By way of comparison, a Premiere upgrade is $299 and Final Cut is $499 so we get a bargain - again :-)

And a thumbs down on the upgrade price from me too. Blimey, that's a lot of dosh for not much upgrade.

I like the lighting effects thing and the XDCAM tweaks could be useful - and if it actually works in 64 bit instead of crashing that would be great. But at that price I'll stick with 8.0c for the moment!

Bring it under £100 + VAT and we're talking, maybe...

Regards
Dave

I guess the feeling about the price of any upgrade is pretty subjective - how much value one individual places on new functionality/stability/features etc will vary from another.

I would be paying $280 (that's with VAT, the crap exchange rate and the annoying hike that overseas vendors feel they need to impose - even on downloaded software) for some interesting minor improvements (that are welcomed, but not must-haves) and for the moment that's too expensive. I don't do red, mxf, ex, etc and I already use the new plugins, so lots of the big ticket new features are wasted on me.

Don't misunderstand me - a lot of the minor improvements look great and I want them NOW. However, like Alastair, my money might be better invested elsewhere. Three months ago I would have gone for it straight away in the hope that certain stability issues had been resolved but then I rebuilt my pc and most of the issues went away.

I will hang on until I've read the early user reports.

on the fence...
 

I too thought the upgrade price a bargain but am a little underwhelmed at the expanded feature list. I would love to see a comparison of features between pro 8 and pro 9 to see what the under the hood improvements are. I early adopted pro 8 and was disappointed to see better plugins shipped with the later version than the early adopter upgrade I purchased last time. Though I don't have the NewBlueFX package so this looks like it might be a good time to buy..

I also am planning to migrate to XDCAM EX later this year so those improvements look attractive too. My interpretations of how this could benifit an EX user are speculative, though, so I would love to hear from some EX people about what these upgrades mean in layman's terms.

Does anyone else find the interface tweaks to be eerily similar to Premiere Pro CS4?

This is what I was thinking. I still have a support ticket open (1 month +) with Sony about the craptastic distributed network render feature and I would LOVE to know if they even touched this feature to fix / improve it.

Yep i'm also un impressed by the upgrade, think its good for xdcam users and red users but for hdv is there any point.
wonder what the preview would be like using red files its not that great with hdv and as i dont see any mention of preview improvement I think I will skip this upgrade at the moment.
8.0c does everything I want and if i want special effects I can use after effects for that so it seems a bit pointless at this time.

currently, if you are using the EX cameras, you have to use clip browser to re-wrap the clip into a format vegas can play with. for me, it takes any where from 15-20 minutes to import 30 minutes of video. still faster than real time, but it could be faster...and now it is. you SHOULD be able to fill up a card, then plug in the camera/card to the computer, open the new device manager in vegas, and select what clips you want in the timeline. then import them, no re wrapping needed. I would assume it will be as fast as clicking and dragging any media on your computer.

And for those of us still in SD world (yes there are some of us) I see even fewer reasons to upgrade. I would still have an $8K investment to jump from SD to HD (in any of the varieties of HD).

Good afternoon,

It is always great to see improvements; Vegas 9 has several I would like.


However, what gags me is that 8.1 is not even right and I had to go back to 8.0 after having obtained a higher speed new 64 bit computer.

Now I have to spend an extra 300 dollars to run 64 bit when I should already be doing so with 8.1. you can bet they will not worry about 8.1.

will I order it? probably so i can run the 64 bit better!!! As Ed points out there are numerous smoother moves now too!!!

Haven't Vegas upgrades been available from as low as $US150 through B&H?

If you compare single upgrade to single upgrade.

I am a fan of Vegas, I make my living with it. The initial start up price of Vegas is definitely much more friendlier.

But I have to say Sony Media Software updates almost twice as often as Final Cut. So over time, the cost of upgrading to latest and greatest version of either NLE would work out to be about the same.

Woohoo, they added a new transition.

Maybe it is amateurish of me, but I want cool new effects/transitions, and I don't want to have to buy newblue for all of them.

I see ripples and the like in high-end ads all of the time. I especially like the one movie maker has that looks like a drop of water has hit in the center and ripples out. I saw it while playing on a laptop at a PC store, and I kept thinking Vegas should have some of these.

Mind you, I use very few transitions other than dissolves. In most projects I use nothing but jump cuts and dissolves. But on occasion I need something different.

Also, when will they move into the present century and add rendering to flash?

I am so over rendering everything twice for my website.

So does anybody have any idea what Audio Studio 9 is-- the bonus software ?? Right now I have Acid Music Studio, and I am wondering if this offers anything better.

Thanks for the info, since it much more detailed, than what SCS has on their website. I have a few questions, which maybe you can answer. Is Vegas 9 Pro still using Video for Windows or has it switched over to Direct Show? With the support for 2K and 4K formats, one would think that SCS has finally updated the interface to codecs and other filters.

Also, does the 64-bit version still spawn an 32-bit proxy program, in order to access 32-bit codecs and filters for I/O, or is everything now 64-bit? Will it read and write Cineform AVI files properly? The Cineform crew is at NAB, else I would have posted that question in their forum.

I think Audio Studio is to Sound Forge as Vegas Movie Studio is to Vegas Pro.

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/audiostudio