Sony Vegas is a very comprehensive program which has advanced effects, excellent audio editing, decent realtime support and comprehensive DVD and Blu-ray writing using Sony DVD Architect which is supplied with Vegas.

Sony Vegas is slightly different to your average editing application. For example, clips are called events and can be dragged out well past their last frame; if you do this then they either loop or freeze depending on your preference.  This may sound odd but comes from Vegas' origins as a sound sequencing program, where you would lay a sample of a drum, for example, and them repeat it several times to produce music.  There are other small things like this which are different from other programs; this is not necessarily bad things, just different to the norm, so you just need to learn the Vegas way of doing things.  Vegas' origins as an audio program do mean its audio capabilities are brilliant and you can even lay out an music CD using the program!

Capture

Like most programs Vegas can capture DV or HDV footage using the built-in capture application.  You can add various cards which will also let you capture footage through other sources - component, composite, HDMI and HDSDI.   These cards are either from Black Magic or AJA.  Black Magic have an Intensity Pro card with all these connections except SDI, so enough for most people, and the card is only £125+VAT.  You can even buy it with a copy of Vegas for £300 +VAT.  See our pages on the different hardware available with Vegas for more information.

Editing

With Version 9 Vegas editing has become a lot similar to other programs.  As you can see from the above picture we have a source and destination window (called the trimmer and the preview window in Vegas) a project window and a timeline where the clips are laid out.  The trimmer can even show you the sound wave form at the same time as showing you the picture which is helpful.

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.

Click here to learn more about the interface of Vegas.

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.

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. You can also nest effects by putting one project inside another and you can have several version of Vegas running with different programs open when editing.

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

DVD & Blu-ray writing

You can write Blu-ray discs directly off the Vegas timeline - these would not have any menus, just video.  However, DVD and Blu-ray 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 Adobe Encore DVD, and you can have multiple menus, slide shows, video menus, subtitles, etc. as you would expect.

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. 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 EDIUS 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 makes positioning subtitles much easier.

Click here to read more about DVD Architect.

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, unlike Premiere Pro, you can make full 5.1 Dolby digital DVDs straight out of the box (with Premiere you need to buy and extra plug-in to achieve this).

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 and VST plug-ins.

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.

We recently had a need for some ADR (automatic dialogue replacement - where you re-record dialogue and overlay it on the original video) and the sample level editing and time stretching abilities of Vegas proved to be the best choice.

Format Support

HDV Support

Vegas can capture from HDV cameras using its own utility. Editing the native files is also very good and has improved compared to previous versions of Vegas.  If you want to convert the files to a different format your best bet is to buy CineForm Neo.  CineForm does not come with Vegas in version 9 as it did with previous versions.  However given Vegas improvements, and given a modern computer you do not need to convert the footage to use it.

AVCHD support

Vegas supports both Sony and Panasonic AVCHD files on the timeline.  It actually does a pretty good job of playing the files back - it would be roughly equivelant to editing the footage using Adobe Premiere CS4 on a similar system.  So the native files are very usable as long as you have a pretty modern computer.  If you computer is not powerful enough then the way Vegas works is that it will drop the quality to maintain a proper speed playback - meaning that even on a lower spec computer the playback is still usable.  The AVCHD Booster pack, available withEDIUS NEO does do a better job although Neo lacks a lot of the features possessed by Vegas.

XDCam Support

Vegas supports native XDCam-HD and XDCAM-EX files. As you would expect for a Sony program it actually supports both Sony's formats very well and has its own built-in loading module to get the footage in quickly.

DVCPro (P2) support

In these days of nearly every program supporting every kind of footage Vegas does not support DVCPro - is this something to do with the fact that it is a format of their great rival Panasonic?

RED Camera support

The great RED camera, as used by film-makers for its huger than HD quality and excellent picture, is supported in Vegas 9. Vegas will edit the RAW footage, unlike a program like Final Cut Pro which has to convert it to QuickTime to edit.  This is similar to the way Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 supports RED footage.

What’s Good about Vegas

• An excellent range of high quality effects - and Vegas is part editor, part compositor! Apart from Media Composer at £1,680 no other program has keyframable moving mattes included as standard or proper 3D motion paths.
• in depth DVD and Blu-ray writing as standard.
• Excellent sound support - with Vegas supports VST plug-ins as well as Direct X, has good surround sound mixing built-in and can even encode the audio into the correct format for DVD without any extra cost (with Adobe Premiere you need to buy another plug-in to do this)
• 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.
• Scripting built-in - this opens up Vegas to third parties writing scripts to automate various processes - which means someone can write a script that may save you a lot of time!
• Animated titling built-in - Premiere can only do still, rolling and crawling titles.  Vegas can animate per latter and bounce them in and out as needed.

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!
• Lack of DVCPro HD support is a shame.