I’ve heard that it’s better, but I’m in an environment where I have access to FCP, Avid, Vegas, and now Premiere, and nothing seems to come close tot he functionality and speed of Vegas so far. Any insights?

Thanks