When filmmakers edit, depending on their platform of Mac or PC, there are the two giants of the industry: Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro. These are the programs you hear about big budget movies increasingly being edited on, now that Avid is becoming less and less necessary. I would argue that there's a third, sort of dark horse for editing, one that is based on an audio editing substructure, and that would be the Sony Vegas editing systems.
As a long time user of Vegas Movie Studio's big brother Sony Vegas Pro (I've used it since 4.0), I cut my feature film White Out on Vegas, in fact, I was looking forward to seeing what this streamlined version would be like, figuring that it would probably eliminate a lot of options, but offer some unique extra things.
Sitting here with both Vegas Movie Studio HD and Vegas Pro 9.0 in front of me, open on two different monitors, I see VERY little that separates these two programs, which is a TREMENDOUS thing for users, because it means a full featured editing package for under $100, which is, frankly, a little insane.
The full Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD editing window.
Having used Movie Studio for a couple months now, I also have found very little of what I do to be different between the two packages. (To see the official list of what the differences between Movie Studio HD and Vegas Pro 10, check out Sony's Comparison here. )
Ease of Use
Well, there's a whole lot here. And if you've used any of the major editing packages out there, you pretty much know that the learning curve will be taken up entirely in finding WHERE Vegas put the tools you want to use. While, this is somewhat true of moving from Premiere to Final Cut, and vice versa, there's a much bigger learning curve when moving to Vegas because it is based on an audio editing mentality. Once you've made it over that initial hump, Vegas Movie Studio, like its older brother, is surprisingly intuitive.
If you want a clip to be shorter, you drag it shorter, if you want it to be in slow motion, you hold control and drag it longer, these things may not sound like a big deal, but once you get into the editing flow, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that there is no other editing program that feels as natural as Vegas.
The friendly pre-labeled tracks, though not sure why I'd need an overlay AND text track.
Importing clips is as simple as finding them in explorer and dragging them to the timeline, if you're the kind of person who wants to cut your clips BEFORE adding them to the timeline, there's a great editor for that as well.
The default view creates 6 tracks for you to help you keep organized, a Text track a Video Overlay Track and a Video Track, then Voice, Music, and Sound Effects. Of course you can rename these and add a few more tracks (MSHD tops out at 10 Audio tracks and 10 video tracks), but this is a great way for people to jump right in.
When you press the make movie button, the wizard pops up. I find myself wishing the old Microsoft Paperclip was here.
Depth of Options
As I said before, Sony didn't skimp the way I feel Adobe often does with Premiere Elements and give a clearly hobbled version of their flagship program at the base level. Using this for quite a while, I'm really still hard pressed to figure out any major differences between this and Vegas Pro.
You're able to do pretty much anything you'd want in a software editing package, import almost any format of video (provided you have the codecs) and export into a wide variety as well, (including for specific portable devices like the iPod). The only real difference I noted was a "wizard" like option for the render called "Make Movie." This asks you questions about the format and gets you to the right place quickly.
Now some would say, that probably gets annoying if you know exactly what you want to do, but you can always click the advanced render button and leave behind the helpful wizard for some "do it yourself" work.
Performance
In preparation for this review, I did two project edits on two different "microfilms" using the system with full 720p HD editing and rendering out to WMV. I benchmarked it with Vegas Pro as well and the system handily performed right on par with Vegas Pro.
I had no issues with crashing (which can, let's face it, sometimes be an industry standard) and was very happy with the output results from Vegas Movie Studio.
Every aspect of Movie Studio is right on par with its far more expensive older brother Vegas Pro. No complaints at all.
The video preview window has many quality settings allowing you to run Vegas Movie Studio even on slower machines.
Value
I can say without a moment's hesitation that this package is a FANTASTIC value. For less than $100 (agreed, not MUCH less, but less) you can get a full horne editing system that can handle almost everything you can throw at it. Really, there's not a lot more you can ask for!
Final Comments I'm very impressed with what Sony has done here, they've taken their major editing system which has gotten better with every release and have just about cloned it, then offered it at a price for the masses. I highly recommend to any new PC based filmmaker to give Vegas Movie Studio a try, and with a 30 day free trial, you can't really go wrong.
Ease
of Use
9.0
Depth
of Options
10.0
Performance
9.0
Value
vs. Cost
10.0
Overall Score
9.5
David B. Grelck is a filmmaker and photographer. His first film, White Out, is being distributed on DVD worldwide, and the short film he wrote, produced and starred in “Gnome Man’s Land” is a web sensation.
When filmmakers edit, depending on their platform of Mac or PC, there are the two giants of the industry: Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro. These are the programs you hear about big budget movies increasingly being edited on, now that Avid is becoming less and less necessary. I would argue that there's a third, sort of dark horse for editing, one that is based on an audio editing substructure, and that would be the Sony Vegas editing systems.
