Vegas Info

Sony Vegas is slightly different to your average editing application. You do not have the standard source and destination view, the timeline instead dominates. Clips, or events as they are called, can be dragged out well past their end and then will either loop or freeze depending on your preference. This type of features come from its original origins as a sound sequencing program. They are not necessarily bad things, just different to the norm, and you can, if you prefer, rearrange the screen to give you a standard source and destination view.

Capture

Vegas is not supported by any particular hardware. It works using standard OHCI and so the most you could add would be an analogue to digital converter. You capture using Sony’s own program which supports full batch capture/logging etc as you would expect with any program. The only time you will not use this is when capturing HDV footage.

Editing

Editing is similar to other programs - clips are arranged in the Media Pool (the project window in other programs), they can be viewed in the trimmer (clip window) although one difference is here you see the clip as a film strip with the complete sound waveform beneath it. You can either mark in and out points and drop the clips on the timeline or mark regions and then drag these regions to the timeline.

Once you get used to Vegas’ methodology editing is pretty similar to other programs - although the tracks in Vegas go in no particular order and you can end up with your sound and video on any track. One very useful feature is the ability to add video as takes - you can have 4 different takes of the same clip occupying the same place on the timeline and switch through them at the press of a button.

Effects

Vegas is excellent at effects. It was doing realtime effects out to FireWire long before any other program even thought of it. There are various quality settings and you can preview effects at low, auto, good or best quality, meaning that you can always choose a setting where you see something. Everything is realtime and the list of effects is huge and includes excellent primary and secondary colour correction, good quality motion paths, a nice titler, and wacky effects like old movie, TV simulation, lens flares and glows.

One area that Vegas is slightly different to other programs is 3D - Vegas actually has excellent 3D motion paths and can do more in 3D than most programs. You can move clips around in true 3D - so they can fly around each other, sometimes in front, sometimes behind, and create really stunning effects. On the other hand the 3D can only be applied on a track level - so that on a long project with various sections in 3D you would end up with lost of tracks! Vegas does get around this by supplying Boris Ltd with the program that can apply 3D effects at a clip level.

Vegas can apply keyframable mattes to clips, with edge feathering. This kind of feature is normally only available in programs like After Effects or Boris, but with Vegas it is built-in. You can use this for isolating an area of the screen, for example a person moving, and keying it onto another background. In the manual they are careful to state that if you want to do this properly you should use After Effects but in our own tests Vegas is up to most tasks. When it comes to keying Vegas is also excellent with results as good as Canopus Edius.

This list of useful effects is huge and all are thoroughly keyframable. It even has media generators which can create moving background textures - very handy for the background of a DVD menu.

Vegas also has keyframable slow motion, again previewable in realtime, and when rendered, due to Vegas subsampling, very smooth.
When it comes to the effects Vegas sometimes feels a bit like After Effects with a bit of editing thrown in, rather than an editing program with effects. What it lacks, and is crying out for, is the ability to nest effects within effects, like Premiere Pro and Liquid Edition can.

Another interesting feature is that you can use other machines on your network to render effects with Vegas, if you purchase additional licences.

Sound

As you might expect from the makers of Sound Forge the sound side of Vegas is excellent. The display of the sound waveform is accurate and once the “peak” file is written, takes no time at all to be updated as you zoom in or out. Vegas also supports proper surround sound mixing and, if you buy the bundle with DVD Architect, you get AC3 encoding for your DVDs built-in.

There is a large range of useful audio effects - although all have to be rendered. Vegas does do this very quickly when asked and automatically replaces the original clip with the new render on the timeline without any intervention. Vegas supports DirectX effects - it would be nice if it support VST plug-ins like most other programs but this does not happen at present.

Anther interesting sound fact is that Vegas, like Premiere Pro, edits down to the sample level as opposed to the frame level, so you can get much more accurate positioning of your sound effects.

DVD writing

DVD writing is best handled by Vegas’ companion program, DVD Architect. Architect can only bought in a bundle with Vegas and as such it adds AC3 encoding as well as a very competent authoring applications. It has a full set of features like Ulead DVD Workshop or Adobe Encore DVD, and you can have multiple menus, slide shows, video menus, subtitles, etc. as you would expect.

Uniquely at present DVD Architect previews your entire DVD through the FireWire connection including all moving menus, which will be played as fast as your machine can manage, and all video clips.

The MPEG files required can be created in Vegas, which has an excellent high quality two pass VBR encoder - using the same Main Concept engine as Encore and Workshop. Alternatively you can create them in Architect, although strangely this only has a single pass encoder. One nice feature in Architect is the Optimise DVD menu where you can specify the encoding settings for each video or you can specify some and tell Architect to fill the disc with the rest.

Architect is a great authoring program and the only reason more of our customers don’t use it is because you can only buy it in a bundle with Vegas and people may choose Premiere or Liquid as their chosen editor!

Architect integrates very well with Vegas. In Vegas you can enter chapter points which are carried over to Architect and you can type subtitles in the Vegas timeline and these too can be carried over to Architect. This make positioning subtitles much easier.

HDV Support

Vegas 6 can capture from HDV cameras using its own utility. When captured you then have to convert the video clip from its original MPEG form into another for editing. Vegas uses the same Cineform codec that comes with Premiere Pro. It does not transcode as it captures - you have to put each clip on the timeline and transcode afterwards, which is a bit time consuming. It is better to buy the full Cineform update and use their capture program instead which will transcode on the fly.

You can edit using the original MPEG transport stream in Vegas, however, the Cineform file is much, much nicer to use, more like using DV. Vegas will play back your HD footage, in standard definition, through a DV device attached to the computer so at least you can check out colour balance and effects at SD while editing. Vegas will also output the video preview to the second screen on your system which is does in pretty good quality. This “second screen playback” works for standard definition as well.

When you have finished editing you have to render the video into an MPEG transport stream, using Vegas standard MPEG encoder. This takes 3-5 mins per minute like most other systems, and then record the results to tape.

What’s Good about Vegas

• It reads and can edit almost any type of file - add practically any file you like to the timeline and Vegas can probably play it.
• An excellent range of high quality effects - and Vegas is part editor, part compositor!
• Excellent sound support - with Vegas 6 now supports VST plug-ins as well as Direct X.
• Realtime with everything and all out to DV.
• Very stable - its true to say I have hardly ever had a crash when editing, even on a machine full of lots of other rubbish!
• Network rendering - use other machines linked via a network to render effects.

What’s bad

• Vegas’ odd interface is hard to get used to if you are a Premiere user. Having clips which can be longer than the media and then finding they are looping the original material is bizarre!
• Although everything is realtime you may find on your machine that in effect nothing is! With an HDV project on a 3.4Ghz machine we found that at full quality we could not even playback a piece of video smoothly without effects. However, we could pile on effects and still get a reasonable playback - even full frame rate at low preview settings.