The basic version of Vegas has everything I'm looking for. Hardware assisted encoding and preview, zoom, image stabilization and the other doodads I'm after. This means it's $50 price tag is going head to head with PowerDirector's $70 price tag. As with the 2 different versions of Powerdirector, the main difference between the basic and $100 version is editing 3D stereoscopic video.
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegassoftware
It's got some (many) good points
- It's the cheapest commercial editor I'm looking at.
- Inbuilt tutorials that show you how to do almost everything.
- Compression is fast and clean.
- Preview rendering is reasonably fast and has options to let you customize the settings to perform well on your computer.
- There's a large range of transitions to choose from.
- There's a good range of title animations to choose from.
- Zoom is easy to use.
- Stabilization is basic but works well.
Like the others it has some issues to deal with though.
- Many of the features are needlessly complex to use, seemingly set up more for "professionals" than throwing together quick videos. Once you get used to the way it does things it gets a lot easier though.
- You can't cut/crop on the timeline, you have to use a separate tool to do it. Again, more complicated than is needed but easy once you get used to it.
- The most difficult to align with music because of the above.
My verdict?
It is incredibly hard to find anything "wrong" with Vegas and every bad thing I can say about it revolves entirely around it's more complicated setup for basic editing than other programs. The program itself seems pretty bulletproof, works well on my middle-of-the-road system, never crashed and had plenty of features to explore and experiment with. Every time I ran into a roadblock with a confusing tool there were the tutorials right there that showed me how to do it, step by step.
Although it's more complicated, the tutorials make sure that just about anyone over the age of about 10 will have no real problems coming to grips with it. They might find it a bit drawn out and boring but the interface won't physically stop them from doing anything because of the complexity.
You'll notice that there's no finished video with this one like the others though. I was about 3/4 the way through before I decided it wasn't worth so much effort. Don't get me wrong, the resulting video so far I was quite pleased with and Vegas gave me every tool I needed to do everything I wanted to do.
It's just that so many of the things are achieved in such a round-about way that it feels needlessly complicated for a consumer-level video editor. If you are squeezing for dollars you can't really go wrong with Vegas and, as I said, although it's complicated some times you get used to it quickly. It works well on lower end computers which is a huge bonus too.
A solid piece of software and I can see why so many people are happy with it. Smooth, stable and feature-rich allowing you to produce some solidly good looking video for Youtube or your home movie collection. Some people are just going to find it too labour-intensive to come out with a slick looking result if they've used more simple editors in the past.
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