When I first started in film, I was coming from a music production angle and could pretty much work on any DAW I wanted, since nothing ever left the program. I was blissfully unaware of the problems with FCP talking with some PC-based products. To make things worse, I'm invested in two of the most unfriendly pieces of software when it comes to playing with others - Sony Vegas and Adobe Audition. For a variety of reasons, I prefer PC over MAC and will continue to work off of PC-based software.
After searching tirelessly on the internet, I feel like these are my options:
- Continue working with what I have and risk appearing unprofessional when I can't import OMF files and can't export back out via OMF. Most little indie projects don't know any better and I can get away with pushing full tracks back to them. Sony Vegas 8 was fine bringing in AAF from FCP, but seems to have troubles exporting to AAF. I'm at v.9 now, so I may just have to find a FCP buddy to test with.
- Invest in new DAW software. Cubase 5 supports OMF, but not AAF and appears to be very unstable on the Windows platform. Sonar supports both, but I know nothing about it. Protools and Nuendo are expensive and I'd rather invest in production hardware than software at this point for ROI.
- Use Pro-Convert PC to take FCP projects or OMF and translate into Vegas formatted projects. Again, I don't know much about this product. I assume it's like the Automatic Duck for PC.
Questions, questions!
Am I just out of luck and need to either spend a lot of money, or continue to work at diminished capabilities?
Does anybody else use PC for their editing?
Is there any other way to work between FCP and Vegas? XML?
Thanks so much for the advice help!!
By the way, wiki had this great DAW comparison chart