I have had it with adobe

[Steven Digges]

Originally Posted by Ron Little

Sad story
I have been with adobe for 15 years. I have studied the books, took the tutorials, bought the plugins, and spent many hours on the phone keeping our relationship working. I spend several hours a day with adobe. I knew as soon as I heard about CC that our relationship was over. Yes I tried to hang on then, adobe cut it off with an email. Adobe will no longer support CS6. I was crushed. Now I am starting to rebuild my life and am looking for a new special software to spend time with. I would however like one that is easy to transition to. Vegas is starting to sound good so I will be checking her out soon. Does Vegas work with Smartsound?

Hysterical! I have been dating her for 15 years too. And the milk was far from free! I refuse to buy the diamond and be forced into a commitment where I will surely suffer long term effects. Everyone changes after a marriage. Divorce is ugly, painful and expensive. I pity those who go to the alter, it is not to late to run!

Seriously...it is not just another software. It is as important to creating and delivering my product as my cameras are. This is a deadline driven industry. No one is going to hold my work hostage on servers called a cloud or anything else. Bailing on Adobe is not optional for me. It is mandatory. I am still very upset that I wasted years investing my time, money, and effort on a product I still want to use but cannot. CC is a business model, not a product upgrade, I am not doing it!

Steve

Steve

[Bryan Cantwell]

Originally Posted by Terry Wall

I'll be checking between Vegas and Edius. Both seem to support event and corporate shooters best. I didn't see any input on how Vegas handles multiple formats on a timeline, but I did see from the comments that Edius handles it well.

Before I sold my Z1 I had zero problems mixing HDV and DSLR video in Sony Vegas. It works with multiple formats very well.

[Bryan Cantwell]

Originally Posted by Brian Drysdale

The Lightworks Mac alpha is being tested by users at the moment. The hold up seems to have been the Version 12, since they've had Lightworks publicly running on Mac since last year's NAB.

Good to know, thanks! I've been out of the loop lately, too busy!

[Christopher Young]

Originally Posted by Terry Wall

I didn't see any input on how Vegas handles multiple formats on a timeline,

+ 1 for Vegas with Edius a strong runner up.

Vegas video. Mix any format in any project at any resolution, any frame rate, PAL, NTSC, SD, HD, 4K, ProRes, MOV, DNxHD, MPEG, MXF, P2, AVCHD, XAVC and in 99% of cases you will be fine. No transcoding no re-wrapping. It handles them all natively. When I have had issues it has in 99% of cases been with something that has been mangled in QuickTime or some strange file out of Avid. Just yesterday someone gave me EX 35-mbit .MOV files out of FCP that only displayed the audio. Had to re-wrap them. For me Vegas is the best all round most stable and intuitive editor I have worked with. You do need a decent spec PC and GPU card to get the most out of it though.

Vegas audio. I haven't used any NLE that comes anywhere close to Vegas' audio handling capabilities.. Hardly surprising seeing that it started out in life as a Sonic Foundry product along side Sound Forge.

I also like working with Edius. It's now pretty resolution independent like Vegas, it will handle almost anything in any format or size mixed on the timeline. Edius has come on in leaps and bounds since being taken over by Grass Valley. For multi-cam it kills anything else. Show me another NLE that can take ten tracks of HD 1920 MXF files with each track being eight hours long and play all that back smoothly. Admittedly off a decent four drive raid 0 but all the same I have to say I was impressed the first time I did it. Any big multi-cam and I go straight to Edius for the switchcut then render out a switched track and then bring that into Vegas for finishing. My biggest down on Edius is the audio handling is still a bit primitive, especially compared to Vegas.

Overall I find Edius a good all round Jobbing editor but if you want basic inbuilt 3D compositing and a pretty comprehensive creative tool set, in other words a Craft Editor, Vegas is my first choice. It is also one of the fastest NLEs to cut quickly on. That's my experience comparing Vegas to Edius, Premiere, Avid MC, Lightworks and NewTek's SpeedEDIT. SpeedEdit is a bit of a dark horse. I can see myself spending more time on it as it proved to be a very capable tool set.

Try them all to see what suits your workflow and requirements best. There is no perfect NLE for sure. I'm still waiting for one to appear... oh that elusive dream!

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

[Noa Put]

Is speededit still supported? I thought they stopped developing it?

[Andrew Smith]

Can't say I didn't see this sort of thing happening. I deliberately jumped off the upgrade cycle when they forced their subscription-only rental model.

You know what? CS6 is pretty good and meets all my needs, even after upgrading to my PMW-300 and entering in to the XDCAM type files workflow.

Andrew

[Chris Harding]

Hi Ron

Vegas brought out an alternative to Smartsound called "Cinescore" which they scrapped later so AFAIK there is no SS plugin for Vegas BUT check their website first.

I still use SonicFire to generate my Smartsound tracks and simply save them in the same folder as my projects so they are instantly available to the timeline. It does mean that you have to run a standalone though.

Smartsound used to have something called Quiktracks that was a plugin so see if they still have that?? Gosh the last time I used SS as a part of my NLE was eons ago when I used Corel's very first NLE called Luminere and it came with Smartsound tracks built in ... howver that was a LONG time ago.

I have no issues running SonicFire when I need to generate an audio track though.

Chris

[Rick Reineke]

It should be noted that Sony Vegas Pro has an audio section that rivals the main stream pro DAWs. (including SloTools). VP was a DAW before video support was added, way back when. VP supports both DX and VST plug-ins. The new ver.13 includes ATSC/EBU loudness meters, the NR-2 noise reduction suite, iZotope Nectar Elements and other Sony audio plug-ins... <font color="#FFFFFF">Enough for a video editor to totally screw up the sound track...</font color>

[Ervin Farkas]

Not that it matters that much anymore, but Edius also runs on almost any PC, no need for a nuclear reactor to power it. And you have to work really hard to manage to crash it - it's rock solid.

Audio handling is indeed a bit of a weak point, although it has improved a lot lately with the plugins that come with it. Very rarely I need to jump over to an audio editor for my needs.

VST plugins also work with Edius, as do Boris, NewBlue, ProDad (titling) and others.

Not negligible: if you need to use After Effects, there is now an Edius to AE bridge available.

[Darren Levine]

I too am a lifelong adobe editor, and am not sold on CC, CS6 is still my program, but recently had 2 instances of that teenie little problem of: try to open that CC project. really quite annoying, and probably something adobe betting on, that many would upgrade just out of basic necessity to be able to read CC projects.

They're not giving a bone, none at all. no way for CC users to export a proper backwards compatible file (XMLs can work, but not for everything) and cutting off cs6 is just harsh, i bought it less than a year prior.

my guess: they tallied up an estimate of just how much they've lost over the years to pirated copies, and figured there would be no way they'd piss people off more than FCX did.

[Steven Digges]

Since I am one of many that is going to jump ship on Adobe I Am very interested in this thread and a few others that are discussing alternatives. The first thing I have learned is all the great input about Sony Vegas. For some reason I had it categorized in my mind as more of the "top of the consumer line" software editor. It is sounding really attractive to me now. Part of that is because of the ease of use comments I read. Frankly, my goal is to keep working productively and make the transition as painless as possible. Learning curve matters to me. I know it shouldn't, it is just software, but I am not excited about it at this point in my career.

The issue goes beyond Premier. I use the creative suite. I will still be able to use some of those programs for time to come but not indefinitely. I was glad to hear Vegas has decent audio tools. I use Audition when I need to go above Soundbooth, that happens most of the time.

What do you guys use for software in addition to Vegas? For example, I am always in Adobe Media Encoder, Encore, Photoshop and Audition. A little After Effects but not much, I do mostly corporate work. I don't use all the other programs in Creative Suite very often. Before CC came along Adobe made great strides in making their programs integrate well with each other. Now, BOOM, they blew the whole thing off the map as far as I am concerned!

Steve

[Seth Bloombaum]

Originally Posted by Steven Digges

...What do you guys use for software in addition to Vegas? For example, I am always in Adobe Media Encoder, Encore, Photoshop and Audition. A little After Effects but not much, I do mostly corporate work. I don't use all the other programs in Creative Suite very often...

I've used Vegas since v1 when it was one of the first non-destructive multitrack audio editors for the PC (no video). I teach a college Audition course.

I prefer to finish audio in Vegas. If you're used to the Waveform tab in Audition, well, Vegas doesn't have it, but you can apply all the "process" oriented plugs right in V's multitrack timeline at the clip, track, bus, master, or project level. If you've got to have a waveform editor, Sony's Sound Forge is a great companion app, but I use it very rarely.

If you're serious about audio, I LOVE Izotope's Ozone mastering plugin suite. The beautiful loudness maximizer alone may be worth the price, but all the other (6?) tools are excellent as well.

Sony's Noise Reduction plugin is an excellent NR, I find it slightly easier to get good results with it than Audition's. Getting the NR plug, well, it comes with some bundles and not others. At this moment I'm not entirely sure there's a 64-bit version, gotta' look into that. The current Vegas Pro is 64-bit only.

For encoding, Vegas has Sony's own as well as Main Concept encoders built in. Native batching is rudimentary. But there's a scripting architecture, and there are inexpensive 3rd party scripts that can really enhance some workflows. I do use (free) Handbrake for almost all my web video, its x264 codec is best-in-class, and it has decent batching. Of course if you're maintaining your CC license you can use AME.

Some people like Vegas' multicam, others swear by 3rd party. Both work, but the native version is pretty constricted to a particular workflow.

You may find that you do less in AE, Vegas has some integrated tools that overlap AE but don't replace it. You'll probably still need PS, if it's important in your workflows.

Yes, Vegas is the original swiss-army-knife, and has been well ahead when new camera codecs come out. And so much 3rd-party support with extensions, stabilizers, scripts, looks, titlers...

There is a vocal minority of seriously pissed-off users and former users. Sony doesn't seem to have really mastered wide compatibility of their GPU-assist functions, and some users report crash after crash. For most of them just turning off GPU functions (in Vegas prefs) restores full stability... but not all. You can do the trial offer and find out quickly if there are problems on your hardware.

[Shaun Roemich]

Originally Posted by Darren Levine

my guess: they tallied up an estimate of just how much they've lost over the years to pirated copies, and figured there would be no way they'd piss people off more than FCX did.

I asked the Adobe CC folks at NAB this exact question (after calling the move to subscription model an "a-hole move" to his face, to some applause from those around me) and the rep said that Creative Cloud had NOTHING to do with piracy and that pirates had circumvented the Cloud security within 2 weeks and he maintained the Cloud model was SOLEY to do with roll out of updates quickly and easily. To which I reminded him that PROFESSIONAL editors aren't the ones who install updates immediately upon release, preferring to wait to see what systemic issues might arise from them.

[Ervin Farkas]

I am very curious, Shaun, what was Adobe's answer to this last remark... if any...

The very first thing I do with all my new (or reformatted) computers, even before connecting to the net, is to turn off automatic updates for Winnie and all other software.

[Shaun Roemich]

There was none, which I'm sure isn't a surprise.

To be clear - despite my reputation, I DID go in in order to find out IF there was a way I could jump ship from FCP7 to Adobe in a way that would work for MY business model (buy a suite outright and legally) and use the stable version until I retire the software/hardware combination it lives on, typically a 3 - 5 year cycle for me.

Once my edit bay is stable, I stop updating.

I walked out with no clear winner in the NLE wars. I NEED what Premiere can do now that Apple has abandoned the traditional editing model and none of the others do what I need. Not even AVID who seem to be ignoring a 4k edit need in favour of story editing with conform.