Avid Media Composer 4. Software only.

Not the right choice for a lot of folks, but if your livelihood depends on getting things done, it's worth a look.

It's got the fastest XDCam(EX) workflow I've ever seen. Absolutely stunning. Have you guys seen the workflow?

I feel your pain Perrone - I don't do near the amount of video editing you do, but I do have clients that expect their work to be finished on time and on budget. The Vegas/Cineform workflow has all but stopped me or at the most, kept me at a slow crawl between Cineform upgrades no longer working with Vegas, or Red/Black clips where I have to restart Vegas a dozen times in a day - that's just ridiculous IMO.

I'm looking at Edius right now since it's minimalist philosophy fits in with how I shoot/edit.

Another Vegas Forum member contacted me on the Edius forums - go figure he had had enough of how Vegas mangles his work when trying to earn a living with a tool that has "Pro" in it.

I've not been this disgruntled in a very long time.

Currently converting my content into Canopus HQ AVI's to see what kind of performance I get. I have a sneaking suspicion Vegas is going to be left for only opening old projects.

That's the thing. A couple years ago, I did a few videos a year. It's been a steady increase every few months. I would have never dreamed a couple years ago that I'd be cutting several HD programs a month.

I'm staring at a bi-monthly episodic show for 2010, about half a dozen conferences, maybe 10 live shows, and whatever creative work I pull in. Part of it is three years ago, we had a contract with a local station to do a lot of our work. PSAs, historic shows, etc. With the tight economy, that was cancelled, and I was asked to pick up the slack. They gave me budget thankfully, but no salary. So they pay me in gear! :)

I could live with a lack of advanced tools. But I can't live with slowness and worse, crashing. There is nothing worse than watching 2-4-10 hours of your day just WASTED because of a silly crash.

Same here. And dang, I just want it to work. I don't need fancy editing tricks. Cuts, dissolves, a few titles, render. Give me that workflow 100% and I'd LIKE more, but could live with it. Well, maybe not at $600, but you know what I'm saying.

There are still no other reasonably priced apps that can work with 2k/4k files. So for me, Vegas will be a part of that workflow. But I hear ya. No more day to day, breadwinning projects.

I looked at Canopus a year or two ago, it was intriquing, but awkward after coming from Vegas. I gave up on it after only a short time.

Yup. Vegas had a good run. And I never pushed Vegas all that hard is what has me frustrated.

None of my projects have been more than 15 minutes in length save for one which was a nightmare to keep going given it was straight footage with dissolves or straight cut edits only and Vegas kept doing red frame/black frame bug.

Tryiing to make myself reassemble my current winery doc project I shot. Since Edius Neo 2 doesn't accept EDL's, I'm having to rebuild it from scratch - looking at the VP9 timeline and reassembling the project accordingly placing the clips where they are into Edius from Vegas.

What a PITA!

BTW - for your insomnia - try 3 to 5mg Melatonin 30 minutes before lights out - works wonders for me ;)

Jeff - I can understand your response but when one is losing time, which is money I'm willing to learn a new NLE if it will save me in the long run. I've been using thr trial of Neo 2 and it has been rock solid so far. It also uses my NewBlue FX plugins so I"m not losing out on that investment.

Perrone, Let us know when you find the problem with your computer - and you will. Meanwhile a good "dose" of another NLE will do you good; let's say it will "refine" your perspective.

Yikes, Canopus HD costs $7400.00. I'm sure there are less expensive solutions among their offerings. Wow, that is some high end stuff.

What are you looking at??

With hardware assist: Videoguys.com - Grass Valley HDSTORM with EDIUS v5 - HDMI Based Editing

Without: Videoguys.com - Grass Valley EDIUS v5 Editing for the Digital Generation

just completed the transcoding of the clips into Canopus HQ AVI's - a little disconcerting given that the same number of clips as Cineform AVI's comes in at a little over 36GB while the canopus AVI's weigh in at over 72GB for the same number of clips (basically a doubling in file size).

I've tried the Cineform clips in Edius and they don't playback as well as the Canopus AVI's do so it's now becoming plainly clear that for the time being, I may HAVE to stick with Vegas Pro.

Truly a PITA right now...

I used to be a Vegas user and made the switch to Mac FCP what must be 12 months now and I have to say FCP rocks in every way.
Give it a go.

I've been drinking the FCP KoolAid since version 1.0.2 on OS8.6

It's been good to me but it is FAR from perfect... Every update prompts the question "what pro feature did they mess up to appease noobies?" and the answer is normally "AH NO, not THAT one..."

CanopusHQ is using a very different kind of compression than Cineform. Cineform is a Wavelet based compression. Best thing going right now. Do some research on Wavelet codec (REDCode, Cineform, Dirac, JPeg2000) and you'll begin to understand why it works so well, and is SO FAST and small. This is why I use it as an archival medium as Jpeg2000.

CanopusHQ is using DCT compression, same as ProRes and DNxHD. It makes beautiful encodes, but it needs more space to do so. And more horsepower to play back, though it can be optimized inside the application, which is why Avid screams with DNxHD, and FCP flies with ProRes.

Vegas comes with a free Jpeg2000 encoder, but it only encodes into the .MOV container. I bought Morgan multimedia's encoder which stores in .AVI. It was $30. It uses the same technology as Cineform, but is 8-bit instead of 10-bit. However, Edius is 8-bit anyway, so you're not losing anything.

since he's running Vegas right now, I am going to assume he doesn't have a Mac handy for editing. It would actually be cheaper for him to go Avid, once you toss in the factor of having to buy a new machine. Not to mention time lost to become conversant in a new OS...

That's not the easiest switch in the world when you've got clients waiting for work. I am running Avid and Vegas together right now. My hope is that by the time I need to switch over fully, I'll be good enough to do anything on Avid, that I can do on Vegas. That is looking like a distinct possibility.

I don't know Avid, but it's known to play better with Mac than PC. I dunno, you might be exchanging one set of headaches for another. I've heard horror stories coming from every brand.