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Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
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Feature-rich program. A versitile product
After four baseball seasons with Pinnacle Studio (upgrading every year), I told myself that I would use a different video editing program to make my son's baseball team video. I was tired of the little bugs, glitches, and incompatibilities associated with Pinnacle, and so I decided to shop around. After quite a bit of research I liked the reviews I read about Sony Vegas Movie Studio - and it was more affordable than I had expected. I was a bit intimidated at first, because it is more sophisticated than Pinnacle, but I knew that I would eventually reap the rewards if I forced myself to tackle the learning curve. What has been a savior for me is all of the great instructional tips available on YouTube. They have motivated me to learn new techniques and imagine new ways of using this great program. My only complaint is the Quick Start Operating Manual; if you are over 40 years old, the small type is a bit hard to read. Oh well.... I'm in the middle of my 5th baseball video (the last one was 28 minutes long) and I am so glad that I "swallowed the red pill".
Rating: -
Not as easy as it may appear to be.
I purchased this product because I read reviews that it was easy to learn. Don't always go by what you read because the ones that rate it probably have experience editing videos. If you know how to use the program, I'm sure it's awesome, but for me....you need a degree in video editing to be able to understand it.
Rating: 
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Best software so far
I've tried so many different programs since beginning of era of video editing. Some programs worked good, some so-so. Most of them leaved me in frustration and disappointment, because they crash, record a movie partially and so on. Sony Vegas is the only program I enjoy to work with. I bought this software two years ago and still have it (I have Sony Vegas Platinum 5; version 8 should be even better). For all this time Vegas has not crashed even ones. Everything you do on the screen will be recorded on the hard drive or DVD. Vegas is a very simple, intuitive program with power of much more expensive professional software. You will enjoy to play (not just edit) with your video using almost endless options. I am not professional and I make movies only for myself and my family, but Sony Vegas can really help you to create a professionally looking video without any effort. I cannot recommend any better software than Vegas.
Rating: -
Great value with some caveats
Casual observers looking at Amazon ratings for Sony Vegas will be inevitably confused by the wide spread of scores, and I attribute this partly to varying expectations. For starters, Sony Vegas is not:
1) paint-by-numbers production software suitable for family vacation memories. For this, look to Ulead and Pinnacle; their software, while less powerful, covers 80% of what most people need in a more convenient fashion.
2) serious competition to Final Cut Pro and Premiere. Though Vegas has much of the functionality, one can't expect top end software for $60-$100.
3) a complete solution. I'd be surprised if many were completely satisfied with Vegas Premium out of the box. Luckily, some of most powerful add-ons cost nothing.
I researched and purchased Sony Vegas for professional use at my employer, a small time media company that wants professional video production but only has a few hundred dollars to throw toward it. Vegas is the best compromise between features, price, and compatibility. In particular, it was one of the few pieces of software compatible with AVCHD at the time of purchase (for anyone confused by Internet discussions, Vegas is indeed compatible with Canon's VIXIA).
Though priced and marketed as a consumer product, Vegas is definitely "prosumer" and has a feature set less like iMovie or Windows Movie Maker and more reminiscent of professional products like Premiere and Final Cut. Vegas includes independent multi-track editing, scrubbing, and even compositing effects. Its interface is definitely finicky and wants a user to do things its way. Once one discovers what Vegas wants in order to function efficiently, movies can be quickly cut and produced.
Reading the reviews, it seems AVCHD output is a highly desired feature, but it is not to be found in Vegas Platinum. One needs the more expensive Vegas Move Studio for that. We output our videos in lossless FFV1 to maintain maximum quality and perform the lossy step separately from Vegas, so this limitation does not affect us. Note that the basic Vegas package does not handle AVCHD at all!
Another common complaint I see revolves around low compatibility with standard formats. Luckily, Vegas respects the standard Video for Windows interface, meaning that it'll more or less accept any codec Windows recognizes. A simple solution to cover the gamut of MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4 part 2/ASP (DivX), and MPEG4 part 10/AVC (H.264) is to install ffdshow, a freely available most-in-one codec interface. After that, one should be able to read and encode to nearly any commonly used format (at least in Microsoft's AVI container), with the exception of Quicktime, which is best handled by Apple's own product or the "gray market" Quicktime Alternative.
Vegas is far from the best tool for video encoding. If your needs are advanced, research into a dedicated encoding tool is appropriate. I suggest one based on the freely available ffmpeg or mencoder, such as frontends like meGUI or SUPER.
Additionally, Vegas is apparently picky about which analog capture cards it accepts and has been for its entire history. Unfortunately ours is unsupported, so we use VirtualDub to capture video from our analog video cameras before passing it to Vegas. This process is not completely compatible: at times, Vegas stops updating the video preview when handling an AVI from VirtualDub. Nothing outside a reboot resolves it, and even then the issue may return. Fortunately, analog video editing was a temporary stopgap for us while we researched and budgeted more advanced options. Internet forums claim Canopus is the best option for Vegas compatibility. DV capture works the same as any other application I've tried.
In conclusion, Vegas is most suitable for high end consumer or low end professional work. It's not an all-in-one solution, but research and (mostly free) companion programs can pole vault over most of its important shortcomings. Vegas is an unbeatable value at its current price point.
Rating: -
All That I Thought It Would Be...and More!
A very professional program...I learn more each day. So glad I didn't buy a product I wouldn't be happy with within a few weeks. Well worth the investment.
