Review: Vegas Video 4 and Vegas+DVD

Andrew Alexander's review Vegas Video 3 was already an impressive video editing program, with features like real-time previewing of effects that made it unique in its class, which includes similarly priced competitors such as Adobe Premiere and Ulead Media Studio Pro. (See ) Vegas 4 ups the ante with features, such as professional-quality color correction, split-screen effect previewing (half the screen displaying the "before" and half the "after" image), surround sound mixing and DVD authoring (the latter included in Vegas+DVD for an added cost).

There are cheaper (not to mention free) video editors that may fill your needs, but if you're ready to drop $400 or so on professional video editing software, Vegas 4 should be on your short list, based on features, stability, and ease of installation and use.

Setup & Installation

You can download a demo version of Vegas 4 from the Sonic Foundry website and then upgrade to the full version directly from the software. List price is $699, but until March 15 at least, you can nab a copy for $399 (or $599 for Vegas+DVD).

I had no problems whatsoever with Vegas 4's straightforward Windows install. The minimum hardware requirements are quite reasonable: a 400 MHz CPU, 7200RPM drive, OHCI-compliant DV (FireWire) card, 128 MB RAM, 40MB Free space, DirectX 8, Sound card and a CDROM. A speedy hard drive is important for capturing video without dropping frames. More CPU power and RAM will allow you to render more quickly, and to preview footage with lots of transitions and effects in real time without sacrificing image quality. However, if your CPU or RAM aren't a match for the complexity of your footage, you can configure previews for a lower frame rate or a smaller size (which means less resolution).

Layout & Design

Having used Premiere for several years before trying Vegas, I found the Vegas interface intuitive only for basic operations like importing media and placing clips on the timeline. Beyond that, for things like doing color correction or adding effects and filters, it took some getting used to. However, once you're used to it, it's a very efficient program to use.

Like Premiere and other video editing programs, the Vegas interface is based on a timeline, where you sequence your clips. The top half of the screen is dominated by the timeline and an accompanying track list that provides some basic controls for each track. The bottom half is devoted to the "window docking area" where you dock windows for functions such as previewing, analyzing video, mixing audio, and adding effects and filters. A tabbed "multi-window". economizes screen real estate by switching among functions like finding clips, trimming frames from the beginnings and endings of clips, accessing all the clips in the current project, adding and managing transitions and effects, and inserting text and background art. You can resize or hide any of these windows.

Features Check out Andrew's review to find out what was already in Vegas 3. Here, I'll highlight half a dozen new features in Vegas 4.

Probably the most conspicuous new capability is DVD authoring. The value that Sonic Foundry places on it is indicated by the fact that Vegas+DVD lists at $999 -- $300 more than Vegas 4. Adobe and Ulead have supported DVD authoring for some time, so Sonic Foundry really needed to add it to stay competitive. DVD authoring fills one of the most prominent gaps in previous versions of Vegas.

Another great new feature is three-wheel color correction, similar to that found in Final Cut Pro and other high-end applications. Three-wheel color correction makes it easier to correct clips that are over or under-exposed, badly faded, too saturated, or shaded with an unwanted color such as a yellow or blue cast. While you could make pretty much the same kinds of corrections with earlier versions of Vegas, you can do it more accurately with Vegas 4. It's also faster and easier, because a single screen contains all the controls for correcting highlights, midtones, shadows, saturation, Gamma and gain. Thus, where previously you had to use multiple filters, you can now do it all on one screen. If you want to produce professional-quality work, this feature alone is worth the price of the upgrade from Vegas 3.

There's also secondary color correction that allows you to adjust a single color without affecting any others. This looks and works like the three-wheel color correction, but it uses only one wheel.

A really helpful feature when doing color correction or applying effects is the new split-screen preview, which allows you to display half the screen with the change and half without, so that you can compare them side-by-side.

Vegas 4 also includes new waveform, vectorscope, histogram and RGB parade monitors, which represent the color content of your scene in various ways (i.e. as a waveform, on a circular display where different directions represent different colors, as a bar graph, and divided into red, blue and green components). Using these monitors, you can get a more precise impression of how color values are distributed, and then go back and make changes using various plug-ins, including the primary and secondary color correctors. All scopes can optionally update in real time, and you can display multiple scopes at the same time. The scopes are also very helpful for making sure that all of the media in the project falls within the legal broadcast color boundaries.

There are lots of other features that don't seem like a big deal until you start to take advantage of them: for instance, the ability to take prerenders and assemble them into a single AVI file, which you can then use to Print to Tape, for example. This can save a tremendous amount of time as compared with having to re-render before you can Print to Tape.

One more thing I'd like to mention: In his review, Andrew noted that the Vegas "media pool," which you use to access all the files in your current project, didn't allow you to sort things in bins, a feature that many competitors offer. Well, Vegas 4 now has it, too.

Audio

Sonic Foundry started off in audio editing, so their audio features tend to be really slick. Vegas has always been first-class audio recording software, able to record audio into multiple mono or stereo tracks while simultaneously playing back existing audio and video tracks. I also like knowing that Vegas will integrate well with Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge, widely considered the best audio editing software around. (Another plus for Sound Forge users is the similarity between the Vegas interface and that of Sound Forge. Sonic Foundry's widely-used Acid Pro music creation software also has a similar interface.) "Open in Sound Forge" will automatically appear on the "Audio" sub-menu of the Options menu in Vegas if you have Sound Forge installed. (If Sound Forge isn't installed, it will simply say, "Open in Audio Editor," and you can point Vegas to your editor of choice.) Sound Forge gives you a much wider range of effects, processing options and tools for enhancing or modifying audio, including doing things like eliminating clicks or glitches.

Probably the two most important new audio-related features are surround sound and ASIO driver support.

Vegas 4 can use existing 5.1 surround sound tracks. You can mix in 5.1 surround sound simply by changing the "master bus mode" property for the current project to "5.1 surround." (I didn't test this, because I don't have a 5.1 audio card to play the mix on.)

You need the new AC-3 5.1 encoder (tested and certified by Dolby Laboratories) to create/render an AC-3 file. (Vegas offers surround sound mixing even if you don't have the encoder.) The encoder is included in Vegas+DVD, or you can purchase it separately if you own Vegas 4 or Acid. If you have the encoder installed in Vegas 4, the AC-3 option shows up in the "Render As" pull down menu.

Steinberg's ASIO (audio streaming input/output) is an audio driver that provides very low latency, something that is difficult to achieve with Microsoft's drivers, and which tends to translate into glitch free recording. (An audio driver is a software layer for exchanging audio data between software applications -- Vegas in this case -- and audio hardware from different vendors.) ASIO will give you efficient access to many high-end sound cards and other industry-standard studio quality multi-track recording hardware like Echo Audio's Layla24. Vegas users can record and play back all audio formats through the Layla24's analog or digital connections.

Learning curve & Support

There is a learning curve associated with many of Vegas 4's major new features. It may take a while to get the hang of scopes and three-wheel color correction, for example. (Although once you do, you'll never look back.)

The help file is good. There is also a very active and enthusiastic online Vegas community. Check out Sonic Foundry's forums, as well as tutorials at Marty Hedler's website and Wide Open West. In addition, one of the most active forums for Vegas and Vegas+DVD can be found at Creative Cow.

Even with all of this help, though, you're likely to go through a lot of trial and error while learning Vegas. Thankfully, it's an extremely reliable application, so you're unlikely to crash it, no matter what mistakes you might make.

Conclusion

Every time I thought I had found a substantial problem with Vegas 4, it turned out to be more learning curve than anything else. For instance, some render times were incredibly slow. It turned out that Vegas 4 is configured by default to resample video whenever the frame rate of a media file is lower than the project's frame rate. In Vegas 3, resampling was off by default, and you had to turn it on manually. I just needed to turn off the new "smart render" switch to get performance comparable to Vegas 3. This isn't a big problem if you just want to turn smart resampling off for an entire project. If you want to use it for some events but not others, it can become a bit tedious. Hopefully, in a future version, Sonic Foundry will provide a way to make any of the three resampling options (smart, forced on and disabled) the default. (For some forum discussion of this issue, see the Sonic Foundry message boards.)

Vegas 4 has lots of impressive new features for the same price as before (or a little less if you buy before March 15). It now also includes a plug-in pack that used to sell for around $150. Vegas 4 is a good deal: full-featured, easy to install, easy to use once you get the hang of it, and very stable.

Availability and Pricing

• Official Pricing for Vegas 4.0: MSRP $699; download from Sonic Foundry for $489; boxed version from Sonic Foundry for $559. Special download pricing $399 until March 15.
• Pricing for Vegas+DVD: MSRP $999; download from Sonic Foundry for $699; boxed version from Sonic Foundry for $799. Special download pricing $599 until March 15.
• Until March 15, registered users of Vegas 3.0 can upgrade direct from Sonic Foundry for $149, or $299 to upgrade to Vegas+DVD. After March 15, upgrades are $199 and $399 respectively.