Vegas Pro 11

[Subhadip Sen]

Avid and Adobe have moved to a rapid yearly release schedule and Sony is following suit with Vegas Pro 11. I have been playing with the trial for the last few hours and very impressed thus far. Vegas Pro 11 is mostly about performance and comprehensive GPU acceleration, including the entire video processing pipeline. It is vendor agnostic and supports a wide range of AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. There are some benchmarks posted on the website showing major performance gains. AMD Radeon HD 6870 seems to be the hands down price/performance king, offering 4.2x playback performance in the benchmark, apparently. The other big news is, of course, native EPIC support. The mixing console has got a nice upgrade and Vegas continues to be the benchmark for audio in NLEs. Extensive improvements to the native Stereoscopic 3D workflow as well, for those who work with S3D. Some interface adjustments including revised monitoring and a useful new Render interface. (Opinion could be divided on this, though)

I am just waiting for the mail with the upgrade offer. Hopefully it's $150.

[Felix Steinhardt]

Can you set Redgammas and redcolor or is it still only "Colormode 1/2" and nobody is sure what that means?
I love Vegas, also worked with CS5 and Final Cut, but Vegas is just so smooth, fast and simple to work with!

[Peter Plevritis]

Still colormode 1/2. Unfortunately.

They list Epic support. Anyone can point me to an Epic 5K r3d?

Yeah, Vegas is really good. Very responsive and intuitive.

[Marcos Montenegro]

Another Vegas user here; love the workflow. I just wished more plugins would be available for Vegas as they are for Premier/after effects, FCP and Avid. Very curious about 11.

[Subhadip Sen]

Performed a simple benchmark between VP10, VP11 and PPCS5 (I don't have 5.5). 5 x XDCAM EX 1080/30p tracks overlaid at 50% opacity each with a simple color curve for each track. Sony Color Curves on VP, RGB Curves on PPCS5, both of which are GPU accelerated. Rendered out to MainConcept AVC, 1080/30p, 32 Mbit/s.

Vegas Pro 10 - 2:38
Premiere Pro CS5 - 2:26
Vegas Pro 11 - 1:47

CS5 used 3.2 GB RAM at peak, VP11 only ~700 MB. GPU usage for CS5 was 8-10%, about 25% for VP11. This test is probably biased towards VP11 as XDCAM is known to play well with Vegas (for obvious reasons) and everything if GPU accelerated, including the opacity, curves and the AVC render over VP10.

Epic footage works fine, performance is great, but Vegas Pro 11 is still not suitable as a finishing app for Epic. The properties UI is still incomplete (The Color version issue), the max resolution is 4096 and there is no sign of HDRx. I am sure all of this is coming soon, but Premiere Pro CS5.5 remains the benchmark for Epic. If you are planning to use a separate apps for grading and finishing, AAF exports work well.

I dragged the Scarlet lion footage onto the timeline, and it works great. Full-res real-time debayer on a Core i7 970 at Good (Full). Added the new GPU-accelerated Sony Color Corrector, still real-time. Adding a second track, few frames dropped. I am sure with a slight overclock two tracks will be possible. Think about that for a second - 2 tracks, full-res, real-time debayer. No Rockets, just simple consumer hardware. So I added the same thing thrice over, dropped to 1/2 res, and - real-time, no frames dropped. Timeline is silky smooth. Very, very impressive. Note that this is at 8-bit. You can always switch over to 32-bit FP for the final render.

There's native support for NVIDIA 3D Vision, MVC and Cineform 3D and everything (incl plug-ins) is 3D ready. The new sync link tool works very well too. There isn't a big list of changes however, just a few significant ones.

[Eki Halkka]

It seems Vegas 11 doesn't use the GPU to decode Red footage - i get pretty much the exact same performance on Vegas 10 and Vegas 11. In my case, poorer than you. I get about 12 fps with "preview half", with 4K footage on a HD timeline, 3K footage plays in real time (same goes with Scarlet 3K on Vegas 11). "Good full" slows down to about 2 fps. I have two 5345 Xeons running at 2.35 mHz (8 cores). It seems like Vegas can't use all the processors fully (the processor usage is below 50%).

But otherwise the GPU acceleration works nicely with GeForce GTX 570, i get real time crossfades, color correction and greenscreen key**, gaussian blur etc. with XDCAM EX footage.

** BTW, i use two secondary color correctors instead of the normal, pretty useless chroma keyer for pulling the matte and controlling spill, much more control that way. Good enough for quick and dirty jobs, no need to switch to After Effects...

[Les Dittert]

That's amazing,
I thought that only Scratch , with their special arrangement with Red, gets to use the GPU for the debayer ?
I hope that that's not true any more!

Can you try this: Get Epic footage and push in on it, say 400%, and see if that plays real time as well. You can see the actual resolution that is being rendered if you zoom in a lot, so there can be no 'cheating' by skipping the debayer step ;)

-Les

Full-res real-time debayer on a Core i7 970 at Good (Full). Added the new GPU-accelerated Sony Color Corrector, still real-time. Adding a second track, few frames dropped. I am sure with a slight overclock two tracks will be possible. Think about that for a second - 2 tracks, full-res, real-time debayer. No Rockets, just simple consumer hardware. So I added the same thing thrice over, dropped to 1/2 res, and - real-time, no frames dropped. Timeline is silky smooth. Very, very impressive. Note that this is at 8-bit. You can always switch over to 32-bit FP for the final render.

There's native support for NVIDIA 3D Vision, MVC and Cineform 3D and everything (incl plug-ins) is 3D ready. The new sync link tool works very well too. There isn't a big list of changes however, just a few significant ones.