Sony Vegas Pro 9 - Any word on when/if this will come out?

[Jon McGuffin]

Just thought I'd drop a line here in hopes somebody like DSE or anybody else who's on the "beta" team might give us some type of hint on when Sony Creative Software plans on releasing a new version of Vegas. I think we're definately past due and hopefully that means Sony is doing some major work to spruce up our favorite editor....

Jon

[Edward Troxel]

Anybody on the "Beta" team can't tell you. It's against the rules that all beta testers must sign. Anyone who tells you doesn't know. If you look at the past releases, though, they're not necessarily "past due".

[Jon McGuffin]

Yes, I guess I should have known that... I've been using Sony Vegas since version 6 and it seems that the delay between 8 and 9 is longer than before... I could be wrong... I'm just anxious to see what SCS is working on..

Jon

[Harold Brown]

Approximate release dates were:
April 2004 Vegas 5
April 2005 Vegas 6
Sept 2006 Vegas 7
Sept 2007 Vegas 8.

[Jon McGuffin]

Yes, that seems about right and you can see we're fairly past due with a new version. I sure would like to see stronger support for better video playback in the preview window in terms of both the quality of the output and the speed of playback.

Jon

[Edward Troxel]

To add to Harold, If I recall correctly, Vegas 3 was around December 2001 and Vegas 4 was around January of 2003 so...

3 -> 4 --- 25 months
4 -> 5 --- 15 months
5 -> 6 --- 12 months
6 -> 7 --- 17 months
7 -> 8 --- 12 months
8 -> 9 --- so far about 16 months have passed.

Take the information for what you will. They'll release when THEY are ready anyway and these numbers really mean nothing.

[Jon McGuffin]

Yes, it's all good and I'm not frustrated with the lack of a new release from Sony.. I, as I'm sure most others here, would rather see a better product delivered later than something thrown out there too early.

Call me anxious.... I feel there are technologies available now that are crying to be taken advantage of from the NLE standpoint. A few that come to mind would be..

#1) Native support for the new Canon M5-II - even if it's through some type of intermediary format.

#2) Hardware assisted playback for video preview within Vegas

#3) Better rendering support for 64-bit versions. I applaud Sony for being one of the first to release a 64-bit version and we can clearly see hints of huge advantages here, but there are some issues and I'd like for them to shore those up while making the product overall a little more robuts.

Jon

[Edward Troxel]

I wouldn't be holding my breath for #2. Vegas has always used the processing power of the CPU for this. As such, you don't have to purchase specific hardware configurations to get it to work. For faster previews... you buy a faster computer. Of course the codecs for many types of video are often updated as well to make their processing faster.

[Paul Kellett]

For the next generation on sony vegas i'd like
> to be able to use the native files from my EX1 (no need for rewrapping to mxf).
> to be able to have the safe areas displayed on the 2nd monitor.

Paul.

[Jon McGuffin]

Originally Posted by Edward Troxel

I wouldn't be holding my breath for #2. Vegas has always used the processing power of the CPU for this. As such, you don't have to purchase specific hardware configurations to get it to work. For faster previews... you buy a faster computer. Of course the codecs for many types of video are often updated as well to make their processing faster.

Gosh, I sure hope that's not the case... It's not too much to ask customers who run NLE's to buy the latest Core 2, Core 2 Quad, Phenom's and i7 processors but we won't write our software to take advantage of video processing that's been available on video cards for the past 4-5 generations and 3-4 years?

There aren't any computers being sold today or in the past few years (Laptops included) that don't include some type of video assissted playback. The vast majority of editors are working on good ATI & NVidia that can do most of this all in hardware. Why not at least make it an option?

Jon

[Ian Planchon]

Originally Posted by Paul Kellett

For the next generation on sony vegas i'd like
> to be able to use the native files from my EX1 (no need for rewrapping to mxf).

even if I had to pay full price again, I would gladly do it to have the ability to read native ex1/3 files. that would save so much time.

[Sherif Choudhry]

I agree with Jon. I put Magic Bullet Looks on almost all my productions - the preview frame rate drops to 5-8fps from 25, its annoying. Of course I turn it off to edit, but i would gladly pay for a card that made Vegas preview at 25fps with MBL and render to MPEG faster.

But what I really want is for a Matrox MXO box to work with PCs and not just Macs for color correction.

All this other bells and whistles is pointless without solid preview rates, fast rendering and reliable color correction. Just my humble point of view. :-)

Originally Posted by Jon McGuffin

Gosh, I sure hope that's not the case... It's not too much to ask customers who run NLE's to buy the latest Core 2, Core 2 Quad, Phenom's and i7 processors but we won't write our software to take advantage of video processing that's been available on video cards for the past 4-5 generations and 3-4 years?

There aren't any computers being sold today or in the past few years (Laptops included) that don't include some type of video assissted playback. The vast majority of editors are working on good ATI & NVidia that can do most of this all in hardware. Why not at least make it an option?

Jon

[Bryan Daugherty]

Originally Posted by Paul Kellett

... to be able to have the safe areas displayed on the 2nd monitor...

I am confused and may be missing something here but isn't the idea of the "safe area" box to give you an idea of how it would playback on a TV and the title safe area box is to allow you to leave room for variation between TV brands and models so your titles don't appear truncated on some displays. And the idea of the external display is to actually play it back on a TV (via FW to a deck or deck link device) so that you can see how it actually plays back on screen? This is why I thought the safe area boxes were purposefully omitted from the external display option? I guess if you are using the "Windows second display option" maybe it doesn't account for safe area, is that the case? If so, I could see that being a useful feature...

[Edward Troxel]

Originally Posted by Sherif Choudhry

I agree with Jon. I put Magic Bullet Looks on almost all my productions - the preview frame rate drops to 5-8fps from 25, its annoying. Of course I turn it off to edit, but i would gladly pay for a card that made Vegas preview at 25fps with MBL and render to MPEG faster.

There's no reason plugins can't use the abilities found in video cards to speed up processing. I though newer versions of Magic Bullet already did.

[Paul Cascio]

I'd like to think the delay is because Sony is planning to leapfrog the competition and also correct it major weaknesses. I think we'll also see a true 64-bit application. Of course, I'm just a picture framers, so what do I know?