View Full Version : Vegas on a Mac (no joke)


Gerald Webb
April 23rd, 2011, 08:18 PM
I got all excited this morning when I started reading about VMware Fusion and a couple of google results that said real time multi cam editing in Vegas 10... on a Mac.
I spend most of my time in OSX and Vegas is prob the only reason I keep a Windows drive running, so the attraction to finally completely jump over is very enticing.
Anyway, downloaded the VMware 30 day trial,
Installed Windows 7, then Vegas.
Allowed VM Windows to share my Windows data drives,
and opened up a project I had been doing on my "real" Windows.

Im sorry to say that files that would play at Best Full in Windows wont even play at Preview Auto in VMware. Let alone cross fades or any fx.

Does anyone here use this?
Is there a trick to the way you set it up, ie. Ram and CPU allocation for each system ?
Should your source files be on a NTSC drive or MAC OSX Extended drive for ease of reading? Tried both, didnt seem to make much difference.

Michael Wisniewski
April 23rd, 2011, 09:02 PM
Almost every person I've known who has tried this has given up, myself included, the performance of Vegas is abysmal through VMWare, even on a MacPro with 8 cores. In the end Vegas in Windows/Bootcamp performs significantly better.

I know what you mean about what wanting to move fully to the Mac OS, the very last windows app I run is Sony Vegas, there's just nothing that comes close on the Mac side ... but I was very encouraged by the recent FCP X preview, it's very Vegas like. I'm hoping come June I can finally delete my Vegas/Windows/Bootcamp partition.

Gerald Webb
April 23rd, 2011, 09:07 PM
wow, so the dream is a myth then.
The guy with the multi cam screen shot of Vegas on his Mac must have waited for it to load and then taken the shot, lol.
Waste of a 30 day trial, it only took 30 mins.
Would love to here from anyone who does have it working and what their Mac or PC specs are.

Gerald Webb
April 25th, 2011, 06:14 AM
This is pretty amazing...
Supermeet Apple Final Cut Studio X presentation (part 2) on Vimeo
Its a video of the new Final Cut Pro being demonstrated at NAB.
It has some amazing features, a lot of them appear to have come from..... our very own Sony Vegas.
At about 12 min in the guy demonstrates how you can now just grab the edge of an audio event and fade it in and out, and then (with gasps of awe from the audience) right click and choose the shape of your fade contour. Sound familiar, lol.

It does look amazing though, if it delivers everything it promises, at $299.00, it could have all the other NLE CEO's rethinking their superannuation schemes.

Gregory Barringer
April 25th, 2011, 02:42 PM
I'm running Vegas 10c 64 bit with Windows 7 Pro 64 bit on an eight core Mac Pro. It works very well.
I installed Win 7 directly to a 2TB internal HDD and dedicated the entire drive to Windows, no VM ware. Since it runs natively it's very fast. For a Blu-ray burner I installed a Pioneer BD-205. DVDA also works well.
The difference in the way I installed is that I didn't start with BootCamp.

Gerald Webb
April 25th, 2011, 08:26 PM
Yeah, I do something similar Gregory,
Windows 7 64 bit on an 128gb SSD,
and,
OSX on 2x Raptors that are set up in raid 0.
I just choose which one to boot into via Chameleon right after bios runs.

The downside is you have to re boot to change OS.

Windows and Vegas are always going to run fine on Mac hardware because if you install Windows via boot camp, or on its own drive as we do, you have just made a Windows machine. There is no difference to the way Windows runs just because the box has an Apple on it.

The trick here would be to run Vegas from inside of OSX, which as Michael said has proven to be almost impossible at this time, well, unless you had a super computer.

Now if Sony had a Mac version of Vegas, that would have to be popular.
Looks like it would have to be less than $299. Fat chance.

Brian Luce
April 26th, 2011, 09:47 AM
How much was the FCP retail previously? Wasn't it like $1200? I've never heard of a price drop like that for any product. What's behind it? They want to corner the NLE market?

Gene Gajewski
April 26th, 2011, 02:59 PM
They want to corner the NLE market?

They want to sell more hardware - lowering the price on FCPX makes a buy into a Mac look less costly.

Charles Newcomb
April 26th, 2011, 03:33 PM
I've ben a Vegas user since V4 and I've been using Vegas under BootCamp on a Mac for more than 3 years now. I don't mind having to reboot to get there because it's a lot less hassle than trying to do a decent crossfade in FCP. And all that rendering... caramba! I just wish I didn't have to deal with Windows.

Brian: When I bought FCS2 I paid $1,200.00 for it. The upgrade to FCS3 was another $300.00. I only use it when a client insists.

The new FCX looks very interesting, however. Gotta admit it. Time will tell.