a new opinion in Software about Sony Vegas Pro 10

Advantages: Really sleek, can make good effects, easy to use compared to its competitors

I'll admit it, after a reasonable amount of time of being told that Apple Macintosh systems were better for video editing, my Windows-defending self-decided to enter the world of video editing. That's right, you guessed it. Sony Vegas 10 Pro is a video editing software for Microsoft Windows.

==My History of Video Editing Products==

I didn't just go and drop ?500 on Sony Vegas Pro out of the absolute blue, I had a variety of other tools that I tried first, of complexity that ascended overtime. At first, I tried Windows Movie Maker, a buggy program that refuses to stay open without crashing and is infuriatingly difficult to work with, despite its simple interface. The end results weren't even that good, and it couldn't save in HD at time of use, so I decided that I would move on, inspired to create.

The next tool that I used was VideoPad Video Editor - it was better than Windows Movie Maker and had the option to save in Full HD, as well as having a few fancy effects to play around with, and limited picture in picture effects. It also worked very well with dual screens, leaving the program on the left screen and have the video you were editing on the right screen. However, I soon tired of its single-track editing system (single-track means that you can only have one video and one audio track playing at once, this can be all fine, but it wasn't up for my use). This software's download link can be found at the end of this review.

After this, I used Ulead VideoStudio, which is now - as far as I can tell, Corel VideoStudio, following the company's purchase of Ulead. This software was better, it had a ton more features as well as built in DVD and Blu-Ray authoring. However, rendering was slow, and although absolutely packed with features, the software didn't really agree with my computer at the time, and continually kept crashing.

From here I gave myself two choices, Premiere Pro, which I have heard has extremely high system requirements, and can absolutely ravage your computer for every last square inch of its power, and Sony Vegas, which appeared to be a little lightweight for the price. I went with Sony Vegas, as it was the least demanding of the two. I have never looked back.

==Ease of Use==

Despite the simple interface that is seen in Sony Vegas Pro 10, it is actually an astoundingly professional and powerful program. It is almost completely stable (unless you are importing files with odd video codecs (compression tools, to keep the file size down)) and its timeline is simple to look at and easy to use.

Sony Vegas also supports full surround sound audio, to make your videos, be it home movies or full-featured films, echo around your living room. The sound effects that you choose to put in (if you choose to put them in) can be placed around an intuitive diagram of the average surround sound living room, along with the video tracks audio. This makes it staggeringly easy to create videos with brilliant sound, and Ulead VideoStudio was the only application that even came close to having this powerful feature.

The interface will probably be confusing to anyone when they first start, there is a vast multitude of buttons, toolbars and windows all integrated into the main application. This is not exactly suited with beginners, and, like myself, you should try some more user-friendly video editing applications first, and you never know - they may actually fill your needs. However, with an aspiring video-professional, a few YouTube videos showcasing how the application works should be more than enough to get you up and ready.

After this point, Vegas is entirely fine, and easy to use. Sure you may need a tutorial once or twice on how to do an extremely complex effect, but after grasping the basics, you're pretty much good to go and enjoy its effects, transitions and superb, clean user interface. The Ease of Use of this products may not seem brilliant at first, but it definitely picks up.

==Ease of Installation==

When you get Sony Vegas, first you will be required to enter a serial key that comes with your product - after this, you will be prompted if you would like to Register Online (if your computer has an internet connection currently) or Register Offline, which allows you to register from another computer later. After this, you will have to perform a few authentication steps, followed closely by an Authentication Code. Once these are entered, your application is 100% ready to go, and you'll never need to worry about installation ever again. It's fluid, it's fast and its rarely ever problematic. Five out of five for the fluid installation, I think.

==Speed==

Sony Vegas isn't the fastest renderer, but the actual video editing component and video playback from within the application interface is super-smooth, rarely crashing or even freezing if you have anything more than a mediocre PC.

For the rendering, I put a fairly frenetic video of me playing HOMEFRONT video into the timeline. The video was 10 minutes long. Rendering with an Intel Core i7, 6GB of RAM and an ATi HD RADEON 4890 - the rendering took an hour for the WMV, and 30 minutes for the AVI. It was, however, not fully utilizing my RAM or the extensive amount of cores that my computer has. This is not a major problem, and it could even be ideal for computers with less RAM, but it does mean that you could be waiting a while for the software to churn your videos out - however, its much less time than other software, such as Adobe's Premiere Pro.

==Variety of Effects==

Sony Vegas has no lack of effects, in fact, it has a lot more effects than you're ever likely to use. These effects, combined with the absolutely massive amount of transitions helps your project feel unique, as the range of tools that are at your disposal is massive.
The flagship that comes with Sony Vegas is most certainly its green screen chroma-key effects, that generally work quite well with well-lit filming locations, but not so well without, as your camera will record the wall with graininess at a small scale, making it hard for the program to work with. The chroma-key tools are not available in any lower version of Sony Vegas, such as the Movie Studio incarnation of the product.

The other feature when it comes to the video and its effects that is included in Sony Vegas Pro but less so in the other incarnations is extensive use of video tracks. In Vegas Pro, you can have an unlimited number of video tracks, which, for a beginner probably means nothing, as they will probably only use one or two tracks, and have no need for the rest. However, if you are doing some high end editing, and mashing together multiple clips, it allows for multiple effects in one go without the migraine inducing complexity that other softwares impose when trying to do similar effects.

==Value for Money==

This is probably the hardest part of the review. Yes, the software is excellent and pretty much surpasses any other video editing software I have ever used (and I've participated in a lot of 30-day-trials), but at the same time - it also costs a lot of money. This could be seen as 'worth it' for a high-end video producer who needs to make his videos look excellent with astounding levels of detail and brilliant effects.

However, home users who want nothing to do with video editing apart from stitching together a few home movie clips should probably stay far away from Sony Vegas, as it is both highly overcomplicated for such a use and the expense is simply not worth it - unless you want a lot of special effects in your home movies, of course.

There is a 30-day-trial period that you can sign up for (and you can see the link in the 'references' at the bottom, if you wish to try it) that offers a fully featured copy of the program for thirty days, to allow you to see if you like it.

==Developer Support==

Some video-editing software is released and then largely left alone by the developers - despite occasionally application breaking bugs and insanely frustrating problems that could mean that you lose your hard work at any given moment. Sony Vegas is, for the most part, not one of them. The developers also update the software fairly regularly (there has been four versions of Sony Vegas 10, each fixing some major problems, including one that caused Sony Vegas to not boot up and required a reinstall to fix (infuriating, as it happened to me several times).

There is an auto-updating feature inside the application, meaning that applying the updates from the developers isn't massively tedious.

==Output File Formats==

The output file formats that the program can save into is totally dependant on what software you have installed. However, from a clean install of Windows 7 Home Premium, it can render to

*AVI
*MPEG
*Image Sequence (for example 30,000 .JPG images)
*MP4
*QuickTime (.mov)
*RealPlayer (.rm)
*WMV

This is a pretty reasonable list of renderable formats, and I generally only use AVI and WMV, depending on how long the video is, and whether or not I'm uploading the file to YouTube* or a similar video sharing site.

*Sony Vegas does not have built in facilities to upload to YouTube or any other video sharing site.

==Would I recommend the program?==

Yes, yes I would. However, it depends who it was that wanted to buy the software, as the capabilities of the program far surpass what some people need, and you don't want to be paying for the extra features that you don't need - certainly not at this price. If you want to do some high-end, multi-layered video editing with superb surround sound - then this is the product for you. However, if you just want to stick together some home movies and call it a day, stick with 'VideoPad Video Editor' (as referenced earlier) and call it a day.

==Links==

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/download/tria ls/vegaspro - Try Sony Vegas Pro 10.
http://www.nch.com.au/components/vpsetup.exe - VideoPad Video Editor (opens a download when clicked)

==Vegas System Requirements==

*Microsoft? Windows? XP 32-bit SP3, Windows Vista? 32-bit or 64-bit SP2, or Windows 7 32-bit or 64-bit
*2 GHz processor (multicore or multiprocessor CPU recommended for HD or stereoscopic 3D)
*400 MB hard-disk space for program installation
*1 GB RAM (2 GB recommended)
An estimate, any computer purchased in the past two years should certainly be fine with Sony Vegas Pro, but always check your system against the requirements before purchase.

==In Conclusion==

In conclusion, I most certainly would recommend this excellent piece of software to video editing maestros, but I certainly wouldn't hand it to someone with only a small goal who could do just as well with free software.

Summary: Excellent for video enthusiasts who don't mind dropping a fair bit of money.

Source: http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/multimedia/sony-vegas-pro-10/1568405/

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