Vegas Pro 9 available for pre-order
 

Expected ship date 5/11/2009 12:00:00 AM.

Product info

Promo offer

BTW, upgrade pricing is still only $234.95 download or $249.95 boxed.

Here's a partial list of the new features.

New! 4K support for frame sizes up to 4096x4096

New! Support for capturing directly to XDCAM-compatible MXF files from supported SDK sources

New! Automatic source media adjustment for working with mismatched media

New! Enhanced 32-bit floating point video levels mode designed to work like 8-bit mode but with the precision needed for 10-bit and higher sources and render formats

New! Gradient wipe transition

New! Glint, Rays, Defocus, Starburst, Soft Contrast, and Fill Light video effects

New! Place and edit audio without quantizing to frame boundaries, while still quantizing video edits

New! Multichannel audio adds from Trimmer Window

New! Includes native 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Vegas Pro software

New! Enhanced user interface with layout presets

New! Impressive lighting effects including Glint, Rays, and Fill Light

New! Darker color palette UI for optimized viewing

New! Audio Mixing and Color Correction default layouts

New! Browse XDCAM EX and AVCHD contents in Device Explorer

New! Native XDCAM EX reading and import

New! Support for gigapixel size pictures

New! Read and save DPX, OpenEXR, and Microsoft HD Photo formats

New! Open and edit RED ONE™ files on the timeline

New! Device Explorer for AVCHD and XDCAM EX devices

Is that delivery on the 5th of November or the 11th of May?

Good question Renton.
My guess is May 11 but I'll wait for the official email to hit my Inbox for confirmation :-)

awesome! Hopefully version 9 will be much more stable. Any word on whether version 9 will be backwards compatible with 3rd party plug-ins that worked in version 8.x?

May 11 2009

Hmm will all Sony Media Software vendors receive version 9 on 05/11? I really want to pickup the Blu-Ray authoring kit from videoguys.com

Ask the Videoguys.

Looks like they bought VelvetMatter's Radiance. Excellent plugin (Glint, Rays, Soft Contrast etc).

I would say that was the only NEW bit that piqued my interest.

Looks like you were right about the purchase.

velvetmatter

£165 for the upgrade isn't floating my boat in any way. I would sooner put that to use on some other plug-ins to Bolster Vegas 8.

Anyone else feeling the same?

For a first-looks review, take a look at my newest newsletter.

www.jetdv.com :: View topic - Vol #7, Issue #1 (April 2009)

£190 inc VAT!

I wasn't particularly excited at first, but a read through Edward's excellent first look review revealed a few new bits and pieces that might just get me shelling out - but not yet - the free software for early upgraders does nothing to turn me on (although it would if I wasn't already a NewBlueFX user).

I'm quite content to hang on for this one.

Good Grief, you are right...I missed the +vat bit. £190 cough.....splutter......No Ta!

Likewise, had i not already been a very happy New Blue user, that would have softened the blow.

wow, yeah, $234 is a bit steep, but man, if it is able to handle native EX files. I will gladly throw that down! I am really excited.

My 2 cents, for what it's worth...
Certain features will make this upgrade mandatory for some users - native MXF & Red support, for example. 4k resolution is huge and timely.

Reading Edward's detailed review (thanks Edward!!!), there's a whole host of minor improvements that add up to quite a bit of benefit for workflow hounds like me.

I really hope that the new 32-bit mode straightens out the gamma problems of the old 32-bit mode. I shied away from 32-bit; seemed like it was quite a ball of yarn to unravel to get settings right for various output codecs, I want to think Sony has fixed this - hope so.

I do look forward to working with the velvetmatter plugins. That and workflow probably make the upgrade decision for me.

No mention of other under-the-hood improvements, dare we hope for improved memory management, avc & large jpg performance on the timeline...?

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

Vegas Production Assistant at $169 is suspiciously similar in features to Ultimate S and Excalibur.

I was intigued with the feature described as follows:

"Automatically swap placeholder slugs with program media".

What is this, anyone know?

Now, had the functionality of the Vegas Production Assistant been included in v9, it may have sweetened the deal for me. It is clearly a rehash of Ultimate S, as you suggested Jeff, and doesn't appear to have anything new in it. Useful tools, but if you have Excalibur or are already an owner of Ultimate S it seems redundant.

And the fact that the UK price is $40 more than the US price gives me that 'being gouged' feeling again. For me it would be cheaper to buy Ultimate S direct from VASST at $169 - or will they be discontinuing it? Spot?

To answer your specific question, Jeff, this is taken from the VASST Ultimate S product description. I suspect it's the same thing:

'The Media Swapper allows any format to be swapped out for any other format video in the Vegas Pro 8 timeline. Got a bunch of proxy avi files you want to swap out for uncompressed HD or AVCHD master files? Got a bunch of TIFF files you'd like to swap out for PNG files, no problem. The Media Swapper is the one-touch solution!'

And from the New Features in Ultimate S 4 document:

'New: Media Swapper can swap any media for any other media by file
extension. Swap mt2 for avi and back, swap jpg for png, swap anything you
want. Multiple targets can be define for a single swap (i.e., swap all m2t,
m2ts, & mxf, to avi in one swap)'

I thought the same thing about Vegas Production Assistant when I first read the description.
Then I read some comments (below) from DSE about VPA and realized that I may have been too hasty.
He promises more info after the big Vegas party tonight :-)

A demo of production assistant is in the box.
It does a lot of what Ultimate S does, and a lot more than any other scripting app out there. It's less than Ultimate S as well, and includes a lot of lower thirds, film looks, etc. It's got some very unique features that are much easier shown than explained.
Including pre-editing, etc. Come by the Sony booth and see it working. It's a well thought-out application that in some circles, is way past due.
Imagine putting a CF or SDHC card in your reader (with no apps open) and go grab a cup of coffee....60 seconds later, the files will have been imported, laid up on the timeline, titles inserted, and only fine cuts needed (depending on your shooting technique, of course).
In one broadcast application, Production Assistant shaved 25 minutes off a 30 minute workflow. :-)
Fun stuff indeed.


Price-wise, it's less than Ultimate S, and does quite a bit more, not to mention that it has several similar features to Ultimate S.
It's actually a very powerful, fast tool that doesn't need to have Vegas open to do some of the work it does....

Media swapper appears to be similar to VASST Gearshift, having more features for swapping minus the ability to create the proxies.

I am positive that the production assistant been created for Sony by Vasst group.

The actual price of the pre-order / download for Vegas 8 to 9 is $184.95. I put it in the cart and it registered as $234.95 then passed through some kind of discount offer and it came out at the lower price. $184.95 isn't a bad price at all--a nice surprise. Can't download it until May 11th though.

The production assistant sounds like something that should be part of the program. Not a add on you have to pay for. Now if its another company I can see that but sony no.

On paper, I think this upgrade rocks. I have a terabyte of RedCine exports for one set of 15 second spots I can dump, I really, really need 4k support, image sequence export to DPX and EXR, need the new color management for 32-bit/wide gamut monitors etc, etc.

As long as it's as stable as v8 (which has been pretty stable for me) and better on x64 than 8.1 is, it will be a winner in my book.

And $185 (in the US) is dirt cheap for upgrade.

this is great news but I would have been even happier if they announced an OS X version. I recently purchased Final Cut Express thinking it would improve my workflow on my two macs (as opposed to running vegas in a VMware virtual machine or bootcamp) but I was SORELY mistaken.

I'm wondering if there are improvements to timeline preview performance for 5D Mark II files.

where are you seeing that price?! I have only found the $234 for the download.