Vegas & Vista

I called Sony today: Vegas 8.0 will work with Vista, but they don't have an estimate of when it will be out. Vegas 7.0 is missing some features when run on Vista, but apparently it still runs (cite):

Sony Vegas 7.0 Vegas+DVD

Sony Vegas hasn't been patched for Vista yet and some features don't function. The media manager, for example, relies on MSDE (SQL 2000 Lite) and MSDE no longer runs in Vista. Losing the Vegas media manager is not very debilitating, and in fact, the new features in the Vista file browser make it preferable to the media manager.

The trimmer panel no longer functioned. I was still able to trim in the track view, but the trimmer has tools for slicing up footage in an efficient manner. As a workaround, I pulled my b-roll footage into a new Vegas project, cut it up in there, and then used Edit / Copy and then Edit / Past to move the clips between the b-roll project and the other projects in the production. Not as easy as using the trimmer, but better than having to drag around 20 minutes of B-roll in the same place as a 4 minute segment.

Another function that didn't work was capture. In XP Vegas can capture HD Mpeg2 streams and standard DV streams without trouble. In Vista, I couldn't load the XP-only JVC GR-HD1 drivers so MPEG2 was out of the question, and for some reason the standard DV capture would just terminate as soon as it started in Vegas. In the end I had to resort to the VT[4] to do my b-roll tape capture. The studio capture was already done direct to disk using the VT[4], so it wasn't much of a hassle. I did test Vista's Movie Maker. It captures DV just fine but you can't control what codec is used and it's a pretty limited tool as well. So, there are options in Vista but you might want to keep an XP box around if you need to rip video from your tapes.

Sony Vegas’s performance and stability under Vista was just great. For the music video I did a 10 layer composite at one point with motion and optical blur and I thought that if anything threw a wrench, this would. It trundled along (pretty fast because of the quad cores) and I was good to go. This is what you would hope for from your old XP NLE and it remained true in the shiny new Vista one. So while some auxiliary features were missing, the core functions of Vegas are still there.

See also Creative Cow thread.