ScorpioProd
07-01-2007, 12:13 AM
OK, I've been using SpeedEDIT and Vegas 7 since the beginning of the year, time to post some comparisons. There are certain advantages and disadvantages to each of course, and I will point out what I've found. I definately feel fluent enough in both to post on this topic, and I hope you all find it helpful.
The best way to showcase the differences is to talk about two projects I've done in the last week, one in SpeedEDIT and one in Vegas 7. Basically, I am currently doing about half my projects with SpeedEDIT and half with Vegas 7.
This week I had a week long conference to do for GE, I had to shoot about 25 hours of video during the course of the week, AND have a 15 minute highlight recap ready for Friday morning.
I chose SpeedEDIT for this project. One of the main reasons being, having used VT-EDIT and SpeedEDIT for so long, I knew I could use it even when half asleep, like I knew I would be during the nights of this project, which was my only time to edit.
Obviously no time to transfer 24 hours of video from tape to the computer, next time I'll have solid state or optical disc media. So, lots of scanning the tapes looking for interesting stuff and capturing it into SpeedEDIT, all DVCAM and DV format.
Opening fancy titles made with Bob Tasa's Oasis and Mirage. Used some multiple crawling words on the screen at once, offset in start and end times and position, fading and blurring in and out at the beginning and end, all VERY easy to do in SpeedEDIT. Simple backgrounds and still pictures all in PNG format, just a little bigger than video resolution. I always batch scale them with IrfanView. SpeedEDIT automatically knew their aspect ratios, of course.
For part of it I needed the stop sign on a slide on a screen in the video to pop out and come full screen. So, I captured the still, took it to Mirage, cut the stop sign out of the slide, scaled the brush up, stamped it, and then recreated it with Mirage using the original as my template. Then I saved that out, brought it into SpeedEDIT, and the I animated it so that that clip starts with it over the actual stop sign on the slide, and then rapidly expands to full screen and just as rapidly to back on the slide in size and position, all with automatic ease in/ease out in SpeedEDIT. It was very quick and easy to set up and very effective to what I wanted to achieve.
Music Bakery "Motivation" theme music was used under the whole project, it took about 3.5 full songs. There were some video clips with sound bites, but mostly just music. Anyway, I put it all together, then rendered it out to DV so I could get it to TMPGENc and then through DVD Workshop 2 and RecordNOW Max 4.5 onto a DVD. Very tight time on getting it all done, but this worked out, as it always seems to.
Overall, SpeedEDIT worked great for this job, and I'm happy I chose it. It did live up to its name in what I needed to do.
But, was it perfect, no, it wasn't. I did hit two problems. The first was that I had to render to DV to get it to TMPGEnc. Because it was a short-form project for me, this was acceptable. For long-form projects, it would not be, as shown in my next project.
The other problem I hit is frankly even more serious, because I can't group or lock clips in SpeedEDIT, at some point I inadvertantly moved my first background music track 10 seconds further than I wanted it. I then set all my other tracks relative to it. I never caught this till I watched the DVD, there wasn't time to fix it, so I let it go, since luckily an opening voice over was happening at that point, though I will fix it for the final final version. This is simply a BAD deficiency not having the ability to prevent this in SpeedEDIT, and I just don't understand why we can't do this. This is bad.
Now for the other project. The other project was a riddiculusly long dance recital. So long that it would be on two 2.5 hour DVDs. This I chose Vegas 7 for for two distinct reasons. First, even though the word "speed" isn't in Vegas name, this bread and butter type job would, without question, be much QUICKER in Vegas 7 than SpeedEDIT, since I don't have to render to DV before going to TMGPEnc.
The other reason is that Vegas 7 lets me GROUP my clips together, so what happened in the above project can't happen here. This is critical here since each DVD would have FORTY dances on it, all with a CG for each dance, and the fat taken out between dances. Also, I have to have TWO channels of audio, with one offset by 2 frames from the other to take care of speed of sound versus speed of light issues (shotgun at camera and sound board). In Vegas I simply set this up once, group the clips, and I am totally safe for my entire edit. There is no way to do this in SpeedEDIT. If you do this in SpeedEDIT, you better put a lot of markers on your clips, cause as soon as you put the first crossfade on the video with the "attached" audio clip, the other clip won't move and you'll be out of sync.
I made a fancy opening with Bob Tasa's Oasis and Mirage. Used some BackTraxx under that, then used the native CG in Vegas 7 and a BG still under it for each title. In previous years I had done the opening with India Pro CG, but nowadays I use Oasis more than it for this.
The regular CG is a change also, both Vegas 7 and SpeedEDIT make you do your CG on the fly, while with the old CG Designer in VT[4], I would have made up all my titles ahead of time and saved them as PNGs, ready to go. I'm surprised to find I don't really mind this change. And to make it easier, at the end of each song I would simply copy the background still and previous CG from the previous song, and then modify it. Very quick and easy in Vegas 7, and it would be in SpeedEDIT as well. Actually, I like the CG in SpeedEDIT better, it is more powerful. But I have gotten used to the Vegas 7 one and can use it if that's the better NLE for a particular project, as it was for this one.
I had to do a fancy pan and zoom on one of the dances, since a girl started puking and I really didn't want to put that in the video. So, using the pan/crop tool and keyframes, I easily set this up. I also set "smooth" for the keyframing to enable the equivalent of SpeedEDIT's ease in/ease out. I do wish that Vegas showed the actual graphs like SpeedEDIT does, but that's not how it is set up, but I can get used to it.
I set my audio levels, threw a soft limiter on my master bus just in case, and then used Satish's Debugmode FrameServer to serve the project directly to TMPGEnc. Authored in DVD Workshop 2 and burned with RecordNOW Max 4.5. The final product turned out fine.
So there you go, two different projects, and different reasons to pick each NLE.
The best way to showcase the differences is to talk about two projects I've done in the last week, one in SpeedEDIT and one in Vegas 7. Basically, I am currently doing about half my projects with SpeedEDIT and half with Vegas 7.
This week I had a week long conference to do for GE, I had to shoot about 25 hours of video during the course of the week, AND have a 15 minute highlight recap ready for Friday morning.
I chose SpeedEDIT for this project. One of the main reasons being, having used VT-EDIT and SpeedEDIT for so long, I knew I could use it even when half asleep, like I knew I would be during the nights of this project, which was my only time to edit.
Obviously no time to transfer 24 hours of video from tape to the computer, next time I'll have solid state or optical disc media. So, lots of scanning the tapes looking for interesting stuff and capturing it into SpeedEDIT, all DVCAM and DV format.
Opening fancy titles made with Bob Tasa's Oasis and Mirage. Used some multiple crawling words on the screen at once, offset in start and end times and position, fading and blurring in and out at the beginning and end, all VERY easy to do in SpeedEDIT. Simple backgrounds and still pictures all in PNG format, just a little bigger than video resolution. I always batch scale them with IrfanView. SpeedEDIT automatically knew their aspect ratios, of course.
For part of it I needed the stop sign on a slide on a screen in the video to pop out and come full screen. So, I captured the still, took it to Mirage, cut the stop sign out of the slide, scaled the brush up, stamped it, and then recreated it with Mirage using the original as my template. Then I saved that out, brought it into SpeedEDIT, and the I animated it so that that clip starts with it over the actual stop sign on the slide, and then rapidly expands to full screen and just as rapidly to back on the slide in size and position, all with automatic ease in/ease out in SpeedEDIT. It was very quick and easy to set up and very effective to what I wanted to achieve.
Music Bakery "Motivation" theme music was used under the whole project, it took about 3.5 full songs. There were some video clips with sound bites, but mostly just music. Anyway, I put it all together, then rendered it out to DV so I could get it to TMPGENc and then through DVD Workshop 2 and RecordNOW Max 4.5 onto a DVD. Very tight time on getting it all done, but this worked out, as it always seems to.
Overall, SpeedEDIT worked great for this job, and I'm happy I chose it. It did live up to its name in what I needed to do.
But, was it perfect, no, it wasn't. I did hit two problems. The first was that I had to render to DV to get it to TMPGEnc. Because it was a short-form project for me, this was acceptable. For long-form projects, it would not be, as shown in my next project.
The other problem I hit is frankly even more serious, because I can't group or lock clips in SpeedEDIT, at some point I inadvertantly moved my first background music track 10 seconds further than I wanted it. I then set all my other tracks relative to it. I never caught this till I watched the DVD, there wasn't time to fix it, so I let it go, since luckily an opening voice over was happening at that point, though I will fix it for the final final version. This is simply a BAD deficiency not having the ability to prevent this in SpeedEDIT, and I just don't understand why we can't do this. This is bad.
Now for the other project. The other project was a riddiculusly long dance recital. So long that it would be on two 2.5 hour DVDs. This I chose Vegas 7 for for two distinct reasons. First, even though the word "speed" isn't in Vegas name, this bread and butter type job would, without question, be much QUICKER in Vegas 7 than SpeedEDIT, since I don't have to render to DV before going to TMGPEnc.
The other reason is that Vegas 7 lets me GROUP my clips together, so what happened in the above project can't happen here. This is critical here since each DVD would have FORTY dances on it, all with a CG for each dance, and the fat taken out between dances. Also, I have to have TWO channels of audio, with one offset by 2 frames from the other to take care of speed of sound versus speed of light issues (shotgun at camera and sound board). In Vegas I simply set this up once, group the clips, and I am totally safe for my entire edit. There is no way to do this in SpeedEDIT. If you do this in SpeedEDIT, you better put a lot of markers on your clips, cause as soon as you put the first crossfade on the video with the "attached" audio clip, the other clip won't move and you'll be out of sync.
I made a fancy opening with Bob Tasa's Oasis and Mirage. Used some BackTraxx under that, then used the native CG in Vegas 7 and a BG still under it for each title. In previous years I had done the opening with India Pro CG, but nowadays I use Oasis more than it for this.
The regular CG is a change also, both Vegas 7 and SpeedEDIT make you do your CG on the fly, while with the old CG Designer in VT[4], I would have made up all my titles ahead of time and saved them as PNGs, ready to go. I'm surprised to find I don't really mind this change. And to make it easier, at the end of each song I would simply copy the background still and previous CG from the previous song, and then modify it. Very quick and easy in Vegas 7, and it would be in SpeedEDIT as well. Actually, I like the CG in SpeedEDIT better, it is more powerful. But I have gotten used to the Vegas 7 one and can use it if that's the better NLE for a particular project, as it was for this one.
I had to do a fancy pan and zoom on one of the dances, since a girl started puking and I really didn't want to put that in the video. So, using the pan/crop tool and keyframes, I easily set this up. I also set "smooth" for the keyframing to enable the equivalent of SpeedEDIT's ease in/ease out. I do wish that Vegas showed the actual graphs like SpeedEDIT does, but that's not how it is set up, but I can get used to it.
I set my audio levels, threw a soft limiter on my master bus just in case, and then used Satish's Debugmode FrameServer to serve the project directly to TMPGEnc. Authored in DVD Workshop 2 and burned with RecordNOW Max 4.5. The final product turned out fine.
So there you go, two different projects, and different reasons to pick each NLE.