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32 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I've used them all and this one is the best, December 31, 2005
If you are savvy enough to tackle the world of non linear video editing, then you will probably play around with some of the toys out there before realizing two things...1. Video Editing is FUN and 2. The more you can do, the more you WANT to do. Sony Vegas is just right for me...not a toy and not technical monster requiring a semester at a junior college before you can add a fade.
ULead's editor is a joke and is usually given away free with DVD burners. Pinnacle Studio 10 is a wonderful product, but Pinnacle's stuff is so buggy that I have seen people trying to rally a class action lawsuit on one of the forums. Pinnacle is great and is easy and fun to use, but odds are after spending hours adding the cool titles and designing menus and editing your video, it will crash during the render, during the burn, and probably twenty times during the process. Terrible shame, really, and but the silver lining is that it led me to Vegas.
Adobe Premier, incidentally, is REALLY hard to learn and the GUI is an ugly mess. Some swear by it, but it simply isn't FUN.
The thing I like about Vegas is it's ease of use. You start by importing the media you want to use or capturing your video. You then simply drag and drop each clip on the timeline. If you want to fade to black, there is a small triangle at the end of each clip that you simply grab and pull until the fade is the length you want.
If you want to crossfade two clips, you simply drag the second clip onto the end of the first. The farther they overlap, the longer the crossfade is.
Want to split a clip in two? Put your cursor where you want the split and hit "S" or click the scissors. Done.
Navigating the timeline is easy and the JKL keys act as a jog shuttle. You can play back at different speeds and the transport controls are well placed and very intuitive. There are multiple ways to do just about anything you want, and the menu system is also very intuitive.
Timestretching a clip for slow or fast motion is also incredibly simple...you simply grab the end of the clip and pull it while holding the Ctrl key down. Pull to the right to make it longer (and slower), left to speed it up. Easy.
Each clip has two icons on it that allows you to either add effects or to add zooming and panning (or both, of course).
The effects are awesome and great fun to play with. You can add effects to individual clips or to the entire track, including color correcting, film effects, etc. You can also gradually increase or decrease the amount of the effect over time. And it's not a pain, like Pinnacle. Its easy.
You can also reverse a clip without an act of Congress. You'd be surprised how many programs don't include this simple feature.
The interface for panning and zooming is incredible, and allows you to easily create the "Ken Burns" documentary style where you pan and zoom over photos. Creating the motion and sizing the zoom is easy beyond belief and tons of fun. You just have to try it to appreciate it. Serious fun.
Adding additional tracks for music is a cinch, and the music editing capability is as good as Sound Forge, Sony's Audio NLE that they just acquired (with Vegas) from Sonic Foundry. You can timestretch the music to make it fit your video and control the volume, pan, etc with easy to use "envelopes" that make controlling the sound a piece of cake.
You can also create markers and regions to keep your project organized. The process is incredibly simple.
There are about ten different choices for monitoring how your project looks (depending on your PC's horsepower), and the effects are applied realtime. You can also monitor on a separate TV or computer monitor if you have the right hardware and connections.
Once you have your project finished, rendering is a cinch. As on all NLE's, rendering is slow, but not any worse than any of the others. And if you have a network, you can use multiple computers to speed the process up. You can render as just about anything for any format.
And even though the program is easy to use, you have incredible control over every tiny aspect of your project, if you need it.
It also will do HD, incidentally.
Enough. For every cool thing I've told you about, there are ten that you just have to discover for yourself.
If there is anything that I would improve, it would be DVD Architect, which you actually have to use to author a DVD, create menus, etc. I just don't like the program, and it is here that Pinnacle really kicks Sony's butt. Number one, it shouldn't be a separate program...it should be integrated and hopefully it will be in the next release. And it should be a LOT easier to use and a lot...dare I say it...cooler. The options Pinnacle gives you to design menus are awesome, and DVD Architect is pretty plain Jane in comparison. Hopefully once Sony really gets their fingers into this they will improve DVDA and make it a truly fitting companion to Vegas, or simply kill it and incorporate a better authoring program into Vegas.
I have tried almost every Non-linear-editor on the market, and Vegas is just about perfect. It's not a goofy little McDonalds toy for idiots, like Ulead and its not a complicated, dense mess like Premier and Liquid. It's JUST right and I hope Sony doesn't screw it up like Corel has done with Paint Shop Pro 10. Don't get me started.
This app ROCKS. Spend the money and thank me later.
And Pinnacle? You owe me about fifty man-hours that I wasted trying to create and burn DVD's with your buggy stuff, and I want them back.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Awesome, April 5, 2006
Ok folks, let me save you a lot of time and money.
Pinnacle 10 - lots of functionality, easy to use, intuitive - BUT buggy as hell. You will spend many hours creating your fantastic video only to have it not render correctly and lose all of your work. Let me say that again, you WILL lose your work.
Ulead 9 - easy to use but not as user friendly as Pinnacle, much more stable. Good entry level video editor, not as fancy as Pinnacle but will actually work.
Vegas - The interface is totally different than the other editors. It is intuitive, powerful, and works very well. The most stable of the 3 editors mentioned. The negative is that when you go to create your DVD you are transferred to another program called DVD Architect.
I have used all 3 of these editors extensively, and the winner by far is Vegas. Vegas comes in two flavors, Vegas 6 and Movie Studio 6. Most folks can get by with Movie Studio 6, check out Sony's web site for the differences. If you are doing a search on Vegas, your smarter than the average bear (editor)!
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Saved me a small fortune, July 25, 2006
In class last month we had a module in film editing using Final Cut Pro 5. The power of FCP was an eye-opening experience. I thought to myself: oh sheesh, now I have to buy a Mac so I can make movies with FCP. This would have cost me $1300 plus the cost of the software.
Then the gods intervened and I came across a forum where people were comparing nle's. So I gave Vegas a try and that's the end of my Mac shopping. It saved me a fortune because my 3-year-old PC runs it fine whereas with Apple I'd need a new system with 2 gigs of RAM (according to Apple).
It has also saved me time because it runs so stable and is more efficient than Final Cut Pro. FCP requires you to render your events before you see them in the preview window. Drop in a new transition and that segment of your timeline turns red telling you have to render that segment. Not so with Vegas!
Is this a serious filmmaker's tool or just for the hobbyist? Both. It's fun and easy to use but the depth is quite amazing. Consider the tools for masking and color correction plus native support for Photoshop .psd documents and Flash .fla files.
It's an embarrassment of riches.
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