With Liquid near or at its EOL I'm not sure if this is a good time to upgrade or not.  I started with Studio 7, went through various patches, then upgraded to Studio 8.  When Studio 9 was at EOL I upgraded to it just before 10 came out.  Then I moved to 10.5 just before 11 was released.

After my early Studio 7 experience I like to wait until the bugs get shaken out, so I've been waiting until near EOL to upgrade.  If I follow that pattern then now is good time to move to Liquid.

I'm now outgrowing Studio and and trying to decide where to go next. I've been shooting some wedding videos, some small corporate promo pieces, some seminars for a landscape designer, etc.  Shoots are 2 camera SD often with an additional audio track.  Three camera shoots are likely in the near future but until I move beyond Studio I can't contemplate that. I doubt I'll be shooting HD this year, but next year is a distinct possibility.

I could stay with Studio another year or so until NextGen is out and proven, or I could go to Liquid now.  What do think I should do?

If you feel that you need more than Studio can offer, move up now.  If you wait for the latest and greatest, you will be stuck in limbo as this technology keeps advancing to something new fairly frequently.  Liquid 7.2 is very solid and well proven.  Although the name a[[ears to be EOL, the NLE application will be renamed (call it NextGen for now) and rewritten to take new OS and hardware technology into account.  The new version (NextGen, probably version 8.0) will be released in 2009 and it will take some time to work out the bugs it, as it always does in any X.0 release of software.  Don't forget that Studio 11 is also EOL and in June you will be faced with Studio 12 (or whatever name) and all its X.0 bugs as well.

My suggestion would be to upgrade now to Liquid 7.2 and worry about NextGen 8,0 when it shows its ugly head.

Upgradenow.  But be sure to get one of the tutorials that are available.  I have Adita, which is a little out of date and Creationtrek.com offers an excellent tutorial by Paul Mitton.

Liquid is not very intuitive, but it is enough like Studio that you should be able to dive right in and get thru the learning curve rapidly. 

One thing I can say for sure is that if you learn Liquid well, almost nothing will be able to replace it.

I am watching tutorials of MC and I am starting to miss Liquid.

Liquid's timeline trimming, you can find nowhere. 

shambels:

Liquid is not very intuitive

For me I can't find anything to replace its futures and speed.

And to correct you Studio is like Liquid not the other way around but it's just me.
 

George,

Studio was here before Pinnacle bought FAST, which eventually became Liquid, so it actually really is that Liquid is like Studio!  However, I understand what you are saying, and I agree with that.

I mean that Studio has based on Liquid's engine not the other way around but I don't think this is important anymore.

 

OK, so far it sounds like this would be a good time to upgrade if I can justify it.

And, although there is a NextGen down the road, it is far enough away that I shouldn't concern myself.

A while ago someone asked me to do a specific effect in Studio and I couldn't find a way to do it; I'm wondering if I could do it in Liquid.  He wanted me to crop a slice, half the width of the frame, out of each of two different clips (different camera angles of the same event) and have them become the left and right sides of the resulting image.  The trick was that the position of the cropped slice would have to move (key frames?) to follow the action and keep it in the half frame.  Could Liquid do this?

I've downloaded the free Liquid trial to see what I might be facing.  Long ago (I think I had Studio 8 at the time) I sat through a half-day presentation on the pre-Liquid Edition and remember being quite impressed ... and more than a little overhwelmed. However I've come a long way from then.

Thanks for all the feedback and keep it coming!

All I can say is that will be again difficult to find a better NLE that can handle 3D soooo easy.

The 2D/3D editor is a very sweet spot on Liquid. And keyframes works for me very good.

Yes, with enough patience to create the keyframes, you could easily do that. It depends on how much movement there is in each frame. Liquid has very powerful 2D and 3D editors.

Bill, before you make the leap, why not post detailed specifications for you system so that we can tell you if there are any gotchas to watch for?

Not at the full asking price. it is not even offered on the front page of videoguys site anymore.
A review of your system specs will help determine the proper path.

Like many others here, I have used several different editing systems. For me, it started with the Amiga and the Video Toaster and wonderful A/B roll editing. I learned that and had a great time with the Amiga with it's wonderful programs and of course with Newtek's Video Toaster. We Amigans were WAY ahead of everyone else at that time. But time marched on, and the Amiga didn't (sob!). So, I went PC and NLE with DPS Editbay, then Matrox RT2500, Pinnacle DV500Plus, Edition 5.5 to now AL 7.2.  I had to learn each one of  these. And, like others, in the future, will have to learn another NLE. I will look around and see what is available and what my needs are. Right now, Studio 11 Ultimate and Liquid work for me, and for the foreseeable future. But, there will come a time when I will have to move to something else. And I will look at what is available on the market at that time. I will look at NextGen real hard. Hopefully, they will offer it to us users at a discounted price. If not, the comparisons begin. While I have been happy with Pinnacle for a long time, I have to go with what works for me and meets my needs.

Good point.  I have a well cooled P4 3GHZ Hyperthreaded with 1GB DDR2 dual channel ram running XP Pro SP2, an ATI X1650 AGP 8X video card with 512MB and lots of SATA (one drive for the system and another for video) and some EIDE drive space for video because I've only got 2 SATA ports, CD R/W and a DVD burner.  It is a bit behind the curve of the dual and now quad cores, but it gets the job done ... so far.  Obviously I should add another 1GB ram if I contemplate running a more demanding NLE.

The system is used almost exclusively for video editting.

Any gotchas?

What about at the Studio to Liquid upgrade price ($300)?

See above for system specs.

Fair for SD underpowered for HD. most 7.2 users run 2 gigram
Time for a new box if HD is on your horizon.

$299 is fair for the software today, do you have some means of outputting to a monitor such as the moviebox?

I agree with TVJohn. You system is fine for SD (I'd also recommend bumping it to 2GB RAM).

For HD - no. You won't find the system fast enough (really, it's the AGP port that's your biggest problem there). Otherwise, it looks like your system should be fine with Liquid.

LewS:

Yes, with enough patience to create the keyframes, you could easily do that. It depends on how much movement there is in each frame. Liquid has very powerful 2D and 3D editors.

Thanks Lew, that is good to know if something like that ever comes up again. When the idea was described to me I had a complete artistic vision of how the result would look and it was extremely frustrating to discover that I didn't have the tools to pull it off.

Thanks TVJohn and Steve.  I suspected I'd be OK for SD since Studio 10.5 is built on the Liquid engine and runs adequately for me. When I go to HD I know I'll have to upgrade my system.

I don't know that I'd say HD is on my horizon or if I did I'd call it a distant horizon.  I don't anticipate being able to make that jump until at least late 2009, over a year from now. First I have to recover from my last major purchase; I bought my wife a B&B this spring.

TVJohn:

$299 is fair for the software today, do you have some means of outputting to a monitor such as the moviebox?

I don't suppose that Liquid can use the old Studio AV/DV card? The painful way would be to render (fuse?) to an AVI, import it into Studio then output it from there. Not very useful to quickly see how the project looks in the middle of editting.

To be honest, I would hold off and wait until a definite answer to the DX10 crisis has been answered one way or the other. Right now Liquid can only fully handle (and is only certified for) the older DX9 video cards. $300 is a fair price for liquid provided they get a DX10 patch out. If a dx10 patch is put out then Liquid is SOMEWHAT future proof and the machine that you are running won't hold you back from running other newer programs that are now asking for dx10 cards. $300 is NOT a fair price (IMO) if you have to set up another older computer just to run liquid

There are reports in other postings here that people are able to work with Liquid and DX10 cards by lowering the hardware acceleration of the cards by 1 notch. You do have to re-render any existing media. Newly rendered media don't have the green flashes.

Please note that no one's done a comprehensive test on this yet with multiple cards, but if you have a DX10 card you can give it a try. 

Bob, AFAIK my card is DX9 (it is at home and I'm at my day job) so that won't be a problem for some time.  By then either the DX10 issue will be solved for Liquid or NextGen would be out and stable enough for my consideration.

And, as DStone notes, there may be a work-around for the current software.

Bill, just go ahead and do it. There is no good reason not too. Ignore the usual naysayers here. Also, buying Liquid now may allow you even greater opportunities in the future with several upgrade paths. But, I would not wait too long.