SONY VEGAS: any reason to upgrade from v4.0 (?)

[jimcornetet]

Looking for you to share real-life experience here....

My video projects are strictly taking video off my Sony PDX10 3ccd dvcamera and creating a menu-based DVD to be played in Home Theater DVD players.

Is there any reason why I should consider upgrading to Vegas6 or Vegas7? Besides some quicker tools and prettier looking GUIs....is there any VIDEO QUALITY advantage to going from 4 to 6 or 7....when all I do is MainConcept mpeg2 that gets used in DVD Architect?

Is the MainConcept mpeg2 conversion the SAME in Vegas7 as it is in 4?
Is Vegas7's video capture off my camera thru firewire any better than 4?

[guns1inger]

Capture off firewire is little more than data transfer from one device to another. You could use WinDV and get the same results as you would from Vegas (in fact, many do just this because WinDV has such a low overhead).

If you use DVD architect for authoring then that might be the most compelling reason to upgrade. There are substantial improvements and bug fixes between the old DVD architect and version 4 which ships with the latest Vegas. Personally I find DVDA to be clucnky and unintuitive, but if you use it a lot, you should look at the features list for version4 as I am sure you will find several new tricks that will prick your interest.

Much of Vegas's improvements have been in the HD area, although there are general speed improvements. I don't use Vegas for encoding to mpeg-2 in most cases, but comments from some of the other Vegas users here suggest that there have been improvements to the quality of the MC encoder.

Bottom line - the best way to find out is to download the demo versions and have a look-see for yourself. Your needs may be modest enough that the upgrades aren't needed. Only you will know for sure.