Raylight Ultra and Sony Vegas 9 – A Consumer Review
Raylight Ultra has been released by DVFilm as the successor to Raylight. DVFilm still supports Raylight, but development efforts in the future will be focused on Raylight Ultra. The core functionality of Raylight, and now Ultra, is coding and decoding MXF files. They do, however, both include the Raylight Plug-in for Sony Vegas: RayMaker, for converting MXF files to AVI, P2 Maker, for converting Raylight AVI to MXF, and also a control panel for working with the Raylight codec.
The best new feature in Raylight Ultra is a great improvement in performance. You should now be able to do real-time editing, with visual fidelity and smooth playback. Before Ultra, you would have to choose between either having smooth playback or full-resolution preview – to see proper full-res playback, the project would have to be rendered. The improved performance of Ultra allows you to preview on the timeline and have the best of both worlds.
This also means that there are now only two editing modes, instead of four. There is still a Raylight Red mode (Low Res Proxy) which allows real-time editing even on a project that’s very demanding or a machine that’s much slower – albeit with an image that significantly degraded.