Finally, a smaller ease of use improvement is the inclusion of highlighting when you’ve snapped to key areas on another clip, like the edge or the mid point. There is a different neon light color for each type of seam or snap point, which makes telling the difference between snapping to the edge of a clip or the playback clip easy to distinguish. You can finally easily snap to video clips found in other tracks, with yet a different highlight color being used for tracks on differing layers. This may not sound like a lot, but it helps streamline use a lot.
Depth of Options
Most of the improvements in Vegas 7 are in both the Ease of Use and Performance categories. However, one nice option is the ability to use Sony's Cinescore as a plug-in in the software itself, for creating custom sound tracks on the fly. You do need to buy the full version of Cinescore to take repeated advantage of this, as they only include a 30 day trial with Vegas. (To read our review of Cinescore, click here.)
The remainder of the new content options in Vegas +DVD 7 come from DVD Architect 4. Similar to Adobe Encore 2, you can now specify auto-animation to digital slide shows, allowing your slides to randomly zoom, pan, and tilt. You can also choose to have individual frames stay on screen longer than others.
Also new to DA4 is the ability to keyframe animations for your menus, add graphics to your subtitle track, and incorporate Cinescore to create custom soundtracks directly in DA4.
Performance
The new dual-core and multi-processor support is a very beneficial improvement on the performance of Vegas, especially for HDV/HD editing. Additionally, the way it deals with Long GOP format HDV has become greatly improved, allowing you to manipulate HDV footage without having to take it into CineForm and conforming it to a readable format, such as Vegas 6 required. Additionally, they’ve improved multi-thread support for audio, giving you better performance when you start adding multiple layers of audio and sound effects.
Unfortunately, there are some rather bizarre limitations on performance in other areas, such as in RAM Render. For example, it tops out at 1024 MB of RAM for your RAM render, which is very irritating, especially if you’ve got 3 or 4 gigs of RAM. I assume they were trying to go with half the Windows XP Home RAM allotment to be safe, but they should give users the option to choose how much they want to allocate without utilizing that low a threshold.
