The Vegas 10 New Features Webinar is at 11AM CDT today. Here's the email I received from Sony:

Join us for a live web event as Gary Rebholz, Sony Creative Software product training manager, explores several of the new features including:
•Stereoscopic 3D Editing
•Enhanced Video Plug-in Architecture
•Closed Captioning Workflows
•Track Management
•Image Stabilization
•Audio Event FX, Input Busses, VU Meters and more

Register here: https://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/news/webinar-reg.asp?keycode=64382

If you missed it, Sony will have it ready for viewing in about two weeks.

Of course you can check out the new features yourself in about 1.5 weeks! ;-)

We've got some great bundle deals going with Vegas Pro 9. For $499 you can get Vegas Pro 9 bundles with your choice of Blu-ray burner or g-raid

Videoguys Blog - September HOT New Products and Promotions (http://www.videoguys.com/Blog/RE/0xcd0cff3b0a728cb761da380b66a42e50/September+HOT+New+Products+and+Promotions/0x4540241f4a9e7bff1e795839e3ad9a51.aspx)

And you get a free upgrade to Veags Pro 10 (direc;ty from Sony) when it is released.

Gary

Gary these bundles look pretty amazing for the price! I'm looking at buying Vegas 10 however I already have a Blu-ray burner and RAID. Do you think there will be any introductory prices once 10 is released or would you suggest a I go for a bundle now? Are these Vegas bundles one license, two PC's? Will the free upgrade also include Production Assistant 2?

we definitely won;t be bale to offer teh $499 price once Vegas 10 ships

There is one more feature not mentioned very much by Sony's PR. Their newly optimized h.264 decoder, which makes proxies/transcoding of dSLR footage irrelevant. Now h.264 is just fast enough (and without the need for CUDA).

This is great news. We heard that Vega 10 handles DSLR footage better, but nothing on why or how. An improved h.264 decoder would explain it.

Sony seems stuck on just promoting the 3D angle, which is cool, but such a small market segment. Vegas 9 had an excellent RED and XD CAM workflows. Now that DSLR footage will be easier is very big news.

I still wish Vegas would take advantage oh hardware. I/O boxes like the MXO2 Mini and GPU acceleration.

We're offerign a great deeal for guys who jump in now. Buy SOny Vegas 9 nudled with either blu-ray burner or G-RAID for $499!! PLUS a free upgrade from Sony to Vegas 10 when it is reelased.

Videoguys Specials Expire October 15 (http://www.webvideoguys.com/expires10-15.html)

Gary

Eugenia and Everybody else,

I need to know more about this h.264 decoder. I am not shooting with DSLR cameras, but with an HMC150 which uses AVCCAM which is a type of AVCHD.

I have not done a serious edit with AVCHD yet. My understanding is that the issue with editing AVCHD/h.264 footage is not just with playback speed, but the handling of transitions, color correction, and transitions. Basically it starts to bog down the editing process and the footage quality breaks down as well.

I am about to receive a boatload of HMC150 footage, and I need to understand whether or not I need to plan for a transcode - not for playback, but for matching their footage to mine, doing effects and what not. I need to know that the footage won't fall apart. If Vegas 10 allows me to save myself 20 hours of transcoding and the storage space it will consume, that alone is worth the price of admission!

Okay, I found more here: Sony Creative Software - Forums - Vegas Pro - Video Messages (http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=730523&Replies=15)

And of course on Eugenia's blog! Eugenia's Rants and Thoughts Blog Archive H.264 performance on Vegas Pro 10 (http://eugenia.queru.com/2010/10/08/h-264-performance-on-vegas-pro-10/)

Kenneth, thanks for posting the link to Eugenia's blog post on V10/h.264 decoder performance.

Anyone editing h.264 from a dSLR is going to be mightily encouraged by the results she got with Canon 5d and 7d clips. I'm certainly anticipating *much* better timeline performance.

Apparently Sony has at last created their own optimized decoder for these files, instead of depending on the QT decode. A simple sentence to write, but anybody who's dealt with QT's decode on Windows knows that that is a statement with a potentially huge impact - and per Eugenia's tests, that impact is real.

The response comments there make a point that has also been made here: Sony has led with 3D, and followed with h.264 hardware-assisted encode in their PR for v10. But the new h.264 decoder seems likely to have a much bigger and immediate positive effect on the editing experience of way more Vegas editors.

There's also some mention in her post of a renewed friendliness between Vegas and Cineform, v10 now using the um, "good stuff" from the Cineform SDK instead of the VfW API that has been around since perhaps v5. The Cineform architecture has changed substantially since then. Eugenia doesn't mention any testing of CF clip performance, but it's probably reasonable to expect improvement there, too. Hope so.

I am in the middle of an editing project where in need to make a "movie" from 50 already shot and edited short documentaries about differents events. Each documentary have been given to me as h264 .mov files, in 1920X1080.

Curently I am editing this job on vegas 8.0 32bits, on a Core 2 quad 2.5 ghz 4 gb ram. I get about 12 fps at preview auto

I just loaded the trial version of vegas 10 to see if I could get any improvements. Wow... Real-time 24 fps!

Now I just need to buy it, along with Cineform NeoScene 5 since some of the sequences in the introduction are in cineform and Vegas 10 is not compatible with the version 1...

there is absolutely NO gain in rendering time to Sony mp4 format as compared to V9!!!! dead even - so where is the improvement??? Preview yes (I can work with files from Canon 5D) but nothing in rendering.