"Special" Upgrade Price
 

The last two rev cycles and maybe more there has been a regular upgrade price and then the "secret" url upgrade price. The secret URL which is a much better upgrade price is emailed to registered users and posted on every Vegas forum known to man. Sony takes good care of registered users and I'm confident they will do so again.

Konrad

On another post I asked about Excalibar - and then looked at its multicam features. With Vegas coming out with multicam editing, where does that leave Excalibar? Get V8 rather than have V7 + Excalibar?

Renton,
If they do multi-cam like Adobe Premiere does multi-cam, it will be cuts only. Excalibur allows a transition (such as a dissolve) between shots.
Buddy

Good!

I sure hope you are right! :)

Jon

Correct
 

Correct, you can manually do this, but the OS doesn't know about it unless you tell it. So it thrashes like crazy when it shouldn't. This means that vista (again, only available in Ultimate Premium Super Duper Version) will lock a single thread to a core by default, making it much smarter from the start.

No doubt
 

Vegas titles have always been barely adequate to put text up on the screen and that is about it. The options for a scrolling title are maddeningly stupid and few so if you want to do anything remotely fancy, you have to kludge it together with loads of keyframed layers and masks.

I agree. So any improvement is welcome.

So of the new features....

Looks like the most signficicant are..

ProType Titler
Multicamera editing tools
Blu-Ray Disc burning direct from the timeline
No-recompress rendering for long GOP HDV (wonder what that really means)

This looks more like an incremental upgrade rather than a huge change which frankly is a good thing..

I'd like to know how performance is going to be affected. If they can get 10-15% better performance, particularly with .m2t HDV playback after color correction, transitions etc then I'm sold...

Jon

64 bit beta
 

The word at NAB is that 64 bit Vegas will be a widespread beta BUT ONLY to people who upgrade to Vegas 8 - for whatever that is worth. They already had a working version of it then.

I second that.

Which is better comes down to what implementation you're talking about (many different ways of implementing 10-bit 4:2:2), your subjective taste, what test material you are using, and context (what are you monitoring on).

As far as 10-bit 4:2:2 deficiencies go...
A- Non-constant luminance. When you have fully saturated green on magenta (and most other combinations), there is a dark band in the transition area.
B- Chroma subsampling causing colors to go out of R'G'B' gamut. If you take valid R'G'B' values, the chroma subsampling can push them outside the displayable R'G'B' gamut. If you have alternating red and black lines, the black pixels will end up with chroma on them, resulting in positive red and negative green and blue light. And of course negative light isn't displayable, so you effectively have clipping.
You can see it in the test patterns at
http://codecs.onerivermedia.com/
C- The subsampling itself is prone to aliasing, imperfect frequency response, and/or ringing artifacts. If you run a color zone plate pattern through a codec you will see this. The worst offenders are the codecs that implement point sampling (e.g. DNxHD in its VFW implementation; haven't tried its other implementations).
D- You also get inappropriate mixing of resampling schemes. Most codec/NLE combinations result in this inappropriate mixing.

The attached images show a zone plate example. Box resampling was the chroma filtering + reconstruction method. Box resampling doesn't follow 601/709 standards (e.g. they call for co-sited chroma, whereas box resampling means interstitial chroma). But nonetheless it's what Vegas works well with.

As far as 8-bit R'G'B' deficiencies go...
You can see banding/contouring artifacts as long as:
A- The image has no noise in it and no dithering or dynamic rounding. (Smart implementations would implement dithering or dynamic rounding so that banding isn't an issue. Or your image source has noise in it, which happens in the majority of real world situations.)
B- The two different tones are very large / have a large visual angle.

In a very clever/interesting scheme, you can actually almost get away with 3-bit bit depth. So the picture of the baby at
http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/ade...i_ACM_24-3.pdf
15.4MB PDF file; it's page 7
HDR companding and bit depth is related; you can ignore the HDR stuff the article is about.

I guess I am coming from a different context. If you send 10-bit Y'CbCr to a broadcast monitor, values 0-64 dont contain visually discernible information. They all result in black.

You're coming from an equally valid perspective in that you can map these values around in post.

Wow...you guys go in deep!

I'm just happy to hear the words Blu-Ray Authoring.

Vegas 8
 

After breezing through the post, I did not see anyone link to the SonyStyle site. I may be wrong, but it looks like they're selling Vegas 8 + DVD Production Suite for $599 but it's on backorder.

Here's the link:
Vegas 8

DSE is even selling training for it.

Forum sponsor videoguys.com is selling Vegas 7+DVDA for $400 after rebate, and announced free upgrade to V8.

http://www.videoguys.com/specials.html