When we looked at Vegas 6 a year and a half ago, we talked about how there wasn’t a lot of competition in the PC market. Well, shortly after that, Adobe started refining their PC editing solutions with a vengeance and Avid bought Pinnacle so they could have a competitive low-end system. Suddenly things got a lot more interesting for low budget filmmakers. The pressure is now on for the big three PC editing manufacturers every time they release a new version of their products.
Now we look at Sony’s recent release of Vegas 7 and their popular Vegas +DVD package, both in the light of how it improves upon Vegas 6, but also in the light of some serious PC competition.
Ease of Use
With increased competition from other video editing companies, Sony has elected to stand by their audio-inspired design, rather than redesign their interface to more closely resemble those found in Adobe, Avid, and Apple editing suites. As such, the audio roots which defined Vegas in its infancy are still alive and well, complete with a timeline that allows you to mix audio and video at will and a vocabulary that’s straight from the audio technician’s dictionary. Audio editors familiar with Sound Forge, as well as previous Vegas users, will be right at home, but new users and video people familiar with any other video editing solution will continue to find the learning curve steep until they’ve used Vegas long enough to think like an audio person.
Most of the improvements to Vegas and DVD Architect are in the form of increased speed and productivity, rather than massive new abilities. For example, similar to the extremely customizable workspace options Adobe rolled out with Premiere Pro 2 and the Adobe Production Suite Premium Pro, you can now grab and drag Vegas’ palettes around until the editing space suits your particular desires for specific types of editing needs. You can then save these in up to 10 slots, which is useful for creating custom looks for things like editing, special effects, color correcting, etc. Unfortunately, there are no presets in this area, so you’ll have to create all of them from scratch. Hopefully, future versions will include a few of the more common presets.
As another improvement for ease of use, they’ve included extensive remapping options for your keyboard. (For video users from other platforms, this means you can finally get rid of confusing shortcuts like “Control + B” for “Ram Render.”) Unfortunately, unlike Premiere Pro 2 (which gives you presets for FCP and Avid as well as custom options in their remapping feature) there are no presets for the keyboard remapping. As such, if you want to program Vegas to behave like any other editor, you’ll have to remap each and every command in Vegas’ arsenal, or find some other Vegas users who’s already done it and doesn’t mind sending you a copy of his/her remapping file.
