| User review:
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Running Vegas since what became the Pro version was in beta, I think it's a pretty cool, pretty complete & capable NLE, with great multi-track audio features to boot. Most of the good stuff you can read in their ad copy &/or adverts... here's a little bit on what they don't tell you.
The big news is that this pro-level, cheaper [& 32 bit compatible] alternative to Adobe's Premiere Pro adds GPU acceleration with version 11. On the Plus side, that hardware assist works with ATI hardware [not just Nvidia like Prem. Pro] -- heading up the Minus column, with ATI graphics at least, that hardware assist may or may not work all that well, regardless whether you've got it turned on or off... with Build 594 [595 for the 64 bit version] Sony Creative Software seems to have gotten a lot [most?] of the bugs worked out, but as the release notes point out, they had to temporarily disable some of the ATI GPU assist features to do that. Depending on the video format I've had display issues on both the timeline & in the 2 video windows, along with some problems encoding -- while nowhere near as bad as the 1st build, with an ATI 6870 [the card Sony lists as their ATI reference] I still get occasional green frames displayed, & obviously if you can't see the video you can't edit it. Turning GPU assist on or off may help, or it may make the problem worse -- it's not something where turning off the feature puts things back to normal.
That said, HD video playback is much improved, & a lot of the FX [built-in &/or add-on] can use GPU acceleration to speed things up. The Mainconcept mpg2 encoder works much better than in version 10 [which I skipped because of that encoder], but not quite as well as in Vegas v. 9. The Sony AVC encoder is much improved, but still has weaknesses, I *think* because Sony needs it to work with the bundled DVDA authoring app. Encoding to Blu-Ray AVC is much faster -- it's fastest in the 64 bit version of Vegas, & slightly faster in win8 on top of that -- producing High level 4.0 video when you set the encoder to just under 22 Mbps or lower, where the encoded video will have a max bit rate of 22 Mbps. As you increase the bit rate setting between 22 & 25 Mbps, the level jumps 1st to 4.1, then 4.2, while the max pops up to 26 Mbps -- this also means DVDA will insist on re-encoding. With build 594/595 Sony has changed their Sony AVC encoder setup window -- you now have to select AVCHD if you want to set a 22+ Mbps bit rate.
DVD Architect [DVDA] is mostly unchanged from the version that shipped with Vegas 9, & in fact the only major change to DVDA since v. 4 [2/16/2007] has been the addition of Blu-Ray. As far as Blu-Ray goes DVDA works, but it won't do Java or pop-ups, it will only output to BD disc or ISO, will not accept DTS, & will not pass every Blu-Ray compliant video file without re-encoding -- as above it seems to be limited re: just what AVC video it will pass through without re-encoding. DVDA and Vegas are also a bit different when it comes to importing video, e.g. H264/AVC should be muxed to .m2ts [I use tsMuxeR] & mpg2 to .mpg [I use TMPGEnc mpeg tools] without the audio stream -- importing AVC or .m2v [mpeg2] into DVDA is possible, but it can take quite a while for DVDA to index the file, & then I've had problems later on in the project. |
