Long time Velocity user here (still use 2 VelocityQ's on an almost daily basis). We've pulled our hair out trying to transition to other NLE for HD editing. Have Premiere CS5.5 (despise it); Vegas 10 (like it but freelancers don't know it); demo'd AVID (much improved but too big a learning curve) demo'd Lightworks Open Source (promising but still too early in development for prime time work), IVSedits...etc.
Long story short, I bugged Harris for weeks and finally got a demo of VelocityXNG, their standalone software HD editing system. Low and behold it works very well! We bought a license last week ($1995 but I "negotiated" a 25% discount since we've used their products since 1999) and I'm editing a project on it now. Works exactly like Velocity10 except project management is different. Very stable...only crashes I've had are in trying to import unsupported file formats. Have edited for about 20 hours with it and no problems with supported formats.
We're editing using an Apace vStor shared storage system and I'm editing full1080i HD using native MTS files from a Panasonic AF100 and .mov files from a Canon 60D transcoded to LXF format (LXF is native format for Velocity software editing systems).
I get 2 channels of real-time video with simple transitions, a couple of real-time graphic tracks and some DVE effects are real-time. Rendering is really fast on our i7 Intel system....and best of all, our Blackmagic HD 3D Extreme spouts out full-resolution HD video via HDMI and audio to speakers! It performs much better than Premiere using the same Blackmagic hardware and at least equal to Vegas. VelocityXNG has AE integration much like Premiere, although mine isn't working correctly at the moment. Harris tech support has been helping to fix it as it works on most systems. They duplicated my error on one of their systems so they're making progress on that. In fact, support has been exceptionally good,especially considering how bad they had gotten a few years ago.
Best of all is that there is essentially NO learning curve, other than figuring out what video formats give the best performance. VelocityXNG HATES Blackmagic formats, which is surprising considering it can make use of the NTSC and audio outs as well as the SDI inputs for capturing. It supports P2, XDCAM HD, MTS and probably 15 other formats quite well. Rendering is to their native LTV wrapper,but it uses the codec based on your timeline settings. So it might render to H.264 but wrap it in the LTV wrapper...or render to MPEG2 i-frame and wrap etc. It natively reads DPS/DVA and LTV/LTA files, so we can bring all our existingcaptured clips into it as well.
Anyway...thought I'd let folks know you can still use Velocity via software and get playout via Blackmagic hardware, and get full HD with at least as much real-time functionality as Premiere or Vegas or Avid or other systems. Matrox bases systems probably have more real-time functionality, but I dislike Matrox products.
Last...there is an update to Velocity10 (for VelocityQ) on the Harris BCD website. It's mislabed as "VelocityQ HD upgrade"..but I downloaded and installed it on one of our VelocityQ systems and it updated fine and fixed a handful of the quirky things in Velocity10, like the audio problem with Quicktime files.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
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