Ideal hardware set-up

[Andy Tejral]

This is a bit wierd--a Edius promo on the sony website Grass Valley EDIUS | Mike Downey

More on point, here are a good set of videos done by Mike Downey of Edius 4--90+% the same as 5, I'm sure.

EDIUS Training

[Jason Robinson]

Originally Posted by Perrone Ford

I would venture to say that more than 98% of the films you see come out of Hollywood or even from large indies are done mostly in Avid, or Final Cut Pro. Indies are probably 80% FCP, and big Hollywood features are probably 80% Avid. In a 2009 survey of the American Cinema Editors uniion 21% responded that they were cutting on FCP, and 79% responded they were cutting on Avid. NO OTHER NLE WAS USED. Period. Zero.

Hummm. I'm not sure how that absolute certainty of no other NLE is possible since my roommate was layout lead for Steve Oedekerk who did his compositing work in Vegas.

[Jason Robinson]

I routinely perform 1hr project edits with 7hrs of footage, a few thousand clips, 40+ tracks, all in a single veggie, and I have only very minor and occasional problems with crashes / hangs / mem leaks.

But it could be that I'm cutting DV footage on a WinXP system with 2GB of RAM on a AMD 64x2 chip. Could be that I'm on such old hardware that there aren't any fancy new features enabled (64bit or >2GB mem) to cause such problems.

If you need a NLE to try out and you do it all yourself, then Vegas is the cheapest test of the waters. Vegas plus a few simple add-ons (many of them free) can handle almost anything the directory/producer/writer/editor (meaning you wear all the hats) of their project can handle.

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Jason Robinson

I routinely perform 1hr project edits with 7hrs of footage, a few thousand clips, 40+ tracks, all in a single veggie, and I have only very minor and occasional problems with crashes / hangs / mem leaks.

But it could be that I'm cutting DV footage on a WinXP system with 2GB of RAM on a AMD 64x2 chip. Could be that I'm on such old hardware that there aren't any fancy new features enabled (64bit or >2GB mem) to cause such problems.

If you need a NLE to try out and you do it all yourself, then Vegas is the cheapest test of the waters. Vegas plus a few simple add-ons (many of them free) can handle almost anything the directory/producer/writer/editor (meaning you wear all the hats) of their project can handle.

Which version of Vegas?

People seem to be talking a lot about version 7 or version 8. If someone today goes to buy Vegas, they aren't buying that version. They are buying 9. Vegas 6/7 never crashed for me, and Vegas 8, crashes were rare. Only when I started fooling with HD.

If you're cutting SD, especially DV, on a verison prior to 9, then none of this applies to you.

[Mike Calla]

..well many programs have codecs or formats that they work especially well with, for me cineform, and about a quarter uncompressed HD work and no problems for me on Vegas working multiple monitors.

I've been reading up on edius lately and am a tad interested because of all the grass valley hardware options (although a bit expensive for top-end stuff). Sony is also a hardware company - why can't they do something like this...

note: Sony Creative Software Inc is a completely separate division than than the broadcast, etc divisions.

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Jason Robinson

Hummm. I'm not sure how that absolute certainty of no other NLE is possible since my roommate was layout lead for Steve Oedekerk who did his compositing work in Vegas.

Compositing is not editing. But regardless, this was an ACE survey, results are posted on their webpage and they clearly stated the no respondent used anything other than FCP or Avid. Clearly it wasn't an exhaustive poll of every union member. But the sample size was representative.