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Vegas 7+ DVD vs Movie Studio – WHAT A DIFFERENCE!
I recently posted my first question in this forum (and in some other forums) about Vegas. Since folks in this forum were kind enough to actually respond I want to reciprocate by reporting back a discovery I made as a newbie to the Vegas product line.
A few weeks back, I bought Vegas Movie Studio Platinum on sale at Fry’s for around $50 to put on my MCE PC for editing “simple stuff”; leaving my more powerful Premier Pro 1.5-based system for more serious efforts.
After using VMSP to edit a short piece for a friend I felt like it’s one of the biggest bargains of the decade. What an amazingly feature-rich and pro-like program! My only initial disappointment was the inability to smoothly shuttle through M2T footage captured from my FX1, which was quickly resolved when I downloaded a trial of ConnectHD. ConnectHD also brought back the automatic clip extraction that I was accustomed to with Scenalyzer.
Then I discovered another small roadblock when I tried to render a 1920×1080 square-pixel WMV file for playback on my Avel LinkPlayer; VMSP doesn’t allow images larger than 1440×1080.
I started wondering what other limitations I would run into, and was I wasting time learning another NLE when I have Premier Pro 1.5? So, using Premier I tried recreating what I’d done in VMSP. I installed a trial version of Aspect HD to make working with HDV footage easier. What I found was that, except for simple crossfades, everything else I was able to do so quickly in VMSP required time-consuming timeline rendering in Premier. It was really an eye-opener.
So I downloaded Premier Pro 2. While it’s cosmetically nicer and certainly has some refinements and new capabilities, it’s still not as accessible as VMSP. With either version of Premier I wasn’t able to quickly do the on-the-spot creative fun stuff I’d found myself doing in VMSP. (I don’t edit often, so when I sit down to edit I want to be able to be creative without having to remember a bunch of workarounds and constantly consult a manual for guidance.)
At this point I went to Sony’s site and looked at their Vegas family comparison page. My first read of that page left me underwhelmed and wondering why people spend several hundred bucks on Vegas when — for $50!! — VMSP does what seems like 90%+ of what Vegas does. Then a kind member of this forum replied to my post with an answer about using a second monitor in Vegas, which prompted me to go ahead and download the Vegas 7 trial — just to check my assumptions.
Wow, was I wrong. Despite VMSP LOOKING very much like the full version of Vegas, and having probably 90%+ of its surface features, the differences are critical and significant. It reminds me of the seemingly tiny percentage difference between human and animal DNA: what a big difference a few percent make!
It doesn’t appear to me that ConnectHD is even needed with Vegas 7. Vegas captures FX1 raw M2T footage, automatically creating separate clips for each shot, yet thus far I’ve been able to quickly scrub in the timeline even though the footage is M2T format, which in VMSP was like trying to stir marshmallow cream. Am I missing something? Any tricks to ensuring this remains the case with longer projects? Is some rendering going on in the background?
Vegas doesn’t appear to impose any limitation on frame size when rendering, so that obstacle’s gone.
…etc. etc. (My intent wasn’t to make this a review.) But I did want to share with any newbies visting this forum my discovery that VMSP gives you only a taste of what Vegas is (though it may be all you need for DV footage). If you want to work with HDV footage, get the full Vegas. What a treat!
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3 Replies
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Sounds like we’ve got another convert. Vegas: +1 Premiere: -1
Sony ought to make a Mac “Switch” type commercial and use all of us who switched from Premiere to Vegas, and love it!
–the Fiddler
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Fiddler,
I totally agree. I to made the switch several years ago from Premiere to Vegas. At work I have the choice to work in Premiere, FCP (Quad G5) or
Vegas. No contest. For almost everything Vegas is my go to program.
Not only is it great at editing video, it is second to none when it audio tools. I do like FCP’s quick and easy wiz-bang templates ( get a look fast ) but in every other regard, Vegas is King.Vegas 7 performance rocks on HDV.
Regards.
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Yes, and though I spent over $100 on ConnectHD a few months ago, it seems it offers no advantage to Vegas 7 HD support.
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