Legit Reviews

Sony Vegas Pro 12: A Quick Look at a New Standard in Video Editing

Sony has recently released their latest upgrade to their Vegas video editing application in Vegas Pro 12. This version of Vegas adds tons of feature enhancements and performance improvements. Since this is one of the main tools we use in our arsenal, we wanted to see just how well this new software worked and took it on a test drive to compare it directly with its predecessor.

Our render speed tests highlighted the real-world improvements that you can expect from a complicated project, but you will see the most improvements to Sony Vegas Pro 12 as you use it during your projects. One thing we did see was the power of GPU acceleration and how it produces better quality renderings and saves you quite a bit of time. The functionality and controls are improved in Vegas Pro 12 allowing you to make your keystrokes more efficient speeding up your editing times as well.

Article Title: Sony Vegas Pro 12: A Quick Look at a New Standard in Video Editing
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/2101/1/
Pricing At Time of Print: $458.46 shipped

For my old job they gave me an Adobe Creative Suite. I tried to play around with Premiere Pro having learned Photoshop the same way and it was a big fat fail. To this day if I open up PP I give up 10 minutes later in frustration. I've played with older Sony software and it was just as complicated. Any thoughts on the ease of use of the new version?

Major_A wrote:For my old job they gave me an Adobe Creative Suite. I tried to play around with Premiere Pro having learned Photoshop the same way and it was a big fat fail. To this day if I open up PP I give up 10 minutes later in frustration. I've played with older Sony software and it was just as complicated. Any thoughts on the ease of use of the new version?

That's a really good question...the changes in interface over the years have been very 'nuanced'. I actually got confused when going between the versions sometimes and had to double-check to see if I was in 9, 11, or 12. I'm not saying there are no differences in performance and functionality, but one of the things I actually appreciated about the Vegas layout was that it is still *familiar*.

For people coming in from a Vegas background, the learning curve is really quick. Older users will appreciate the new key feature additions - Things that I wished we wished the older versions did: Color Match with a touch of a button; Audio/Video fades; even the audio indicator when the render finishes...

It just seems like a more mature product.

Now for people just getting into editing, as I said in the article, you will probably need to make a choice in which package to learn. I decided years ago that I will go with Vegas and not Premiere or Final Cut. Not because I thought Vegas was soooo much better than the others, but just because when I first started, I tried them out and gravitated towards Vegas.

No easy learning curves for this stuff, imo. What can really help is YouTube...they have some great online tutorials if you can't get your hands on the "official" ones like the video2brain or Lynda series. (That's how I learned Photoshop).

now how does this compare to lighworks, it's FOSS and is known to be used by holywood guys

I want to know how open-source/cross-platform software compares to such high-end software

Major_A wrote:For my old job they gave me an Adobe Creative Suite. I tried to play around with Premiere Pro having learned Photoshop the same way and it was a big fat fail. To this day if I open up PP I give up 10 minutes later in frustration. I've played with older Sony software and it was just as complicated. Any thoughts on the ease of use of the new version?

since you seem not to use it heavily, I think you may use some simpler software, like KDEnlive (linux/OSX), windows live movie maker (windows)...

here's a good list and feature comparison
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison ... g_software

madooo12 wrote:now how does this compare to lighworks, it's FOSS and is known to be used by holywood guys

I want to know how open-source/cross-platform software compares to such high-end software

I've never used Lightworks but I have seen it and it looks really good. I think there is going to be a learning curve with any of these packages.