Is Vegas 9 worth the upgrade from 8?
 

I'm very happy with Vegas 8. Not sure if the upgrade will be worth it or not. Sell me on it :)

How is anyone supposed to "sell you on it" when we have no idea what you shoot or why? Do you need the features of 9? If not, stay where you are.

Need RED support? Go 9
Need DPX/EXR support? Go 9
Need 64bit? Go 9
Need better color space support? Go 9
Need to render to XDCAM? Go 9
Need to drop in AVCHD including the Canon 5D/7D? Go 9


Don't need any of these things? Stay with 8.

That was very well put...

I might also like to add, that when you're on the fence, the time to upgrade is upon the release while Sony makes the upgrade cost a very reasonable fee (usually about $200 or less total). At this point, if you're happy with 8, I'd probably stick with it and just wait another year or so and go for version 10...

From what I can tell, aside from the points above Perrone made, 9 just isn't that much of an 'upgrade' over 8.

Jon

Not much of an upgrade really depends on where you're standing. They literally put in everything on my wishlist. I was absolutely thrilled. Now I just wish it would read my jpeg2k files!

I bent the Vegas Program Managers ear for an hour at the expo with new stuff I'd like to see in the program, one of which is OMF support. If they get that working Vegas will suddenly become a player on a different level. Add 3cp, support for Avid's MXF format and decent EDL compatibility with FCP and Avid, and Vegas will find a home in some pretty lofty places.

DPX and real RED support in this release put it on the radar of some interesting folks. Not often you hear someone say that their files in Vegas look better than FCP or Avid.

You can drop 5D2 files into the Vegas Pro 8 timeline no problem. They will not play without dropping frames mind you, but I'm pretty sure Vegas 9 won't fix that either, you'll need an intermediate either way. Just saying Canon video files work fine on the Vegas 8 timeline.

Does anybody remember what you get from 7 --> 8?

And, more importantly, is there any way to convince Sony to let you buy it for the cheaper introductory rate now that the period has passed? (I didn't need it then!)

Does anybody remember what you get from 7 --> 8?

Vegas Pro 8 Readme

...is there any way to convince Sony to let you buy it for the cheaper introductory rate...

Sorry but no :-(
Once the introductory period is over, so is the cheaper pricing.

The absolute biggest thing for me was that the whole issue in HDV of red or black frames appearing on the timeline (and sometimes rendering!) went away. I was right in the middle of a long multicam project, and voila, things got so much easier.

And HDV became much better behaved on the timeline in general, better preview framerates.

It also added multicam natively.

Well I have upgraded to 9 from 8 and the first thing I hated was the darker layout. HATE IT!!! I'm still editing in 8 for now.

I only use 9 for editing I-Frames from the nanoflash.

You realize you can turn that off?
Options - Preferences - go to the Display tab and UNCHECK the Use Vegas color scheme box.

I never noticed the difference to be honest. Forgot that they had changed it. And I cut on both versions every week. Sometimes simultaneously.

I like the new effects from Velvet Matter, the audio duck feature and the darker interface but the program has also been buggy. The one bug that is now driving me back to Vegas 8 is the inability to archive projects using Save as>Copy media with project>Create trimmed copies of source media. It no longer works with Cineform HD files. I'm not sure if it works with M2t HD files.

It does however work perfectly in Vegas 8 and Sony has not acknowledged it as a bug in Vegas 9 yet.

I tried out Vegas 9. I like how easy it is to use and how quickly it runs especially under windows 64. In my experience, its much more stable than Premiere which always seems to crash at the worst time. My only complaint of Vegas, only one sequence/timeline per project.

I've never understood the multiple timeline thing. Where is that useful? Particularly where you can nest in Vegas and easily run multiple instances..

In larger projects it has lots of uses.
- I like to dump the raw unedited footage into a timeline then I duplicate that sequence and edit it down to a rough cut then duplicate that. Now at any point I can jump back in time to a previous sequence.

- If I do a mulitcamera shoot, I might have 1 sequence as the final mix of different angles and another with only the wide. The mix goes to the audience purchases while the wide only is for the dance choreographer.

- For a performance with an intermission I'll have a separate sequence for each half. If its really long, I'll make a sequence for each DVD. I also sometimes make a montage either for the dvd menu or as a sample for my demo reel that gets thrown into its own sequence.

- For really long documentary where the project encompasses many events over a few weeks, its easier to organize the work in one project. Often multiple events might be on one tape so when you capture the entire tape its easier to sort them out in one project.

I'm probably missing something, but I can't imagine not using multiple timelines, like on the order of 50 to 100 in one small project. Many are audio tracks, but is there another way when you do keyframe panning/cropping/track motion/picture-in-picture?

No way would I just encode these keyframe sequences as snippets to drop onto one timeline, things are always changing in the project.

And I don't understand the concept of nesting, unless that means dropping a veg file onto the timeline. If you do that, then go back and modify the nested veg file again, does it update automatically when you render the project you dropped the veg file into? What if you changed the length of the nested veg file? Would the project you dropped the nested veg file into auto-ripple? Maybe it's a more efficient way, I dunno.

The only negative I can see with multiple timelines is you have to be careful to lock the keyframes to events, so if they get shifted along the timeline, the keyframes move together.

I can lock events together, and I can organize a project into one project folder containing sub-folders for each of the medias, video, audio, voice overs etc. It seems like a cleaner way of archiving the project than having all these filetypes mixed into one folder.

(I FRIGGIN HATE NOT BEING ABLE TO QUOTE THE LAST POST!!! UGGGHHH!!)

Ok sorry,

In Vegas, you keyframe on the event. I'm doing it right now. If I have 6, 1 minute pieces of video, I can drop them on the same timeline, and keyframe them individually. I don't need a separate timeline for each one. And no matter where I slide them on the timeline, the keyframes stay intact. Audio, video, and photos behave this way.

Yes, nesting means dropping a .veg onto the timeline. It comes in like a rendered event. You can apply any filters keyframes or anything else to it just like it was a single clip. Very handy. And yes, any changes made in that .veg file, automatically happen in the project where that .veg is placed on a timeline. This is particularly handy if you want to work on individual scenes of a movie, and have one overarching master file that holds your final edits and looks. You can even create an SD master file and an HD master file, and drop the SAME .vegs into both and get one SD and one HD project automatically. Set one for 24p the other for 60i and you're golden. However you want to do things.

I separate my media types as well, but that's got nothing to do with this.

There's audio ducking in Vegas 9? Does that come free/included? If so, that's awesome, didn't know that. Does it just create a volume envelope for you or does it do the ducking on the fly without envelopes?

Right, okay. I understand that. The keyframes stay intact if the "lock envelopes to events" box is checked, so we'll assume that it is checked. So you can slide them anywhere, and the keyframes stay intact. But if you have multiple picture-in-picture windows open, you have to have another video track above the main one. At least I don't know another way.


That could be useful and clean, I agree. Does it make more efficient use of memory, or speed editing? Double useful if it would. I'll give it a try on the project I'm doing now.

Thanks, BTW.
Tom

When you have an audio envelope on the timeline, you can now make a selection, then pull on the envelope inside the selection and your 4 points are created automatically.

Bill, as Marc indicated, Vegas 9 added the feature where if you create a selection area on the timeline and then drag any envelope (it works with all envelopes - not just audio), it will automatically create 4 points - 2 on each end of the selection area - allowing you to modify everything in the selection area.

Personally, for automated ducking, I use the Voice Over tool in Excalibur which can reduce the volume level on an audio background track wherever there is something on the Voice track and let the music remain louder when there is nothing on the voice track. Ultimate S has a similar tool as well.

you have to click on the button with the page icon (right of the Quote button), it toggles to either + or -, then you click Quote. Took me a while to figure it out.

Excellent! Thanks for the tip!

Good point Edward. One of the great features of Vegas is the ability to use scripting programs like Excalibur. Your program has save me countless hours of work. Could not edit without it.

Marc, I agree. I'd be lost without scripts at my disposal.