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Sony Vegas 7 is now Vegas + DVD Production Suite, and offers digital video/audio editing and DVD authoring in the same box for $699, $200 less than its predecessor's $899 retail price. The good news is there are significant improvements in this software package from Sony, making it easier than ever to create all types of video productions. Usability improvements abound throughout the package, and it's also more versatile. Let's take a look at the capabilities of this updated version, testing the software on all types of video and audio content.
To get the most out of Vegas + DVD, if you want to edit HDV footage, Sony recommends a minimum 2.8GHz Intel Xeon system or its AMD equivalent. For our testing, we used a PC with 3GB of RAM and an Intel Core 2 Extreme 2.93GHz processor inside. I tested version 7.0a, the latest update as of this review -- a point release update will be out next week or close to it.
First up was HDV editing, where Sony has rebuilt its long-GOP (Long Group of Pictures, the way HDV is compressed) decoding engine, and there is a noticeable improvement in its performance over predecessor, Vegas 6. I was impressed with the smoother native playback of HDV footage in Vegas 7, making the operations feel almost like editing regular old garden-variety DV footage when playing back effects, moving shots around on the timeline and generally getting things done quickly.
If you wish, you can still use the old CineForm codec for editing HDV, a multi-step process that you'd probably only use with legacy projects. Sony has also improved Vegas's memory handling for longer HDV projects, and Sony's implementation of editing without using any external acceleration hardware works very well, especially with the latest Core 2 Duo processors.
Capturing HDV has also been improved in Vegas 7, where you can now Scene Detect HDV footage as you capture it. This means that you can put a tape in a connected deck and instruct Vegas to capture all of the shots on that tape, and the software will dutifully grab each clip and place each one separately into your designated folder. It works just as well as it always has when working with standard-definition DV footage. A slight drawback I noticed is that there is still no facility for logging shots and then capturing them later when using HDV footage, a routine that I've grown accustomed to when working with DV footage on various software packages, including Sony Vegas. Nor is there the ability to scene detect from a designated in and out point on an HDV tape. Although these operations are more difficult to do in the HDV format than they are on a DV tape (which is already possible on Sony Vegas), let's hope Sony adds that same capability for HDV capturing in an upcoming release.
Although we don't have XDCAM shooting and playback equipment here at the Midwest Test Facility, I was able to observe Vegas 7's impressive new XDCAM support at Sony?s software offices. In the demo, I was able to browse the contents of the disc using Vegas 7?s built in XDCAM Explorer window, and then choose which files to import. You are given the option to import small, low resolution proxy files or full resolution files. The proxies that are automatically created by the XDCAM camera were very quickly imported over a standard 1394 cable (iLink in Sony-speak), and transfer over a network connection is also possible. Editing with the proxies was exactly like editing DV footage in Vegas.
Even directly working with the high-definition XDCAM footage was smooth enough to see simple effects and cut the shots together. Like HDV 1080i footage, XDCAM HD footage is long-GOP MPEG-2, and as such has a DV-like bitrate, capping out at 35MB/s. And like native HDV 1080i, it plays back well in Vegas 7 even when Vegas? quality setting is in Best mode. It might skip a frame or two at the maximum preview resolution, but even this high-definition footage was easy to work with, and playback was smooth enough to get an accurate preview of the edits. Even so, I found it easiest to work with XDCAM's automatically-generated proxies to do my cutting, and I was then able to effortlessly conform those shots at the end of the edit using the original high-definition footage. After that, the Master to Disk routine, the same principal as Print to Tape in the old school world, was a cinch. The one big difference here is that Master to Disc, like import from disc, is a file copy, so dropped frames or other similar glitches do not occur, no matter what else the computer is doing at the time of transfer. It was a good demo, and all SD and HD XDCAM formats are supported. XDCAM users will be delighted.
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| [Click graphic for enlargement] Sony Vegas 7's user interface appears about the same as its predecessor, but there's more than meets the eye. |
Those above-mentioned updates were impressive, but my favorite improvements in the new Vegas involve its user interface and timeline editing enhancements. Most noticeable but not most importantly, now you can turn Vegas upside down, making it look more like Adobe Premiere, Avid Xpress or Final Cut Pro with its timeline on the bottom and its preview and project windows on the top. This might seem like a small detail, but for some users it makes the interface feel a lot more comfortable and familiar. The slight drawback with this routine is that it must be initiated in a huge preferences dialog box that's rather buried in the menus that are growing ever larger in Sony Vegas. And, it's not as easily adjustable as the same capabilities in Adobe Premiere which can be done with a simple drag and drop. Some of the windows are draggable and dockable, but it's just a little more awkward than it needs to be. Complexities like this make Vegas a bit more difficult to learn than a few other editing packages such as Final Cut and Premiere.
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| Vegas turned upside down?! That's right, now you can position the timeline on the bottom, just like in numerous other video editing applications. |
On the other hand, making things easier is the ability to save layouts, where it's simple just to go to the View menu and then select Window Layouts, and then you can save your favorite window configuration any way you wish. So, for example, if you have a particular configuration you prefer for audio editing, you can place that layout into one of an available 10 presets, and then save another preset with a layout that you prefer for video editing. Neat. But I wish Sony had included some sample layouts in the presets. That would suggest a few best uses for new users, further enhancing this powerful new capability.
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| Vegas 7 now lets you save 10 window layouts. |
Another enhancement is Vegas's improved timeline snapping, with color-coded "snap objects." What the heck are snap objects, anyway? These are color-coded lines that show what you are snapping to in the timeline as you edit. This lets you move clips and have them perfectly match up in time to clips on other tracks, even if those tracks are scrolled vertically out of view. For example, when dragging a video clip down the timeline in time, the end of the video clip snaps to the beginning of the audio clip that's sitting on another track as you drag over that point in time. Not only does a clip feel like it's magnetically pulling toward a snap point, but the snap point itself glows when a clip gets into close proximity to it. This is the best implementation of snapping I've seen, enhancing the software's usability. It alone is worth the cost of upgrading.
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| Color-coded timeline snap objects |
It gets better. The colored highlighting of snap objects is not limited to just clip edges. Each timeline object that you can snap to has its own distinct color -- a different color for event edges, markers, region, timeline grid points, and the cursor. In a complicated production, I noticed that editing with this new snapping behavior made operations that were once difficult much easier. This has an interesting tie-in with the XDCAM format. With XDCAM, you can record "essence marks," in the camera that show up in the source media on the Vegas timeline or trimmer, and the cursor will snap to those. There are a surprising number of video characteristics that can be chosen as essence marks, such as brightness peaks and audio peaks, and you can use those as locator points as you edit. This can be a remarkably powerful thing. These kinds of markers could automatically indicate, say, where a bright flash occurs where you might perhaps like to place an audio effect, or where a loud noise happens, indicating where you could match that with a specific piece of video.
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