Digital Home Thoughts: Sony Releases Vegas Video 9

"The Vegas Pro 9 collection integrates two powerful applications that work seamlessly together to provide an efficient and intuitive environment for video and broadcast professionals. This comprehensive suite offers the most robust and progressive platform available for content creation and production. With broad format support, superior effects processing, unparalleled audio support, and a full complement of editorial tools, the Vegas Pro 9 collection streamlines your workflow. From acquisition to delivery, from camera to Blu-ray Disc, the Vegas Pro 9 collection delivers exactly what you need to produce outstanding results."

The big updates with this new version of Vegas seem to be related to supporting newer video formats - specifically XDCAM EX and RED. Support for still images greater than one gigapixel in resolution has also been added - why you'd need something so impressive sounding is beyond me, but this is serious video editing software at $599 USD. What I was hoping to see - really, really hoping to see - what hardware acceleration, specifically of the NVIDIA CUDA variety.

NVIDIA has been beating their chest lately about all these "great" CUDA-accelerated software applications, but they're missing one very important piece of the puzzle: a real video editing suite. CUDA is a powerful advantage in the speed department, but so far Sony, Adobe, Pinnacle, or any other major video editing player has supported it in their applications - leaving the user with CPU-only video encoding, which no matter how fast your CPU, just isn't fast enough.