In the past,
PCs have had a tendency to attract bubble-gum editing
suites because they could be packaged with cheap computers
and parceled off to little old ladies who wanted to plug
in their camcorders and burn DVDs of the kiddies. These
"play"-editing systems like Movie Maker and
early versions of Pinnacle only served to reinforce the
idea that the PC was not something for which a reliable
editing software would ever be made. Through their Vegas
editing suite, Sony has slowly, but surely, been working
to change that perception, just as it changed the American
perception of Japanese production quality decades ago.
I
come from a background that has worked with virtually
every editing suite on the market at one stage or another,
from Pinnacle to Premiere to Media 100 to Final Cut
Pro to Avid. The only program I hadn't used prior
to this review was Vegas. While I have always been a cross-platformer,
I have done most of my serious editing with the Mac-based
versions of Final Cut Pro, Media 100, and Avid
and tend to like the cleanness of the Mac interface in
general and how it distributes system resources in regards
to editing.
Going
from that into Vegas is like walking around a corner,
getting hit in the head with a brick, and hauled off to
Oz. Once you regain consciousness and realize you're not
in Kansas anymore, you start to realize that there are
a lot of new things that are available in this strange
new land. Some of these are things that you're already
familiar with, but they're made available in strange new
ways, whereas others are completely new and innovative.
You have to relearn how to do things, but, once you do,
things work well.
The
reason Sony Vegas is a program with a steep learning
curve for those who are more familiar with traditional
editors is due to the fact that it was originally based
on AcidPro's interface, which was an audio looping
and editing system. When you start from that place you're
going to have a very different look and feel to a video
editing system. Unfortunately, this does mean that the
interface is quite a bit more boxy, because the original
design wasn't meant to accommodate streams of video, but,
in the end, it still works out.
With
that said, let's get into what's featured in the newest
incarnation of Vegas.
