I'll put in my two cents here for the Canopus Edius software, which beats everything else I know of in terms of realtime performance without special hardware acceleration. Vegas seems to be more clever at "degrading gracefully" when its realtime limits are exceeded, but technically Vegas isn't a realtime editing program in the first place. With Edius I can get 2-3 layers of video (PIP) playing at full quality through the DV port on my laptop, and when I move my projects to my desktop system with DVStorm hardware I can also get realtime MPEG2 output. I haven't seen any other software which makes such efficient use of available processing power, and it's rock solid for projects up to several hours in length. I just checked the Canopus web site and they have a new "Edius DV Pack" with all the hardware and software you'd need to do complete DVD projects, for a retail price of $699.

http://www.canopus.us/US/products/EDIUS_DV_Pack/pt_EDIUS_DVpack.asp

Let me throw a cheer in here for real time editing.


If you are doing that many weddings, you will get a very large boost from RT editing. Nice as Vegas may be, it isn't anywhere near true real time.

When you are editing for money, time is the major factor and needs to be one of the major issues in your choice.

I'll agree that Vegas isn't real-time on output. However, it IS real-time on preview (degrading gracefully when effects get too complicated). But the time savings afforded by scripts (such as Excalibur for editing multiple camera shoots) more than makes up for the render time.

Bottom line - there are several good NLE's out there. It's really useful to try the demos of each before selecting the one that YOU like best (as opposed to the one that *I* like best).

I use the Matrox RT100 with PPro an I'm very happy with it. I think a lot of the negative things said about premiere mostly apply to the older versions (and well deserved). PPro was totally re-vamped and is much better than previous versions.

With the amount of editing you do you would probably benefit a lot from the hardware that comes with the Matrox and Canopus bundles.

Vegas 5 supports network rendering. The basic version allows up to 5 computers to be used. You can also purchase additional 5 pacs if needed.
If you decide to use Vegas or Premier, go to debugmode.com and download the free wax plug-in. Then you will have access to all the great virtual dub filters too.

Joe, that would be 3 computers per network rendering license.