Two of the underdogs of editing (compared to Final Cut Pro and Avid) wasted no time in unveiling new versions of their video offerings Monday at NAB. First of all, let’s just take a basic overhead view two of the announcements:

Sony Vegas Pro 9

Sony Vegas announced Vegas Pro 9.0d at NAB with a few new features. Multi-layer PSD support (with support for manipulating individual layers within Vegas, which is pretty cool), closed captioning support, more device support, and a burn to DVD from timeline feature.

Adobe Premiere Pro CS5

I have to admit that I am not a Premiere fan. It was my first serious NLE that I used, but I floated over to FCP and never looked back. However, Monday Adobe showed off the CS5 versions of its video lineup (which includes Premiere, After Effects, and all the little tagalong Adobe apps like Media Encoder, blah blah) and turned some heads, including mine.

First of all, Premiere Pro uses Adobe’s much-touted Mercury technology, which boasts “amazingly fluid” realtime editing of clips snagged right off of your Canon 5D or 7D (to name a few). It’s also only 64 bit – no 32 bit machines allowed. And if you have the right graphics processor, you can gain some significant speed advantages in rendering and playback by using your GPU over your CPU. This, when FCP is still dancing around Open-CL is a little distressing to FCP users. At least, of course, until Apple decides to let us know the next steps for Final Cut Pro (fingers crossed).

Some other cool features involve being able to share assets with FCP and Avid. Some are yawners like being able to easily export a still frame from the timeline, but there are some useful things like a tool that sniffs out gaps in your timeline. Of course, the real news is in the whole structure of the program, not some of the feature bells and whistles.

Moving Away From Features and Towards Platform

I think what we’re seeing now is a great emphasis on the platform for editing, and less on the specific features. This has of course been the case for a while, but the emphasis on workflow so far at NAB really works it in for me. Less talk about what you can do with the program on a feature level, and more about how you can create a very smooth workflow quickly and easily.

Why? We already know what a NLE can do. Every editor uses the same tool: cutting shots together to make a compelling piece. Yeah, a gap sniffer is cool, but what we are looking for now is Minority-Report style ease of getting footage in and footage out. Mercury and 64 bit is a huge step forward for Premiere Pro in that regard, and I hope that Apple follows suit.

No More Tape

There is very obviously no room for tape in the vision for NLE editing. Sitting down and capturing your HDV tape is a huge time waster when you can slide in your Canon 7D footage right onto the timeline. Makers like ARRI are even showing FCP some love by supporting Apple’s ProRes codecs.

So again, this has been the case for a while, but Monday at NAB shows just how far into the tapeless world that we are. All the exciting stuff is workflow-oriented.

Hopefully there is more great stuff coming up for the rest of the week!