Comments on: Sony Vegas Pro 8 only $129

By: Sean

Sean — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 16:37:43 +0000

The one in the link is not an upgrade ver. The catch is it doesnt come with DVDA4.5. Hence u only have Vegas 8.0 alone.

By: Bal

Bal — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 02:07:50 +0000

Just a note. The product offered by B&H is an “upgrade version”.

By: stephen v2

stephen v2 — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 03:16:25 +0000

Vegas 8 (why even mention v6 - that’s over 3 years old), while not perfect, rocks. It’s a full-blown DAW for starters and puts all other NLE’s audio tools to shame. Audio is often the main weakness of low budget films and a real reason Vegas is more professional in many ways than other sub $5000 NLE.

It also offers 32-bit processing - a big jump from earlier versions and way more than others in it’s class. Compositing is superior and Vegas is hardware independent. Run it on old crappy laptops or 64-bit Windows multicore powerhouse.

It is different from FCP/Premiere’s NLE design and is not Avid like at all. It looks deceptively simple. But it’s the best NLE I’ve used (I’ve never used a high end Avid etc. but have used lAvid’s DV products, FCP, Premiere, Edius etc.). If you are used to other NLE’s and not used to doing serious audio work, you might thing there is not much too it, but it’s deeper in some ways than those apps.

As I said, it’s not perfect. Camera/codec support is not as broad as it should be and in recent releases overly favors Sony now that Sony owns them. Media and sequence management is better in Avid and FCP but that gap is closing.

And a true 64-bit version is due in September and it already takes great advantage of multi-cores. Hopefully 4k support is coming also. So, before you think it’s a budget NLE, does your NLE support 32-bit processing and 3D compositing with a full-blown multi-track DAW engine?

By: wally

wally — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 23:32:35 +0000

no snob appeal but it looks like there is a chip on your shoulder.
i don’t think the author was slamming vegas

By: James Gates

James Gates — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:15:23 +0000

For many many people Sony Vegas is the first choice for NLE, not just because it is the most intuitive, but for example for FCP to be up graded to just do what Vegas does out of the box you need:
FCP $1500
Logic $500
Adobe After effects $1000

So it takes $3000 worth of software to just do what Sony Vegas does out of the box, then consider when a program is intuitive you are more productive. None of Logic, Adobe or FCP
are easy to learn and when combined you have a great system, but are difficult to learn and so what good are tools, if you don’t know how to use them?
Sony Vegas is the best budget choice, but it is also the best productive choice, it is the best and most complete out of the box choice and one area where it suffers, I concede this point.
There is no snob appeal.
I belong to a Sony Vegas Users group and we have professionals who make their living every day using Sony Vegas, all of them have migrated from FCP, Premiere, Adobe because of what it can do and it professional features, not because of a budget choice. Clearly in NLE purchase cost is not an indication of quality.

By: Allan W.

Allan W. — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:04:55 +0000

I actually miss Vegas. There’s some great things about it: speed, flexible UI, TrackFX, the way transitions are handled, and amazing audio capabilities.

Reading about it online though, many users who run it on WinXP even have problems. Running Windows was problematic at times.

If you’re on a budget though, it’s a great tool.