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).
