NLE's, looking for opinions of current offerings

[JCook]

Hi all,

I recently put together a new I7 series video editing PC. I have separate system, source and destination SATA drives, 12GB of tri-channel RAM and a GTX460 NVidia graphics card, basically everything a growing boy needs to get up and going with a new PC.

I've a question regarding current state of NLEs from the different vendors. I know some of you like Final Cut Pro, some Vegas some Premiere Suite etc...without breaking the bank what's the best offering out there today that'll utilize the graphics card to offload timeline previrews etc from the CPU?

I've dug around a bit and have read the Premiere CS appears to offload the most to the graphics card but wonder if any of you have used the current Vegas, Pinnacle etc and how well did they work?

For the record I don't do a lot of special affects etc, mostly straight up editing with sound cuts and then offload to a DVD/Bluray creation package. My current system is a mixed bag of 3-4 year old Premiere NLE and Vegas movie suite. It all works well enough but I'm ready to step up to current technology and would like something that can utilize the graphics card during NLE timeline creation.

Regards, John

[MoonstruckProductions]

I've been pretty happy with the new Vegas Pro 10. Still makes use of all the processing power and ram you can throw at it and now it uses NVIDIA CUDA video cards to cut AVCHD codec render times big time. I'm also able to play and edit AVCHD files (quicktime files from Canon 7D, 5D and Nikon D7000) natively.

Premiere is also offering a similar AVCHD file playback compatability but I think it costs a bit more than Vegas.

Just my $0.02.

-Scott

[JCook]

Thanks, I'd read that as well about V10 using the card for MPEG4 related conversions.

It appears that I just missed the boat, Sony had an upgrade sale on V10 for half price through Feb 28th...Snooze you lose. 8O Maybe they'll reopen their sale again soon.

Are there any rumors to a release 11 in the near term? One can surmise that a 50% upgrade special may be the last chance blow out to sell the current product prior to the next release.

[Daniel]

Hello,

There is also the software Quantel Pablo PA; that can be downloaded for a month as trial.

minimum PC spec for running Pablo PA is :

Quad Core i7 2.0 GHz
4 GB Dual Channel memory
Direct X9 Graphics inc Pixel Shader 2.0 in hardware min 1920 x 1080 res (must be Windows 7 compliant including the driver)
1 x 7200rpm SATA or SAS Drive.
Windows compatible sound card
1000baseT.
Keyboard, mouse and 17 inch monitor (1920x1080 minimum)
Windows 7 64bit Professional

Best regards,
Daniel Henriquez Ilic

[ewanuno]

be sure to check out Lightworks, which is a big pro level NLE thats going open source, you can download a fully functioning copy Free from the website.

i didn't use it for anything serious yet, but its looking pretty good.

http://www.lightworksbeta.com/

ewan.

[Tscan]

That is going to be one screaming system. I have a new i5 with Vegas 10pro and it renders like a hot knife through butter. I'm only running a 32bit OS right now too, for Velocity HD. I've been using Vegas since version 4.0 and it has been a powerful tool. Excellent grading tools, handles various codecs very nicely, really user friendly. I've always taken advantage of special offers when upgrading to the latest versions.

[miles&jules]

Premiere cs5 is good.

But depending on your motherboard you may be able to turn your monster pc into a monster hackintosh. That way you can use FCP which I beleive is more stable than prem. But coming from a pc background I am a bit faster at editing premiere. I've been using the same configuration for over a year and it never crashes.

My board is a Gigabyte ep45-ds4
Just a thought.
Miles

[Charlie Blackfield]

I recently edited a very complex music video (see http://vimeo.com/21772435). I tried to do it on Final Cut Express HD, and, generally speaking, I find Macs a lot more reliable and less prone to crashing than PCs. However, on this occasion, Final Cut played havoc with the clips on the timeline whenever I inserted another clip that I wanted to be layered upon the rest of the footage. I talked to a friend of mine who has a lot of experience with editing in Final Cut Pro, and even he couldn't offer a satisfactory solution to this problem (not even one that would have worked in Final Cut Pro as opposed to Final Cut Express). So in the end, I resorted to editing the video (well, entirely film-based 'video', I hasten to add) on my ancient PC running Adobe Premiere 6 with a Pinnacle DVD500 capture card. It worked a treat, except for the fact that the equally ancient graphic card was a bit overwhelmed, which resulted in about 20 digitally artefracted frames that I had to painstakingly fix afterwards. Even so, it was a smoother workflow than it would have been in Final Cut.

Charlie

[Uppsala BildTeknik]

If you can wait until June, the new Final Cut Pro X will be released for a crazy-low price of $299...