Vegas Movie Studio 11 Is Out

[Chris B]

VMS11 is now available. It seems to be a very incremental update unless you count 3D as a "must have" feature. I've had a quick play with the trial version.

1) Export to SonyAVC now uses (some) of my graphics card - this saves around 15-20% on encoding time.
2) There's a new titler with some pre-set effects. Unfortunately the presents are totally non-editable (as far as I can tell).
3) The keyframe editing seems slightly refined - although it's a half hearted attempt.
4) That's about it.... (seriously there's not much).

I will assume that there's a ton of bugfixes etc under the hood - but VMS10 was stable for me so I don't see the benefits.

I quite liked the glow expand preset - but wanted to change the colours - a quick trip to the HSV effect and we're away

[Paul LS]

Export to SonyAVC now uses (some) of my graphics card - this saves around 15-20% on encoding time.

I wish I was seeing this in Vegas Pro... Sony say that you should see "some" improvement, but I am seeing virtually none. And nothing compared to that in Premiere Pro.

[Chris B]

I've got a reasonably serious card - what's yours? The encoding only used 7-8% of the GPU (and 4 threads of encoding - consumer level restriction). An example I tried took 6:07 to encode on Vegas 10 and 5:08 on 11. It's still waaaay slower than "real time".

[Steve Grisetti]

I like the titler overhaul. The text animations are pretty cool.

It also is able to work with 3D video (for what it's worth), and it includes support for 50p/60p and 24p video.

Sony also claims to have completely overhauled its AVCHD engine, but I haven't done any real benchmark testing on it yet.

And, yes, I am hard at work on book for version 11.

[Chris B]

Steve,

Given that I might well be looking to upgrade - there's not a lot of difference between Platinum and Suite editions. The only thing that's of interest that I can tell in the new "titler" plugin from newblue - however the trial dosen't seem to include it. Do you have any screenshots or examples of what it does/can do?

[Paul LS]

Hi Chris, I have the GTX470. With PPro I get 80% GPU utilization... in Vegas a few percent.

Paul.

[Chris B]

Sounds like Sony just haven't worked out how to do it properly....

[Paul LS]

Hi Chris, here is a comparsion of Vegas Pro v Premiere Pro render times when just using the CPU and when using the GPU.

Exporting AVCHD clip with picture-in-picture effect:
- Sony AVC (1440x1080, Dolby Stereo, TS): CPU: 2:11, GPU: 1:50
- PPro H.264 (1440x1080, Dolby Stereo, TS): CPU: 2:20, GPU: 0:45

Huge improvement for PPro when the GPU kicks in to render the PIP effect. Although Vegas and PPro take about the same time to render the effect with CPU.

[Steve Grisetti]

And I would recommend springing for the Platinum version in any event. A couple of very nice added features for just a few more dollars.
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/mov ... pe/compare

[Chris B]

It was always at least Platinum. I've got Studio 10 Production Suite right now - the question is whether I spend $60 upgrading to 11 Platinum or $77 to V11 production suite - Given I've already got the other packages is there anything there that's worth the extra $17. The "newblue titler" seems the only thing that might be of interest - hence the question about it since I can't find any info right now.

[Steve Grisetti]

Aside from the updated program, you don't get anything more by upgrading the entire production suite.

If you've already got a previous version of the production suite, I'd just upgrade the program itself to 11 Platinum.

[George Tyndall]

Hi Chris, here is a comparsion of Vegas Pro v Premiere Pro render times when just using the CPU and when using the GPU.

Exporting AVCHD clip with picture-in-picture effect:
- Sony AVC (1440x1080, Dolby Stereo, TS): CPU: 2:11, GPU: 1:50
- PPro H.264 (1440x1080, Dolby Stereo, TS): CPU: 2:20, GPU: 0:45

Huge improvement for PPro when the GPU kicks in to render the PIP effect. Although Vegas and PPro take about the same time to render the effect with CPU.

Paul LS, does it follow from your results that, if I was to move from PRE7 to PPro and perform the well-known "hack" on my existing GPU, the result would be a decrease in rendering time to about 76 percent (185/241 seconds)?

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

................if I was to move from PRE7 to PPro and perform the well-known "hack" on my existing GPU, the result would be a decrease in rendering time................

Using the hack on my graphics card caused system instability and lockups when using PPro so I removed the hack.

[Paul LS]

Infact the figures I quoted above are with my older GTX 260 card, the same as you have in your signiture. So yes you should get a significant reduction in render times.