Sony Vegas

[irishmark]

Saying that Vegas is a "Premiere Alternative" is sinful and includiong it with Ulead Media Studio is even worse. I work in Broadcast Studios in London using Avid And Media 100 Suites and I have found Vegas to be equally on a par with them if not better in some areas. Premier, even premier pro and Ulead Studio are childerns toys in comparrison to Vegas'. As a PC based edit package it really cannot be compared to anything els on the market. Where Final Cut Pro is taking over the market in the broadcast world I think Vegas is also equally matched to it. Also I must add - Because its an evolution of Soundforge its sound capabilities are incredible and seeing alot of Sound studios using souindforge only backs up Vegas's credentials.

[Mike Thorpe]

Uh... huh....

*nods and grins*

Probably something to do with the fact that Marc The Wemaster has had no experience with Sony Vegas.

Also, this is mainly an amateur site, so i'm willing to bet the vast majority of people coming here looking for help are going to be using either premiere or pinnacle.

Oh and, hello by the way

[Marc Peters]

Hi Mark and welcome to the forums.

We had seperate forums for both Vegas and Media Studio, but they simply didn't warrant their own dedicated sections due to the comparatively low number of posts.

In an effort to streamline the forums, it was agreed that I should combine Sony and Ulead into one forum. The Adobe section is by far the most popular, which although isn't an indication of merit, is an indication of popularity. Hence the lablel, "Premiere alternatives" - a way of suggesting to all the Adobe users that oranges aren't the only fruit.

I think we have just the right balance of forums now. Past experience has proved that the more forums you have, the greater the propensity for people simply to post in "News".

I'd be happy to seperate out the Ulead and Vegas if we had a few Vegas and Ulead "experts" on the forum and we could lose another forum (which would probablty be "Video Editing Retail Specialists and Hardware For Sale".

[irishmark]

Yeah I thought this was the case. I just wanted a moan and I selfishly took it out on you!! lol.

S'all good. My Brother and I both have similar systems running Vegas and maybe between the both of us we could be said Vegas Experts. - I'll chat to him and email you if he's up for it.

It's a great site btw. Even as a pro I've read a few posts that have been handy. - You can never learn it all.

[Marc Peters]

You can never learn it all.

Infact the raison d'etre of the site started out as a repository for the tips I'd picked up when first starting the hobby - I needed somewhere to wriet everything down. It's grown slightly beyond that now!

[irishmark]

Mike,

Jus been looking at some of the vids on your site - fucking hilarious dude.
I have some advice though which should prove very useful to you.
On my own sites I have video and initially i started with Divx however there is a simpiler way - so easy its silly. Use Windows Movie maker to encode the movies. You can get fantastic quality at about 2-3mb per min at 320 x 240.
So a 5min prog will be 7.5mb and believ me the quality will be excellent.

Look at my own site for samples - There are are a few movies which do get a bit pixilated but that's cause i was being stingy on file size but they are all still quite small.
http://www.mediachill.com/irishmark/...%20shutter.htm

[Marc Peters]

Use Windows Movie maker to encode the movies. You can get fantastic quality at about 2-3mb per min at 320 x 240.

Whatever you do, don't let mrlipring here you say that. You see WMV is the spawn of Satan.

But seriously, a two pass encode of WMV at Peak Rate VBR of 600k/bits per second looks good. Remember, it;s not he native resolution but the bitrate that makes the file size - you could have a video sized 320x240 or 640x480... if the bitrate is the same, the file size will be the same.

I encode all my videos I post at the shot resolution of 720x576. But take a look at Xvid though. One thing I like about Xvid and DivX is the fact that the first pass is stored as a log - so each sunsquent Nth pass already has the first pass (saves time if you want to encode again).

[irishmark]

You are right sir!!! - However!!!! Even if you dont like wmv's as a format they will stream - avi's are a pain in the arse to stream and they dont stream well when they do.

I was suggesting windows movie maker and WMV's because of this and because its probably the quickest simplest solution. - As long as the video looks good on the site presentation and all, then it doesn't matter what format you use. Also not all PC's have divx or xvid codecs - but they will all have windows media player. So for the person browsing on to your site it's the fastest and simplest method. Consider those poor sods who have limited PC knowledge. I've used this method over and over for corporate clients so it's tried and tested.

MrLipring shouldn't get so stuck up about using WMV's. Yeah technically they are bullshit but the end user doesn't think what format the vid is in when they are watching it.

I am God, hear me now in what I say and go forth from this day and practice it!!!!...phhht

[Mike Thorpe]

mark - cheers for the comments

So God works in the Broadcast industry then? Interesting.

Let there be three point light! :-P

We did actually start using WMV over DivX for the last video we did as a collaboration with another site, it's probably something we'll carry on doing. We're definitely going to have two different file formats though, because some people do prefer divx (plus, what's WMV support like on MacOS or Linux?) but we will be using WMV as one of the options.

We were on track to release another video. We filmed it in January, and Marc was helping us out with it because the colours were way too dark. Problem is, we were close to releasing it, and then something happened which made us change our mind for at least a couple of years.

I'm not going to go into too much detail, but needless to say, it involved fake explosives :-/

[irishmark]

explosions - lol - alays difficult to fake fire - lol