My experience at a local Videographer's Association meeting..... at DVinfo.net

Glen Elliott · September 22nd, 2004, 12:35 AM

I just attended a GPVA (Greater Philadelphia Videographer's Association) meeting tonight- quite an interesting experience. It's nice to be surrounded by lots of talent and experience.

Anyway towards the end they did a "round table discussion" where anything goes. They would just mention topics and see where the discussion leads. One of the first things the speaker did was a show of hands and what NLE they used. Final Cut Pro....70% of the 50+ audience raises their hands. Premiere Pro...about 28% raises their hands. Pinnacle- about 4....then Vegas....3...yes a measily 3 out of the entire association- thats including myself and my friend I brought with me. So techically there was only "1" GPVA member that is a Vegas user.

There was an employee from B&H video there that was arguing with some of the members almost "aggressively" over Edius vs FCP. At one point a member blurted out that Canopus is weak on audio and how FCP is great for audio. I had to hold my tongue as I really didn't want to start mixing it up beings it was my second attendance to this association and I'm not even a paid member yet. I thought, man...if only Douglas Spotted Eagle were here....or even Trox or Gary. Man that would get ugly! However it would be interesting to see how they'd respond to such informed Vegas evangelists.

Another big issue was "real-time" capability. Ironicly enough I have no problems not having true hardware supported real-time capability. I can always adjust the res of the preview monitor to keep my frame-rates up. And if rendering time is an issue- NETWORK rendering baby!

Anyway I plan on joining the GPVA simply for the exposure to other professionals in the wedding/event videography field and the ability to network with a great deal of people. Me and a friend must have spoke to the sole Vegas user for 2 hours after the night ended. I told him about the joys of Excalibur and we even exchanged reveiws on some of the training material we've purchased including Gary K's, and Spots DVDs.

I assure you in a few months time that group will know the power of our "little" program. I hope to impress them with some of my work cut on it. Wish me luck. :)

Rob Lohman · September 22nd, 2004, 03:08 AM

Just keep it a secret Glen! Not too many people need to know
about this! shhhhhhhhh <g>

All the best,

Peter Jefferson · September 22nd, 2004, 07:08 AM

hahahaha
dude, i know where ur coming from.. there are many disbelievers..

which is where i come in..

i can do more in Vegas in 5 minutes than i have seen anyone do in Premiere, FCPro, After Effects, Edius, and Liquid..

mix it up with sound forge, Acid Loops, Midi interface (im using a Yamaha RS7000) and people usually poo their pants as to teh power of it..

but one person once asked me, "Whats its mission in life.. it CANT do everything.. " " Its SHOULDNT" yadda yadda..

well it can do most things apart from realtime output (such as prem with a matrox rtx100)

so i say to those disbelievers, LIVE IN YOUR LITTLE TUNNEL-VISIONED WORLD while i pump out job after rock solid job

Funny.. i tried to change a projects settings halfway thru the project using prem pro..
I couldnt... why? Welel the argument was that you shouldnt have to.. but hang on.. what if i want to create different aspect rations for different format outputs??
you cant.. unless u start ur project all over again..

Vegas is a click of a button... some people think this is basic.. but you try mixing 4:3 with 16:9 footage with Prem Pro.. then try do it with VEgas and tell me which one is faster, easier, hassle free.........

Steven Andrus · September 22nd, 2004, 08:28 AM

people always look down their nose at me (especially the FCP people) when i tell them i use vegas.. ...i don't get it, ived edited on vegas for years and cant stand the work flow of other NLEs. I edited an award wining short film for the MCAI 48 hour fim festival. we won nearly every award including best in show. Afterwards people kept comenting on how nice it looked for having been shot/edited in under 48 hours. without vegas, i never would have been able to pull it off. What's more, i just finished editing a feature with vegas, and i only ran into 2 frustrations. 1. You can't import veg files on the time line like you can add sequeneces in Avid and 2. no animatte

Keith Loh · September 22nd, 2004, 09:50 AM

I also get lots of clients come in asking me about what product they should pick up and I usually tell them to pick up Vegas. Easy to use and powerful.

Peter Jefferson · September 23rd, 2004, 05:43 AM

hehehe

go to the matrox, adobe and canopus and pinnacle sites.. have a look at their support areas.. notice something??

2 things.

theyre all complaining about things they CANT do (or refine in realtime) or having issues with instant death

the other is compatibility lists.. u can run vegas on anything and it will do what it says it will do.. try do have the shit u can do with Vegas on a standalone prem unit (without matrox help) and Vegas poos on everything on the market..

Yi Fong Yu · September 23rd, 2004, 09:39 AM

yeah i always wonder... why don't more people know about vegas yet? it's sorta "the little engine that could". i mean back in its "video vegas" days no1 took it seriously. they thought it was just another consumer-friendly app... until v.3?v.4? came along. it started blowing everything out of its surpassing everything.

Simon Wyndham · September 23rd, 2004, 10:28 AM

problem is that first impressions count, so some people will still think that Vegas is a simple basic consumer editor.

On the one hand I don't care because I now those doubters are missing out. But on the other I do care because I like to be taken seriously in what I do.

I'm currently editing a feature, and you can be sure that somewhere in the credits, much as some people stick the Avid logo on, I'll be pointing out that it was done using Vegas!

Dylan Couper · September 23rd, 2004, 10:52 AM

Tell the FCP people what I tell them.

"Vegas is like Final Cut Pro for the PC. Except Vegas is fast, and stable."

Aaron Koolen · September 23rd, 2004, 02:33 PM

While it has it's downsides, Vegas is an awesome program.

I can't remember how long it took a friend of mine to switch. He was using Premiere, and it was going REALLY slow on long shows. It was fiddly and unstable also.

I practically had to yell at him and say "USE VEGAS YOU DUMB ***K".

Guess what, he used Vegas for is latest job (He edits wrestling shows) and I got an email during his editing session "Vegas rocks!" simple as that.

He does multicam shows so he's rapt how vegas handles this so easily.

Aaron

Simon Wyndham · September 23rd, 2004, 03:50 PM

Every program has it's downsides. But Vegas has less downsides than most others.

Glad to hear the wrestling guy finally caught up!

Personally I think the name does Vegas more harm than good. It doesn't really conjure up images of a professional editor, and harks back to it's origins when it was a bit basic.

Premiere users are the worst to pursuade. I recently upgraded to Vegas 5 and transferred my Vegas 4 license to my colleague (another thing in Vegas's favour is the ease of doing such an operation via the helpful people at Sony). Yet so far he has barely tried it, despite agreeing with me how cool some of the stuff it could do was when I went around to demonstrate stuff to him.

One thing I have found with Vegas is that a number of the things it can do to ease the workload aren't immediately apparent. As well there are several different ways of doing the same operation sometimes. The Premiere users usual first complaint is that there isn't a source or preview window in the usual place!

You just can't tell some people.

Dylan Couper · September 23rd, 2004, 06:45 PM

Do you think maybe we can petition Sony to change the name?

Josh Bass · September 23rd, 2004, 07:09 PM

Yes, please. Something powerfully cheesy, like Proteus, StreamEdit, Timeline, anything but "Vegas." If you call it "Vegas," you might as well call it "Happy Fun Video", or "My Wittle Video Editor." Thoses names not powerful enough? How bout "Max Power" or "Muscle Edit," Or "Nuclear Death Editor".

I believe I got the court reporting firm my friend works at to use it, simply 'cause I told him it was a good NLE, and this other production company (and by "production company" I mean guy working out of his apartment) to use it as well, simply by recommending it.

I've been ridiculed, laughed at etc. for using it and saying how sweet it is. I remember a gig that never materialized (tells you something, eh?), where I had to show these guys my reel, and someone asked me how I'd put it together, and I mentioned Vegas, and they said something about. . ."(chuckle), well we'll be editing on something a little more professional than Vegas" (I think they had FCP). This is also the gig where one guy told me they'd do the lighting in post, and not to worry about it on set (no, really!), and were really surprised when I told them miniDV blown up to 35mm wouldn't look like 35mm blown up to 35mm. . .and then they told me "not to tell that to our investors."

Anyway, I still say, in my experience, better scrub tool, and fix the media bin glitch that occurs with Win XP, and enable it to do real EDLs, and it's perfect.

I know I have no idea what I'm talking about, so keep that in mind as you read this.

Glenn Chan · September 23rd, 2004, 11:04 PM

C'mon, all Sony has to do is to add "Pro" to the end of the name. ;)

Final Cut Pro
Premiere Pro
Vegas Pro

Maybe someday we'll even see Avid Pro.

Boyd Ostroff · September 24th, 2004, 08:06 AM

<<<-- Originally posted by Glen Elliott : a show of hands and what NLE they used. Final Cut Pro....70% of the 50+ audience raises their hands. -->>>

Good thing I wasn't there... it would have been 72% ;-)

<<<-- Originally posted by Dylan Couper: Do you think maybe we can petition Sony to change the name? -->>

Since I don't use PC's I have no experience with Vegas, but it does sound nice and my experience with Premiere on the Mac is enough to keep me away from it. But I've never understood that name either. Why would you want to associate your product with "Vegas?" To me it conjures up images of expensive, tasteless glitz with no substance and gambling against impossible odds where you are pretty much assured of losing your money? ;-)

September 22nd, 2004, 12:35 AM	#1
Glen Elliott Wrangler Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Philadelphia, PA Posts: 2,898	My experience at a local Videographer's Association meeting..... I just attended a GPVA (Greater Philadelphia Videographer's Association) meeting tonight- quite an interesting experience. It's nice to be surrounded by lots of talent and experience. Anyway towards the end they did a "round table discussion" where anything goes. They would just mention topics and see where the discussion leads. One of the first things the speaker did was a show of hands and what NLE they used. Final Cut Pro....70% of the 50+ audience raises their hands. Premiere Pro...about 28% raises their hands. Pinnacle- about 4....then Vegas....3...yes a measily 3 out of the entire association- thats including myself and my friend I brought with me. So techically there was only "1" GPVA member that is a Vegas user. There was an employee from B&H video there that was arguing with some of the members almost "aggressively" over Edius vs FCP. At one point a member blurted out that Canopus is weak on audio and how FCP is great for audio. I had to hold my tongue as I really didn't want to start mixing it up beings it was my second attendance to this association and I'm not even a paid member yet. I thought, man...if only Douglas Spotted Eagle were here....or even Trox or Gary. Man that would get ugly! However it would be interesting to see how they'd respond to such informed Vegas evangelists. Another big issue was "real-time" capability. Ironicly enough I have no problems not having true hardware supported real-time capability. I can always adjust the res of the preview monitor to keep my frame-rates up. And if rendering time is an issue- NETWORK rendering baby! Anyway I plan on joining the GPVA simply for the exposure to other professionals in the wedding/event videography field and the ability to network with a great deal of people. Me and a friend must have spoke to the sole Vegas user for 2 hours after the night ended. I told him about the joys of Excalibur and we even exchanged reveiws on some of the training material we've purchased including Gary K's, and Spots DVDs. I assure you in a few months time that group will know the power of our "little" program. I hope to impress them with some of my work cut on it. Wish me luck. :)

September 22nd, 2004, 03:08 AM	#2
Rob Lohman RED Code Chef Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: Holland Posts: 12,514	Just keep it a secret Glen! Not too many people need to know about this! shhhhhhhhh <g> All the best, __________________ Rob Lohman, visuar@iname.com DV Info Wrangler & RED Code Chef Join the DV Challenge \| Lady X Search DVinfo.net for quick answers \| Buy from the best: DVinfo.net sponsors

September 22nd, 2004, 09:50 AM	#5
Keith Loh Air China Pilot Join Date: May 2002 Location: Vancouver, B.C. Posts: 2,389	I also get lots of clients come in asking me about what product they should pick up and I usually tell them to pick up Vegas. Easy to use and powerful. __________________ -- Visit http://www.KeithLoh.com \| stuff about living in Vancouver \| My Flickr photo gallery

September 23rd, 2004, 09:39 AM	#7
Yi Fong Yu Trustee Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: Vulcan Posts: 1,564	yeah i always wonder... why don't more people know about vegas yet? it's sorta "the little engine that could". i mean back in its "video vegas" days no1 took it seriously. they thought it was just another consumer-friendly app... until v.3?v.4? came along. it started blowing everything out of its surpassing everything. __________________ bow wow wow

September 23rd, 2004, 10:52 AM	#9
Dylan Couper Wrangler Join Date: Jun 2002 Location: Vancouver, British Columbia Posts: 8,314	Tell the FCP people what I tell them. "Vegas is like Final Cut Pro for the PC. Except Vegas is fast, and stable." __________________ Need to rent camera gear in Vancouver BC? Check me out at camerarentalsvancouver.com

September 22nd, 2004, 07:08 AM	#3
Peter Jefferson Inner Circle Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Aus Posts: 3,884	hahahaha dude, i know where ur coming from.. there are many disbelievers.. which is where i come in.. i can do more in Vegas in 5 minutes than i have seen anyone do in Premiere, FCPro, After Effects, Edius, and Liquid.. mix it up with sound forge, Acid Loops, Midi interface (im using a Yamaha RS7000) and people usually poo their pants as to teh power of it.. but one person once asked me, "Whats its mission in life.. it CANT do everything.. " " Its SHOULDNT" yadda yadda.. well it can do most things apart from realtime output (such as prem with a matrox rtx100) so i say to those disbelievers, LIVE IN YOUR LITTLE TUNNEL-VISIONED WORLD while i pump out job after rock solid job Funny.. i tried to change a projects settings halfway thru the project using prem pro.. I couldnt... why? Welel the argument was that you shouldnt have to.. but hang on.. what if i want to create different aspect rations for different format outputs?? you cant.. unless u start ur project all over again.. Vegas is a click of a button... some people think this is basic.. but you try mixing 4:3 with 16:9 footage with Prem Pro.. then try do it with VEgas and tell me which one is faster, easier, hassle free.........

September 22nd, 2004, 08:28 AM	#4
Steven Andrus Regular Crew Join Date: Sep 2004 Location: Scottsdale, AZ Posts: 48	people always look down their nose at me (especially the FCP people) when i tell them i use vegas.. ...i don't get it, ived edited on vegas for years and cant stand the work flow of other NLEs. I edited an award wining short film for the MCAI 48 hour fim festival. we won nearly every award including best in show. Afterwards people kept comenting on how nice it looked for having been shot/edited in under 48 hours. without vegas, i never would have been able to pull it off. What's more, i just finished editing a feature with vegas, and i only ran into 2 frustrations. 1. You can't import veg files on the time line like you can add sequeneces in Avid and 2. no animatte

September 23rd, 2004, 05:43 AM	#6
Peter Jefferson Inner Circle Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Aus Posts: 3,884	hehehe go to the matrox, adobe and canopus and pinnacle sites.. have a look at their support areas.. notice something?? 2 things. theyre all complaining about things they CANT do (or refine in realtime) or having issues with instant death the other is compatibility lists.. u can run vegas on anything and it will do what it says it will do.. try do have the shit u can do with Vegas on a standalone prem unit (without matrox help) and Vegas poos on everything on the market..

September 23rd, 2004, 10:28 AM	#8
Simon Wyndham Trustee Join Date: Dec 2003 Location: Malvern UK Posts: 1,931	problem is that first impressions count, so some people will still think that Vegas is a simple basic consumer editor. On the one hand I don't care because I now those doubters are missing out. But on the other I do care because I like to be taken seriously in what I do. I'm currently editing a feature, and you can be sure that somewhere in the credits, much as some people stick the Avid logo on, I'll be pointing out that it was done using Vegas!

September 23rd, 2004, 02:33 PM	#10
Aaron Koolen Trustee Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Auckland, New Zealand Posts: 1,727	While it has it's downsides, Vegas is an awesome program. I can't remember how long it took a friend of mine to switch. He was using Premiere, and it was going REALLY slow on long shows. It was fiddly and unstable also. I practically had to yell at him and say "USE VEGAS YOU DUMB ***K". Guess what, he used Vegas for is latest job (He edits wrestling shows) and I got an email during his editing session "Vegas rocks!" simple as that. He does multicam shows so he's rapt how vegas handles this so easily. Aaron __________________ My Website Meat Free Media

September 23rd, 2004, 03:50 PM	#11
Simon Wyndham Trustee Join Date: Dec 2003 Location: Malvern UK Posts: 1,931	Every program has it's downsides. But Vegas has less downsides than most others. Glad to hear the wrestling guy finally caught up! Personally I think the name does Vegas more harm than good. It doesn't really conjure up images of a professional editor, and harks back to it's origins when it was a bit basic. Premiere users are the worst to pursuade. I recently upgraded to Vegas 5 and transferred my Vegas 4 license to my colleague (another thing in Vegas's favour is the ease of doing such an operation via the helpful people at Sony). Yet so far he has barely tried it, despite agreeing with me how cool some of the stuff it could do was when I went around to demonstrate stuff to him. One thing I have found with Vegas is that a number of the things it can do to ease the workload aren't immediately apparent. As well there are several different ways of doing the same operation sometimes. The Premiere users usual first complaint is that there isn't a source or preview window in the usual place! You just can't tell some people.

September 23rd, 2004, 06:45 PM	#12
Dylan Couper Wrangler Join Date: Jun 2002 Location: Vancouver, British Columbia Posts: 8,314	Do you think maybe we can petition Sony to change the name? __________________ Need to rent camera gear in Vancouver BC? Check me out at camerarentalsvancouver.com

September 23rd, 2004, 07:09 PM	#13
Josh Bass Slash Rules! Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Houston, Texas Posts: 5,472	Yes, please. Something powerfully cheesy, like Proteus, StreamEdit, Timeline, anything but "Vegas." If you call it "Vegas," you might as well call it "Happy Fun Video", or "My Wittle Video Editor." Thoses names not powerful enough? How bout "Max Power" or "Muscle Edit," Or "Nuclear Death Editor". I believe I got the court reporting firm my friend works at to use it, simply 'cause I told him it was a good NLE, and this other production company (and by "production company" I mean guy working out of his apartment) to use it as well, simply by recommending it. I've been ridiculed, laughed at etc. for using it and saying how sweet it is. I remember a gig that never materialized (tells you something, eh?), where I had to show these guys my reel, and someone asked me how I'd put it together, and I mentioned Vegas, and they said something about. . ."(chuckle), well we'll be editing on something a little more professional than Vegas" (I think they had FCP). This is also the gig where one guy told me they'd do the lighting in post, and not to worry about it on set (no, really!), and were really surprised when I told them miniDV blown up to 35mm wouldn't look like 35mm blown up to 35mm. . .and then they told me "not to tell that to our investors." Anyway, I still say, in my experience, better scrub tool, and fix the media bin glitch that occurs with Win XP, and enable it to do real EDLs, and it's perfect. I know I have no idea what I'm talking about, so keep that in mind as you read this. __________________ The Bass' camerawork The Bass on IMDB

September 23rd, 2004, 11:04 PM	#14
Glenn Chan Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: Toronto, Canada Posts: 4,750	C'mon, all Sony has to do is to add "Pro" to the end of the name. ;) Final Cut Pro Premiere Pro Vegas Pro Maybe someday we'll even see Avid Pro.

September 24th, 2004, 08:06 AM	#15
Boyd Ostroff Wrangler Join Date: Dec 2002 Location: Mays Landing, NJ Posts: 11,802	Re: My experience at a local Videographer's Association meeting..... <<<-- Originally posted by Glen Elliott : a show of hands and what NLE they used. Final Cut Pro....70% of the 50+ audience raises their hands. -->>> Good thing I wasn't there... it would have been 72% ;-) <<<-- Originally posted by Dylan Couper: Do you think maybe we can petition Sony to change the name? -->> Since I don't use PC's I have no experience with Vegas, but it does sound nice and my experience with Premiere on the Mac is enough to keep me away from it. But I've never understood that name either. Why would you want to associate your product with "Vegas?" To me it conjures up images of expensive, tasteless glitz with no substance and gambling against impossible odds where you are pretty much assured of losing your money? ;-)