Anyone want to state their opinion of V8 yet? at DVinfo.net

Jeff Harper · September 10th, 2007, 03:44 PM

Is this a overly-hyped upgrade, or do you like it so far?

Paul Fierlinger · September 10th, 2007, 05:56 PM

As an animator I bring all my clips into Vegas as 720p non-compressed avi's so I do all my color corrections in my source application and it was clear to me that many of the anticipated benefits in this direction are going to go right past me.

I like working with Vegas a lot (in the past it's been Premiere and DPS Velocity for me) and was happy to pay $ 150 for a bit of the promised raised playback speed and a vastly improved titler; both important parts of my work.

As far as playback goes, nothing has changed. If someone had upgraded for me when I wasn't here, I think it would have taken me weeks before I noticed any change in anything whatsoever ... except for the Pro Type Titler, which I would call a Pro Hype Titler.

I have worked with several truly professional ones but this one doesn't come even close to any of those that I own. I can do much better even with Mirage's titler (my 2D animation source application), which is humbly called Simple Text, than I can do with this one, and I am not talking about any 3D features either; I actually dislike 3D graphics, period.

If I discover that I said any of this preternaturally, I'll be very happy to apologize; so please someone, prove me wrong, but I have spent the better portion of this afternoon exploring the new titler and in my opinion it's no great shakes.

Jeff Harper · September 10th, 2007, 06:08 PM

Thanks Paul...

Mark Holmes · September 10th, 2007, 06:24 PM

Paul, just followed your info to IMDB and to the PBS information page for "Still Life with Animated Dogs". Beautiful work. It is great to see such an unconventional use of the Vegas software. You are an inspiration. I wonder how many other animators are using Vegas this way?

Emre Safak · September 10th, 2007, 06:33 PM

Oh ****. The titler was the one thing I was really looking forward to.

Paul Fierlinger · September 10th, 2007, 06:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mark Holmes

I wonder how many other animators are using Vegas this way?

I know of at least a dozen animators who have Vegas and half of those have bought Vegas on my recommendations on the Mirage Bauhaus forums. I know of several animation schools that have caught onto Vegas. Vegas fits the animation medium in an intuitive way because its timeline is much like most animation software timelines. The file management system also works well with most popular animation programs and is based very much on our habits of integrating several graphics applications into a contiguous workflow..

Thanks for looking at my work. That Still Life film happens to hold the PBS record for the most aired independent program in the network's history and I was informed about that three years ago while it's still being aired to this day.

Mike Dulay · September 10th, 2007, 09:36 PM

Would be curious to know if the new Vegas is now able to remove pulldown from HV20 24p.

Richard Zlamany · September 10th, 2007, 09:55 PM

I find it a great upgrade at a fair price. Vegas Pro 8 is much quicker, so that right there makes me very happy. The titler is good and also very quick and easy to use. I will still use Boris G. for some projects, but the vegas titler is a nice addition.

Danny Fye · September 10th, 2007, 11:18 PM

I have been spending the day testing the trial version.

For those who want to do multi-cam work get Excalibur, Ultimate S or Infiniticam. The new built in one for Vegas 8 works but that is about all I can say for it. Reminds me of the old titler, it works but that was about all one could say for it as well. There is a free one from VASST that is better than the new built in one.

I noticed that when I use the new 32-bit floating point with SD 16x9 that when I looked at the video on the preview the colors were a lot better but when I rendered to 16x9 SD wide-screen Mpeg the colors looked weak and sort of blah. When I rendered the same video with settings of 8 bit the colors looked great when rendering to Mpeg. The oposite of what one would expect! Rendering to *.wmv the colors looked pretty much the same. Render times with *.mpg were approx 3 times longer and not very good results. Render times to *.wmv was approx 4 times longer and the results were about the same. There was no benefit to having the 32 bit on when rendering.

Great News!!! I loaded a 90 minute *.m2t file onto the time-line and the build peaks worked fine. No more crashes. Also there were no black frames. So those problems seems to be solved, at least on my system.

About the new titler. One of my original questions concerning it was will it allow for multiple fonts on the same line. It does.

On the right side there are these little things one can click on called, Curves, Collection, Effects and Gradients. I had a terrible time figuring out how to use those. The help was no good and I couldn’t find anything in the manual on them either. I found out they work by dragging what you want to the little time-line at the bottm of the titler. I won’t try to explain it all here.

There was an interesting help item on how to create a credit roll with the new titler. I will play with that later but finally (if this thing actually works) one can get super fancy with multiple fonts with their credit rolls. Note: One can paste text from a word processor but the fonts and other stuff will not be preserved. The only thing one should do with a good word processor is to setup for word wrap and to check for spelling errors. Copy and paste the text and then do the fancy stuff with the fonts and effects in Vegas.

From what I have seen I think they should rename it from ProType to ProsumerType. Not as amateur as the old one but not a real pro one either.

So to answer the OP’s question, I’d say from my first impressions and playing around with the trial version that Vegas 8 is somewhere in the middle. Some hype and some beef.

I can get a downloaded upgrade for $134.95. For HD I’d say there is enough beef for that price. For SD I’d say that unless the new titler is a must have then there just is’t quite enough there. Then again looking towards the future and HD and considering that if one waits after the end of October then one would have to pay $100 more for the upgrade. So even those who are working with SD only might just as well go ahead and upgrade and save the $100.

https://www.sonycreativesoftware.com...&keycode=64060

Danny Fye
www.dannyfye.com
www.vidmus.com/scolvs

Jeff Harper · September 11th, 2007, 05:49 AM

Apppreciate the feedback. It is sad to read the lukewarm endorsements after the huge expectations...

Paul Fierlinger · September 11th, 2007, 06:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jeff Harper

Apppreciate the feedback. It is sad to read the lukewarm endorsements after the huge expectations...

But it comes with plenty of hope as well. The price isn't unreasonable and as many have already pointed out, things improve. I like the sentiment that we pay a small fee to become beta-testers and see nothing wrong with that. I just don't like hype in any form and wherever it appears in life -- what's the point of it?

Kris Bird · September 11th, 2007, 08:08 AM

If you grade and/or composit then the 32bit takes vegas from being completely useless (in a grading sense) to being entirely workable into a high-end workflow. Also if you have any plans to ingest 10bit then vegas can now work with it. These are black and white improvements, but only relevant to some of us obviously.

Kevin Shaw · September 11th, 2007, 08:21 AM

For those of us working in HD the support for Blu-ray authoring is a big deal, assuming it works well. That alone might be enough to persuade me to give Vegas a try after several years of using Edius, and it looks like my main other alternative is Adobe CS3. Or I could keep using Edius and buy the Roxio DVDit Pro HD authoring program, but I can get an old copy of Vegas plus the upgrade for less than what that costs.

Can someone tell me in more detail how the multicam feature in V8 works? What I saw of a plugin one for V7 didn't impress me compared to what I'm used to, which is to click on a camera clip while playing the timeline and immediately have that change show in the preview window. Is the built-in multicam for V8 like that?

Joe Busch · September 11th, 2007, 08:34 AM

After properly setting up my preview window, I've found a vast improvement in playback while editing, I'd get 10fps before now I'm getting 30fps...

Same project, same settings, Vegas 8 is running much faster

I'm just having trouble getting it to open my old Vegas 7 projects (well Vegas 7 had trouble opening them too, they're quite large with a lot of clips/subclips)

A clip that has heavy filters on it, plays back at 18fps in Vegas 8, and 11fps in Vegas 7... Non-edited HD is 25fps in Vegas 7, and 30fps in Vegas 8... light effects are still 30fps in Vegas 8... (Color correction... etc... some slow motion) Whereas they'd drop down to 20-25fps in Vegas 7

I'm happy, I'm only using the trial right now...

Paul Fierlinger · September 11th, 2007, 08:46 AM

After properly setting up my preview window, I've found a vast improvement in playback while editing, I'd get 10fps before now I'm getting 30fps...

Same project, same settings, Vegas 8 is running much faster
============================================
Would you mind clarifying? What did you do differently to "properly set up your preview window", because in the next sentence you say "same project, same settings". I ask because I was hoping to improve my playback too, which is that my 720p clips play at the proper speed of 24fps with Best(Full) in my preview window, but just 19fps when I open my secondary display on my third monitor. Not bad performance for V 7 but I was hoping that in VP8 I would get 24fps playback in both instances.

September 10th, 2007, 03:44 PM	#1
Jeff Harper Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Cincinnati, OH Posts: 8,425	Anyone want to state their opinion of V8 yet? Is this a overly-hyped upgrade, or do you like it so far?

September 10th, 2007, 05:56 PM	#2
Paul Fierlinger Major Player Join Date: Aug 2007 Location: Wynnewood, Pennsylvania Posts: 355	As an animator I bring all my clips into Vegas as 720p non-compressed avi's so I do all my color corrections in my source application and it was clear to me that many of the anticipated benefits in this direction are going to go right past me. I like working with Vegas a lot (in the past it's been Premiere and DPS Velocity for me) and was happy to pay $ 150 for a bit of the promised raised playback speed and a vastly improved titler; both important parts of my work. As far as playback goes, nothing has changed. If someone had upgraded for me when I wasn't here, I think it would have taken me weeks before I noticed any change in anything whatsoever ... except for the Pro Type Titler, which I would call a Pro Hype Titler. I have worked with several truly professional ones but this one doesn't come even close to any of those that I own. I can do much better even with Mirage's titler (my 2D animation source application), which is humbly called Simple Text, than I can do with this one, and I am not talking about any 3D features either; I actually dislike 3D graphics, period. If I discover that I said any of this preternaturally, I'll be very happy to apologize; so please someone, prove me wrong, but I have spent the better portion of this afternoon exploring the new titler and in my opinion it's no great shakes. __________________ Paul Last edited by Paul Fierlinger; September 10th, 2007 at 06:13 PM. Reason: I had the price isted as $ 250 incorrectly

September 10th, 2007, 09:36 PM	#7
Mike Dulay Major Player Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Somerville, NJ Posts: 304	Would be curious to know if the new Vegas is now able to remove pulldown from HV20 24p. __________________ DIY, 35mm, HV20: http://www.primitivebuteffective.net

September 10th, 2007, 11:18 PM	#9
Danny Fye Major Player Join Date: Dec 2003 Location: Independence MO. Posts: 318	I have been spending the day testing the trial version. For those who want to do multi-cam work get Excalibur, Ultimate S or Infiniticam. The new built in one for Vegas 8 works but that is about all I can say for it. Reminds me of the old titler, it works but that was about all one could say for it as well. There is a free one from VASST that is better than the new built in one. I noticed that when I use the new 32-bit floating point with SD 16x9 that when I looked at the video on the preview the colors were a lot better but when I rendered to 16x9 SD wide-screen Mpeg the colors looked weak and sort of blah. When I rendered the same video with settings of 8 bit the colors looked great when rendering to Mpeg. The oposite of what one would expect! Rendering to .wmv the colors looked pretty much the same. Render times with .mpg were approx 3 times longer and not very good results. Render times to .wmv was approx 4 times longer and the results were about the same. There was no benefit to having the 32 bit on when rendering. Great News!!! I loaded a 90 minute .m2t file onto the time-line and the build peaks worked fine. No more crashes. Also there were no black frames. So those problems seems to be solved, at least on my system. About the new titler. One of my original questions concerning it was will it allow for multiple fonts on the same line. It does. On the right side there are these little things one can click on called, Curves, Collection, Effects and Gradients. I had a terrible time figuring out how to use those. The help was no good and I couldn’t find anything in the manual on them either. I found out they work by dragging what you want to the little time-line at the bottm of the titler. I won’t try to explain it all here. There was an interesting help item on how to create a credit roll with the new titler. I will play with that later but finally (if this thing actually works) one can get super fancy with multiple fonts with their credit rolls. Note: One can paste text from a word processor but the fonts and other stuff will not be preserved. The only thing one should do with a good word processor is to setup for word wrap and to check for spelling errors. Copy and paste the text and then do the fancy stuff with the fonts and effects in Vegas. From what I have seen I think they should rename it from ProType to ProsumerType. Not as amateur as the old one but not a real pro one either. So to answer the OP’s question, I’d say from my first impressions and playing around with the trial version that Vegas 8 is somewhere in the middle. Some hype and some beef. I can get a downloaded upgrade for $134.95. For HD I’d say there is enough beef for that price. For SD I’d say that unless the new titler is a must have then there just is’t quite enough there. Then again looking towards the future and HD and considering that if one waits after the end of October then one would have to pay $100 more for the upgrade. So even those who are working with SD only might just as well go ahead and upgrade and save the $100. https://www.sonycreativesoftware.com...&keycode=64060 Danny Fye www.dannyfye.com www.vidmus.com/scolvs __________________ www.dannyfye.com

September 11th, 2007, 08:46 AM	#15
Paul Fierlinger Major Player Join Date: Aug 2007 Location: Wynnewood, Pennsylvania Posts: 355	After properly setting up my preview window, I've found a vast improvement in playback while editing, I'd get 10fps before now I'm getting 30fps... Same project, same settings, Vegas 8 is running much faster ============================================ Would you mind clarifying? What did you do differently to "properly set up your preview window", because in the next sentence you say "same project, same settings". I ask because I was hoping to improve my playback too, which is that my 720p clips play at the proper speed of 24fps with Best(Full) in my preview window, but just 19fps when I open my secondary display on my third monitor. Not bad performance for V 7 but I was hoping that in VP8 I would get 24fps playback in both instances. __________________ Paul

September 10th, 2007, 06:08 PM	#3
Jeff Harper Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Cincinnati, OH Posts: 8,425	Thanks Paul...

September 10th, 2007, 06:24 PM	#4
Mark Holmes Regular Crew Join Date: Mar 2004 Location: San Diego, California Posts: 119	Paul, just followed your info to IMDB and to the PBS information page for "Still Life with Animated Dogs". Beautiful work. It is great to see such an unconventional use of the Vegas software. You are an inspiration. I wonder how many other animators are using Vegas this way?

September 10th, 2007, 06:33 PM	#5
Emre Safak Trustee Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: Brookline, MA Posts: 1,447	Oh ****. The titler was the one thing I was really looking forward to.

September 10th, 2007, 09:55 PM	#8
Richard Zlamany Major Player Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Hamden CT Posts: 470	I find it a great upgrade at a fair price. Vegas Pro 8 is much quicker, so that right there makes me very happy. The titler is good and also very quick and easy to use. I will still use Boris G. for some projects, but the vegas titler is a nice addition.

September 11th, 2007, 05:49 AM	#10
Jeff Harper Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Cincinnati, OH Posts: 8,425	Apppreciate the feedback. It is sad to read the lukewarm endorsements after the huge expectations...

September 11th, 2007, 08:08 AM	#12
Kris Bird Regular Crew Join Date: Sep 2005 Location: UK Posts: 173	If you grade and/or composit then the 32bit takes vegas from being completely useless (in a grading sense) to being entirely workable into a high-end workflow. Also if you have any plans to ingest 10bit then vegas can now work with it. These are black and white improvements, but only relevant to some of us obviously.

September 11th, 2007, 08:21 AM	#13
Kevin Shaw Inner Circle Join Date: Sep 2004 Location: Sacramento, CA Posts: 2,488	For those of us working in HD the support for Blu-ray authoring is a big deal, assuming it works well. That alone might be enough to persuade me to give Vegas a try after several years of using Edius, and it looks like my main other alternative is Adobe CS3. Or I could keep using Edius and buy the Roxio DVDit Pro HD authoring program, but I can get an old copy of Vegas plus the upgrade for less than what that costs. Can someone tell me in more detail how the multicam feature in V8 works? What I saw of a plugin one for V7 didn't impress me compared to what I'm used to, which is to click on a camera clip while playing the timeline and immediately have that change show in the preview window. Is the built-in multicam for V8 like that?

September 11th, 2007, 08:34 AM	#14
Joe Busch Major Player Join Date: Feb 2007 Location: Sammamish, WA Posts: 398	After properly setting up my preview window, I've found a vast improvement in playback while editing, I'd get 10fps before now I'm getting 30fps... Same project, same settings, Vegas 8 is running much faster I'm just having trouble getting it to open my old Vegas 7 projects (well Vegas 7 had trouble opening them too, they're quite large with a lot of clips/subclips) A clip that has heavy filters on it, plays back at 18fps in Vegas 8, and 11fps in Vegas 7... Non-edited HD is 25fps in Vegas 7, and 30fps in Vegas 8... light effects are still 30fps in Vegas 8... (Color correction... etc... some slow motion) Whereas they'd drop down to 20-25fps in Vegas 7 I'm happy, I'm only using the trial right now...