To What [NLE] Shall I Turn?

[Battle Vaughan]

You might like Premiere Pro CS4 if you have the horses to run it. The production premium suite has, imho, what you need. Disclaimer: I have practically no experience with Vegas; like you, the interface looked hard to manage and I never went beyond the free trial. Lots of people love it.

But avoid Avid Liquid like the plague, it is much loved by it's affectionados, but is (A) end-of-life, perhaps to be replaced by something else (B) quirky and viciously unstable (just look at the user group on the Pinnacle website) It was given the Avid imprimitur to make it sound impressive, it really is a Pinnacle product and is the same engine as their Pinnacle Studio consumer product. I bought it, never got it to work reliably, and s***-canned it, taking the loss with a sigh of relief. My two cents. //Battle Vaughan/miamiherald.com video team

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Battle Vaughan

Disclaimer: I have practically no experience with Vegas; like you, the interface looked hard to manage and I never went beyond the free trial. Lots of people love it.

You wouldn't think that the move away from the A/B roll paradigm would be so off-putting, but that is the very first thing people see in Vegas and get turned off. I came from Premiere, so it was a change for me, but I didn't have 10 years of editing on A/B roll, so I just kinda went with it. I'm glad I did.

Frankly, you can set Vegas up to do something very much like A/B roll, but once you see the benefits of NOT doing things that way, it's hard to just go back to it.

[Kevin Amundson]

Bryan, you are dead on with what Adobe is planning for people to use Premiere, AE, & Encore for. One other point I'll mention about my current workflow is that I apply all me CC, titles, effects, etc.. in a 16 bit enviorment. This way there is no loss of quality when I export my master. Even though my footage is 8 bit, I get better results when I edit in a 16 bit enviorment.

Part of the reason I love AE is that as long as I can export my footage from the NLE as a Quicktime movie with the anamation codec(lossless compression), or a TIFF sequence(also lossless compression), I don't have to worry about NLE specific plug-ins. I just need to have the specific plug-in for AE & I can import just about anything to apply the disired plug-in.

Do you know if Vegas export to tape on the XH-A1 in 24f & 60i?
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Perrone, I will definitelly be taking you up on your offer about discussing my workflow. Any pointers or steps that I can take to help streamline my workflow would be greatly appreciated! I will shoot you an email through your profile with my email address.

Thank you for confirming that I can export a QuickTime movie with the animation codec out of Vegas. As stated above, I like to work in a 16 bit environment to prevent any loss of quality while adding CC, effects, etc.

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Jack & Richard, would either of you know wether I need to use Edius 5 or would Edius Neo work for me? They both claim that they can handle HDV, but do they both capture 24F? I was looking at the comparison and most of the features listed in Edius 5 seam like overkill for me. Does either of these flavors of Edius burn Blu-ray, or export to tape on the XH-A1 in 24f & 60i?

Do you know if there is an Academic version of Edius? The $700 sticker price is a little out of my budget.
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Mark, I am currently running XP & have no interest of jumping to Vista so I should be OK if I choose to move to Edius right?

System specs:
XP 32 bit
Dual Core 3.2 GHz
3.5GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT(256MB)
RAID 5 HDD for video storage.
Single HDD for OS/programs
Single HDD for render/previews

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Battle Vaughan, do you know if On Location works wtih the XH-A1 in 24f to record to disc?

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I have downloaded the demo version of both Vegas and Edius. I will give them both a try and test out the batch capture, scene detection, multicam editing, and output otpions.

I've been wondering if maybe I should keep using PP2 for my short films so that I can easily move my projects into AE. Then I would use Vegas or Edius for my conference videos & just forget about using AE for them if I can get satisfactory results from using either Vegas or Edius. Any thoughts on this idea?

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Kevin Amundson

Perrone, I will definitelly be taking you up on your offer about discussing my workflow. Any pointers or steps that I can take to help streamline my workflow would be greatly appreciated! I will shoot you an email through your profile with my email address.

Thank you for confirming that I can export a QuickTime movie with the animation codec out of Vegas. As stated above, I like to work in a 16 bit environment to prevent any loss of quality while adding CC, effects, etc.

Here you can see a screenshot of some of the quicktime codecs available/loaded.

[Battle Vaughan]

Kevin, I have used OnLocation CS4 with my XHa1 in 60i mode but not in 24f, so I will have to run a test and get back to you tomorrow.

[Kevin Amundson]

Originally Posted by Battle Vaughan

Kevin, I have used OnLocation CS4 with my XHa1 in 60i mode but not in 24f, so I will have to run a test and get back to you tomorrow.

If you could do that for me, I would greatly appreciate it!

Perrone, thanks for the screen grab!

[Battle Vaughan]

Update -- borrowed a friends computer at work that has OnLocation CS3 on it, it recorded to disk just fine at 24f, although the recorder info shows 29.97 frames, the output as read in MPEGStreamclip shows an mt2 file at 23.976 fps, mpeg2 file, 1440x1080, 16:9, etc. etc. Audio MP2 stereo 48khx, 384 kbps. It never pays to assume with Adobe, but probably CS4 version works also. I'll check when I get home.../Battle Vaughan/miamiherald.com video team.

PS the native OnL format seems to be avi, but I couldn't find how to change that, it defaulted to m2t, maybe because that's what the camera was sending...

[Bryan Daugherty]

Originally Posted by Kevin Amundson

...I apply all me CC, titles, effects, etc.. in a 16 bit enviorment. This way there is no loss of quality when I export my master. Even though my footage is 8 bit, I get better results when I edit in a 16 bit enviorment...Do you know if Vegas export to tape on the XH-A1 in 24f & 60i?

Right, ok i think I was a little to vague when I posted before. In vegas you don't need the external aps anymore. you want to color correct, title, add effects? Welcome to Vegas the all in one solution. No more transfers over to Audition for audio correcting, you want to alpha mask, no more transfers to AE. The end result is a highly functional all in one solution for your video needs. you do sacrifice some of the clean interface of the Adobe line of products but the Vegas interface is highly customizable and intuitive. Your playback window may not always be as friendly as premiere but that is because you don't generally do effects in Premiere, you would export to AE for that, with Vegas it is all in one so it is hungrier for your resources. I enjoy PP3 and respect it's power but often find my results in Vegas to be equal at 1/2 the cost now and in the future as upgrades come out.

Vegas does support output to tape, though again, i don't have that camera but I don't see why the camera model would matter.

[Kevin Amundson]

Originally Posted by Bryan Daugherty

Right, ok i think I was a little to vague when I posted before. In vegas you don't need the external aps anymore. you want to color correct, title, add effects? Welcome to Vegas the all in one solution. No more transfers over to Audition for audio correcting, you want to alpha mask, no more transfers to AE. The end result is a highly functional all in one solution for your video needs. you do sacrifice some of the clean interface of the Adobe line of products but the Vegas interface is highly customizable and intuitive. Your playback window may not always be as friendly as premiere but that is because you don't generally do effects in Premiere, you would export to AE for that, with Vegas it is all in one so it is hungrier for your resources. I enjoy PP3 and respect it's power but often find my results in Vegas to be equal at 1/2 the cost now and in the future as upgrades come out.

Vegas does support output to tape, though again, i don't have that camera but I don't see why the camera model would matter.

I did understand that Vegas is supposed to be the all-in-one solution, but as far as I know(and please correct me if I'm wrong) Vegas doesn't edit in a 32 bit environment. That is why I would prefer to apply my CC for my short films in AE. I wouldn't mind so much if my conference videos were completely edited, CC, and finally authored to DVD in Vegas because I'm more concerned with speed than anything else in that situation.

And output to tape is supported in Premiere for almost every camera except the XL-H1, XH-A1, & XH-G1. It's just something about the 24f that Premiere & a couple other NLE's don't like.

[Bryan Daugherty]

Vegas pro-8 and later, will edit in a 32 bit floating point environment

I wish i could be more helpful on the export to tape but surely someone on here is more knowledgeable than I on that. Best Wishes!

[Battle Vaughan]

If you're using 24F the discussion linked below might be of interest. The 24f thing is over my head, but there's pulldowns and flags that aren't implemented and a bunch of technical stuff that indicates Canon's 24 frame mode is Canon thing that other brands of kit may not understand. Our Sony decks won't play it back, for instance. I find myself wondering if one could use a consumer Canon camera --- a used HV20, say, from Ebay --- as a deck and write to tape from Premiere to it, if one needed to do that...just musing....apparently Premiere understands 24f at standard def as a 60i file, somehow, but hdv/mpeg is a different story. Premiere 2.0 had a 24f plugin available, I assume it may be in CS4 but we don't do 24 frame so I've never looked...

Here's the link -- Re: Deck for reading Canon 24f? : HDV Format

Battle Vaughan

[Battle Vaughan]

OnLocation CS4 happily recorded the XHA1 at 24f to disk,making m2t files. On first try in Premiere Pro CS4 the first clip opened nicely requiring no rendering on a sequence setting of hdv 1080p 24, although this isn't really correct, I think. Subsequent clips showed an odd "dimensions too large error", probably something I did; tried at 60i as well (I have read that for some reason the 24F is read as 60i on some nle's) and got the same message. Should not deter, I think, as this was a quick test and I probably have a rogue setting in my sequence. It worked a charm on the first clip..../Battle Vaughan

[Battle Vaughan]

I put the clips on my quad-core (had them on my laptop, much lower powered!) and things are working nicely, the boggle was my underpowered laptop, not the process, I think. M2Tclips import to PPro, require no rendering, output nicely (for grins I made a 720p AVI conversion and it's bee-youtiful....) Hope this helps....Battle Vaughan

[Kevin Amundson]

Thank you for all the responses. I think I am going to go with Vegas to cut my Event videos with!

Thanks again!

[Bill Mecca]

I know I'm a little late to the party, busy busy busy...but just to clarify, the Academic Version of Avid Media Composer does NOT contain the 3rd party software included in the full version. Otherwise I would have grabbed it for the incredibly low pricetag I was quoted.
Avid Media Composer Software