Vegas... To Upgrade, or Not to Upgrade...

A place to discuss non-Moho software for use in animation. Video editors, audio editors, 3D modelers, etc.

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drumlug13
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Vegas... To Upgrade, or Not to Upgrade...

Post by drumlug13 »

Humble Bundle is having a sale for Vegas Pro Edit 15 ($25). I know that the "Pro Edit" version is a slimmer version of the "Pro" version but overall I'm not super familiar with the Vegas versions and the changes/upgrades that happened with each new release.

I don't use the DVD authoring feature that comes with the "Pro" version. Also I'm assuming that there are a couple of plug-ins that are left out of the "Edit" version as well but I don't really use those either.

All I know is that I instantly regretted buying into Vegas Movie Studio #13. I hated it. So I know that Vegas/Magix isn't immune to laying a giant egg every now and then.

My question for the people that stay current with Vegas... I'm currently using Vegas Pro 14. Would you recommend buying Vegas Pro Edit 15?
Adam
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Greenlaw
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Re: Vegas... To Upgrade, or Not to Upgrade...

Post by Greenlaw »

The missing DVD part is probably DVD Architect, which is a separate program for authoring the DVD or Blu-ray's interface. I've been maintaining copy but, TBH, I haven't mastered a DVD for several years now that everything is going streaming. IMO, you probably won't miss it. Pro also comes with a lot of third party stuff like the HitFilm plugins suite.

Vegas 15 is actually the previous release which is probably why it's discounted (the current release is 16.) I used Vegas Pro 15 on a number of projects and really like it. The most noticeable change in 15 was the UI. I personally think they improved it a lot but, annoyingly, they decided to 'hide' a bunch of things by default and I had to change a lot of those defaults. I know they wanted to reduce screen clutter but IMO they really went overboard. They way you access the 'hidden' options is better though, using the 'hamburger' buttons that have become popular these days.

There's a lot of 'small' workflow improvements that I really appreciate, like being able to disable SmartResample as a default, and the 'dark' UI which is so much easier to look at when your editing in the wee hours. The Freeze Frame command may seem like a trivial feature but I've been using over-and-over again in these the tutorial videos I've been creating--to me, this has been super useful. This is related to the Velocity curve, which lets you fluidly re-time the footage up to 400% directly over the clip. Oh, and now it has 'hover scrubbing', meaning you can scrub by dragging your cursor over the video window.

There are some new tracking and 'Smart' transform tools that seem to work well. I normally prefer do all this stuff in compositing but I seem to be using these tools more and more when editing in Vegas these days.

The new 'Magix' codec is a good variant of H265, and I've been using whenever I can now. There's also native support for ProRes. This was a bigger deal for me a while back when a client requested footage in ProRes format and I don't have a Mac in my home studio.

However, for editing on the timeline itself, I found that .mov files don't play as efficiently as .avi in Vegas. Just an FYI when outputting animation for editing, I've been using the MagicYUV codec (not related to Magix) in .avi for Vegas and it works great! The same codec used in a .mov doesn't work nearly as well in Vegas and may even crash so I don't recommend using .mov for Vegas. (Another Vegas users told me that that's always been the case.)

I don't know if all of the above is in the 'Edit' version but I hope this helps.
Last edited by Greenlaw on Mon May 20, 2019 6:25 pm, edited 2 times in total.
chucky
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Re: Vegas... To Upgrade, or Not to Upgrade...

Post by chucky »

Magix have poisoned the well IMO especially file formats rendering.
I used to love both Vegas and Acid but since they have been taken over I get nothing but problems.
Haven't upgraded to 15, I just hate giving them money after being badly burned with a dodgy version 13 which never got patched, a nothing 14 trial and overpriced upgrades.
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Greenlaw
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Re: Vegas... To Upgrade, or Not to Upgrade...

Post by Greenlaw »

Obviously, I don't completely agree with Chucky's views on Vegas but I can understand his feelings about Magix.

I only recently started using Acid Pro again with the release of version 8. So far, I think this version is a big improvement over 7 because it adopts a lot of the UI improvements from Vegas Pro 16 and, more significantly, Acid Pro 8 represents a long overdue transition to x64.

However, I have to admit, I'm more than a little annoyed that Acid Pro 9 came out a couple of weeks ago, and I don't think version 8 has been out even a year yet. I mean, c'mon guys. :?
chucky
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Re: Vegas... To Upgrade, or Not to Upgrade...

Post by chucky »

Greenlaw wrote:Obviously, I don't completely agree with Chucky's views on Vegas but I can understand his feelings about Magix.

I only recently started using Acid Pro again with the release of version 8. So far, I think this version is a big improvement over 7 because it adopts a lot of the UI improvements from Vegas Pro 16 and, more significantly, Acid Pro 8 represents a long overdue transition to x64.

However, I have to admit, I'm more than a little annoyed that Acid Pro 9 came out a couple of weeks ago, and I don't think version 8 has been out even a year yet. I mean, c'mon guys. :?
64 bit plugins don't work in Acid 8, they want you to upgrade to get that patch.
Magix seem to treat patches like upgrades.
Buy something broken pay to get the fix, this is the worst type of gravy train scam I can think of. Besides apple of course :wink: .
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drumlug13
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Re: Vegas... To Upgrade, or Not to Upgrade...

Post by drumlug13 »

A belated thanks for the comments guys. Actually you were the exact 2 people I was hoping to read in this discussion
Adam
chucky
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Re: Vegas... To Upgrade, or Not to Upgrade...

Post by chucky »

Cheers Adam,
On the topic of Acid 8, I treid recording some guitar through line input today,
After a lot of fiddling ( this used to be easy) I got a signal through but didn't display a wave and I heard nothing in playback.
I'm going to try the Acid 9 trial to see if anything is fixed, but I'm loathed to give them a freakn cent.
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InfoCentral
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Re: Vegas... To Upgrade, or Not to Upgrade...

Post by InfoCentral »

I guess sales of Vegas aren't too well as I keep getting "special" offers to upgrade.
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