Looking to those who are using Vegas in their broadcast/film projects to help me finalize some things for a blog posting I've written.

Based upon my initial research, it appears Vegas Pro is not capable of meeting broadcast specs for HD for either Discovery (http://www.discoverychannel.ca/Article.aspx?aid=13726) or PBS (http://www.pbs.org/producers/redbook/). Can anyone confirm or refute this?

In addition, There is also some information I've received that indicates Vegas isn't capable of a proper workflow for projects going to film - anyone chime in on this as well?

I just started film school for documentary film making and of course the tools being suggested don't include Vegas Pro due to some of these issues mentioned above and before I have to go make a move to one that is said to be a proper NLE, I'd like those who have in depth experience in this realm to lend their insights.

Absolutely, there's broadcast and docu work being done on Vegas, I think Survivorman on Discovery was edited with Vegas. Could you make Vegas work for these sorts of broadcast specs, given motivation, a little video engineering expertise, time and money? Yes.

Is it the straightest line? No. Can you call your favorite video engineer or VAR and get help with SDI ingest, monitoring and output to HDCAM for Vegas the same way you can for AVID or FCP? No way. Is Vegas optimized for HDCAM the way it's optimized for DV, HDV, XDCAM, and (arguably) AVCHD? No. Can you go out to AVID DNxHD, one of the codecs everybody likes? Yes.

Could one make Vegas work to industry specs for film workflows? My understanding is no, Vegas doesn't support all the metadata that's needed for film.

If you're working on developing editing skills for platforms that are recognized in the industries as standards, if you need to work in environments where you can dial-up support services, where you need to deliver hard-drives for film-outs, where someone is going to deliver hard-drives to you, etc., you'd best be working with industry standards.

Those tend to be AVID for broadcast, AVID for features, and AVID or FCP for indy film.

These are my observations talking to people and reading, mostly I'm working in corporate/industrial where FCP tends to be the favorite... but I do all right with Vegas, because I can be an island most of the time.

PS. Note that Vegas has gained new Closed Captioning functionality with 9.0d and later...