Your personal opinion on Vegas 11

[Don Parrish]

I would like to ask the community for their personal opinion on Vegas 11, pro's, cons.

GPU acceleration a plus for you ?
Render times good ?

Thanks

[Garrett Low]

Hmm, no answers to this. I would also be interested as I'm thinking of making the jump from Vegas Pro 9 to 11.

Thanks,
Garrett

[Edward Troxel]

It's working fine for me but my card is not a supported GPU to test those features. I have a friend using it on a supported card and he loves it. His FCP guys are envious when they need to update the closed captioning on an MPEG file - THEY CAN'T DO IT so they come to him to make the changes.

[Danny O'Neill]

It's working brilliantly for us and GPU acceleration is well worth investing in a suitable card.

For info we have it on a 4 year old Dell XPS 420 with a Quad core Q6600 processor and a Geforce 8800 GTX graphics card. The graphics card is quite old and gives very little GPU accelleration for rendering.

My machine is a Dell XPS 8300 with an i7 processor and a Geforece GTX 560 Ti (OEM) card and it flies. I can render a 20 minute project from DSLR source footage out to DVD in 20 minutes with VERY heavy grading. Output to Blu-Ray AVC format takes about 30 minutes.

One benefit of the GPU processing is that it takes on some (not all) of the work. For example. In our projects we use a sharpen and film grain filter. Which are not supported by the GPU processing. However, when rendering I can see that the GPU is working hard on everything else and leaving the CPU to handle all the non GPU processing of filters. If I disable those plugins it renders in the same ammount of time, just uses less CPU.

If you have a suitable graphics card its well worth upgrading. If not, then get a decent card and upgrade.

[Jeff Harper]

A big thumbs up on Vegas 11. Before the latest release I had some major issues of one kind or another with features, and crashing was a constant problem.

It has all been fixed, as far as I am concerned. I have not had a single crash with the newest update. Before I had random crashes all the time, very frustrating.

Go for it!

GPU acceleration doesn't do much for me, I think because my processor is very fast already. A more expensive card than my GTX 460 might give me some speed, but I kind of doubt it.

I am very unhappy with preview performance of mulitcamera projects using 3-4 lines of 1080i and 1080 24p footage is awful, and my system is pretty well configured, I think.

But aside from preview performance, about which there is nothing to be done except invest in a dual processor system, I am very happy.

[Buba Kastorski]

Originally Posted by Garrett Low

Hmm, no answers to this. I would also be interested as I'm thinking of making the jump from Vegas Pro 9 to 11.

i would jump from 9 to 10 for sure, but 11 - i don't know, I use 11 for r3ds only, my main editor is still 10, somehow I don’t see dramatic benefits of GPU acceleration, although i have a very decent graphics card;
my main reason staying with 10 is stabilize, for me it works much better on ver.10

[Sean Seah]

V11 rocks! IT is one of the most worthy upgrades for me so far. I too use a Dell XPS8300 plys GTX560. The machine keeps crashing (blue screen due to shitty hardware - ram suspected) but when it is working fine Vegas works very well.

I see a big improvement in render times for mpeg2 and avc mpeg4 especially. The keyframe possibility with ofx support for almost everything makes the titler a lot more versatile. My only wish now is for Vegas to support xml for grading in Davinci.

In short, go for it!

[Jeff Harper]

Glad you're happy Sean. I am too, but I had my first crash this morning, and I lost a bit of work, as the bak file nor the restored version contained my work, very strange. So I'm back to backing up often again, like every few minutes, which is a pain since I save each time to three locations.

Otherwise I'm as happy as you, sorry to hear about your crashes!

[David Jimerson]

NOT a fan of the new VFX controls.

[Edward Troxel]

Jeff, if you use my Auto Save custom command, it will do that for you! It installs when you install Excalibur. Auto Save is free to use, though.

[Jeff Harper]

Edward, thanks much for your tip about using Excalibur's save command. As I wrote my post I remembered you and your program, and how I needed to try it!

I will install it later tonight. Thank you good sir!

[Peter Riding]

GPU acceleration doesn't do much for me, I think because my processor is very fast already. A more expensive card than my GTX 460 might give me some speed, but I kind of doubt it.

I am very unhappy with preview performance of mulitcamera projects using 3-4 lines of 1080i and 1080 24p footage is awful, and my system is pretty well configured, I think.

But aside from preview performance, about which there is nothing to be done except invest in a dual processor system, I am very happy.

I can't quantify how much difference GPU acceleration has made for me because I upgraded to a GTX570 at the same time as replacing my i7 processor cooling fan and renewing the thermal compound (previously it would run at well over 90 degrees when stressed, now down to 60). I also had to update the driver thatcame with the new video card before Vegas would even recognise it. But together the speed increase has been massive :- )

Jeff I regularly do multicam editing from three X 1080p / 50p sources (TM900's) together with up to 4 separate WAV audio tracks. I found that switching to 8 bit from 32 bit gives me a smooth playback staying at 50fps almost all the time. 32 bit is rough. The processor is a 4 core 8 thread i7 950.

Pete

[Jeff Harper]

Hi Peter, with GPU accleration on this latest update of V11, as I mentioned earlier in this thread or another one, (I forget), my playback is now fine.

Previously when editing in 720 60p, I did fine, but 1080 just gave me fits. It was especially disappointing because I spent $$$ on 15K rpm SAS drives, a great SAS controller, overclocked my I7 980 to 4.2gHz, and still 1080 was lagging.

But all is now well, as the GPU thing has given me smooth playback in 1080. It's marginal at times, but it's good enough.

Mind you I'm running the playback screen in the largest size, at Best quality, on a 30" monitor, so I may have been pushing things to begin with, don't know. I find Preview quality setting is just too poor when working with 1080 as it pulsates with grain during playback, very distracting.

Thanks for your feedback. BTW, I don't run in 32 bit mode, but thanks for mentioning it!

[David Wayne Groves]

Vegas 11 has been pretty smooth for me, although I still get the crashes from time to time, but with the latest patches it has happened less often.
I just finished a multicam project with footage from my Sony NX5U,AX2000, Canon HG21 and HG10, all loaded in the timeline and they ran smoothly on my i7 920 setup, I have a older GTX 295 Video card so the GPU feature is available but not really noticable. of course I really have not felt the need to move up since editing and rendering have been smooth and fast on my current rig...

[Peter Riding]

I'm running the playback screen in the largest size, at Best quality, on a 30" monitor, so I may have been pushing things to begin with, don't know. I find Preview quality setting is just too poor when working with 1080

I should have added that I'm using two 24" screens, one for editing and the other for fullscreen playback. I have viewing set to Best+Full and "Adjust Size and Quality For Optimal Playback" disabled - because as you say it gets tricky to see enough at lower settings. Dumping 32 bit made a significant difference in playback frame rate as well as in rendering times; coming from a pro-photography background as I do I had simply taken it for granted that 32 bit was indispensible rather than only using it when needed.

Pete