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Section :: software

- Format For Printing...

Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 11 / Production Suite

Video Editing Package
Friday 11 November 2011.
 

$94.95, £59.95 (standard) / $124.95, £79.95 (production suite)
Sony Creative Software http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegassoftware

I’ve been using Vegas Movie Studio HSD Platinum for a few weeks now and to say that I’m impressed would be to do it an injustice. In this price bracket it is, quite simply, a stunning piece of software.

Vegas - edit video and audio and add text and effects

If you’ve ever used any timeline-based video or animation software, you’ll feel right at home with Vegas. Fundamentally its user interface comprises a set of timelines for videos and audio and you just import clips into them, edit and produce. Clips can be moved around on a timeline or cut and pasted using the mouse.

There are a good number of ready-to-use transitions that blend one clip into another using everything from simple fades to quite fancy animated effects such as ‘clock wipes’, ‘barn doors’ and gradient wipes. The transitions can be dragged straight out of a panel onto a timeline. Other panels provide quick access to video effects such as lens flares and colour corrections; there are also various animated text effects to jazz up titles and annotations.

The text animation is surprisingly powerful. Not only can you select ready-to-run effects such as moving, bouncing and zooming text but you can also edit the parameter of the text animation one by one using an effects dialog with its own key-framed timeline. This makes it possible to animate glows and colour changes, movement and resizing with a high degree of control.

The user interface provides a number of timelines as standard and you can right-click and make a menu selection to add, delete or duplicate tracks. It’s also easy to group and ungroup tracks so that when you cut or resize one track any other grouped tricks will also be cut and resized. This is useful if, for example, you import a separate audio track that you want synchronized with the video. I do that all the time. I record narration straight to computer using a good quality microphone while I record the video onto the camera. When I download the video onto the computer the first thing I do is group my separately recorded narration with the video track, matching its waveform to the lower-quality audio track that was recorded by the camera. Then I ungroup the camera’s audio track and delete it. Finally, I group the high quality audio track with the video so that the two tracks now work as a single unit.

There are a few things I’m less enthusiastic about in Vegas. For example, I find its Pan and Crop controls a bit awkward to use. When you want to alter the size or position of a clip, you have to do so in a popup editing window. This has its own mini timeline but synchronizing it precisely with the main timeline can take some trial and error. What’s more, when I try to Maximize the window (I’d really like to dock it full-screen on my second monitor), it maximizes to some arbitrary size, rather than to full screen.

Another thing I find harder to do than seems entirely necessary is the video rendering. The real problem here is that there are so many choices – dozens of presets with different output formats and frame-rates – but very little in the way of guidance as to which one will produces the smallest videos for online use, the highest quality for DVD use and so on. I must say that my best efforts to optimize video for online viewing still end up producing huge videos – hundreds of megabytes for just a few minutes. I know these can be compressed because, once uploaded to an online video service such as YouTube, the videos are reprocessed and squashed down to a fraction of the original upload size. In only wish I could find an appropriate rendering option to compress them that much before uploading!

To Zoom and Pan you have to work on a timeline in a separate window

If you buy the Production Suite Edition of Vegas 11, you’ll receive a bundle of other software products including DVD Architect Studio which is dedicated to burning your videos to DVD or Blu-Ray, and Sound Forge Audio Studio which is an audio recording and editing package. Sound Forge lets you create audio files from one or more tracks and perform editing tasks such as cutting, copying, pasting, stretching and reversing. It also has a number of ready-to use effects – for example, to add reverbs and tremolos.

The package includes a disk of video tutorials for newcomers to the software and there is also a neat interactive help system that guides you through the use of the software’s functions by highlighting windows and menu items, one step at a time, and providing instructions on what the user needs to do to accomplish specific tasks.

In short, this is a remarkably powerful and serious tool for video editing in this price range. It goes way beyond the capabilities of something such as Corel’s similarly-priced Video Studio, for example, though the downside of this is that it is not – initially anyway – as easy to use. If you need a powerful software suite for producing videos for viewing from disc or online, Movie Studio HD Platinum, would be a great choice.

If you want even more features Vegas Pro 11 (at $599.95/£495) has additional lighting effects, supports higher resolutions and provides built-in scripting. At the other end of the scale, the entry level edition omits some features such as stereoscopic editing and 5.1 sound support, but it costs a very reasonable $44.95 (£29.50).

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