A few days ago Sony released the 11th version of their consumer “Movie Studio HD Platinum” version of their popular PC video editing platform, Vegas. A variety of new features can be found in it, most importantly 3D stereoscopic editing support, and a faster h.264 decoder for AVCHD/digicam/dSLR footage.
Note: I have fully reviewed Vegas in the past here on OSAlert, so this article will mostly talk about the new features, since the rest of the experience hasn’t really changed.
The biggest new feature is of course stereoscopic 3D support. 3D is not new in the filmmaking world, but many argue that this time is here to stay, and it has now invaded the consumer space as well. It was always relatively easy to shoot in 3D (just put two identical cameras next to each other on a dual tripod-head, and bang two stones together to help syncing in post), but editing the two resulting streams on a single timeline was never easy. Vegas now allows the user to “bind” together two streams, edit them as one, and watch the preview window in various 3D modes (e.g. anaglyph, half-half etc). Only disadvantage of this new feature is that the companion DVD Architect application wasn’t upgraded to a newer version, so it can’t burn 3D Blu-Ray disks, but rather a “baked” 3D look, e.g. red-cyan anaglyphs.
Editing the music video embedded below.
The other big new feature is the update of the h.264 decoder, which is now faster than in Vegas Platinum 10, and night-and-day vastly faster than on versions 7, 8, and 9. On my DELL laptop (1.3 Ghz i3 mobile CPU), 1080/24p footage from Canon’s digital cameras (e.g. the SX230 HS, dSLRs) were previewed in real time. AVCHD at 60i too. It’s interesting to note that unlike Adobe, Sony does not use special h.264 hardware acceleration for decoding (e.g. CUDA), but rather old-fashioned hand-optimized code, and whatever generic acceleration DirectX can provide.
The third most interesting feature is its fuller support for 24p. While older versions also supported 24p (for a long time Vegas was the only notable consumer editing app that supported 24p), the feature was unofficial, but now it’s been integrated better with various options in the editor, e.g. the timeline ruler’s time format.
Other interesting features include a new text/title plugin that offers more options than the standard text plugin, transport controls for the trimmer, and a new rendering UI for the various exporting codecs. Some new NewBlueFX plugins are bundled with the app too. Finally, rendering using the SonyAVC encoder now supports both nVidia CUDA and ATI OpenCL graphics cards for hardware accelerated encoding. In my tests though, with an nVidia card, the encoding time difference with and without acceleration was very small.
My music video for this indie band from Santa Cruz, Old Arc, was edited with Sony Vegas Platinum 11.
Video shot with the small Canon SX200 IS digicam (HD, h.264/MOV), handheld.
On the negative side, the application is still 32bit, so the app, or the SonyAVC encoder, sometimes crash when it needs more than 2 GB of RAM. There is a workaround, where you can “extend” the various executable files and DLLs of the app to make them use up to 3 GB of RAM, but no more than that. The hack seems to fix most crashing problems successfully.
There is also a bug with projects that use 5.1 audio: sometimes the project doesn’t reload. Hopefully, that’s a bug that Sony will fix with a free update, but we should note here that the previous version, v10, never saw any free update, even if it had its share of bugs (traditionally Sony always released Movie Studio updates, so that was a surprise for most). The Movie Studio community voiced their discomfort with this in the last few months, on the official forum.
Overall though, Vegas Platinum 11 is the most powerful consumer video editor in the market today. For those who don’t use complex masking or CGI, but rather create narrative videos (e.g. short movies, simple music videos, travel and family events), the app can fulfill most needs better than any other in its class. Usability is very modern and the app is overall easy to learn.
For the price ($95), the app not only competes with the $300 Apple FCP X, but it’s even better than it in most features. It also blows out of the water Adobe Premiere Elements 9 ($90), both in speed and features. In the past I’d suggest Vegas Pro, FCP or CS5 to users who are interested in filmmaking more than the average Joe is, but now the consumer Platinum 11 has enough features to stand on its own feet and offer the flexibility needed to create something professional-like.
FTC 16 CFR Part 255 Disclaimer
Sony Vegas Platinum 11 was sent to OSAlert for free, and to keep, in return for the unbiased review. Sony had no influence or involvement in the article’s findings and opinions.
I am sad that the reviewer fell for the fake 3d scam. Other then that, not a bad review ….
I liked your video. It was interesting and entertaining. I don’t own a Windows computer. So, this is not on my radar. But, I don’t do much video editing anyway.
I’m guessing this would be a bit overkill for just editing some home videos… is there something a little more iMove-ish on the Windows platform?
I don’t think that Vegas Platinum is overkill, it’s as it should be for its price.
iMovie is missing a lot of features, even for people who are not interested apart from family/travel videos. For example, iMovie does not have 24p support, so if someone just bought a recent cheap Canon HD digicam (their 2011 models are all 1080/24p), and puts it on iMovie’s timeline, the app adds pulldown and makes it 30p. And when the user exports, there’s a buttload of ghosting because of resampling that Quicktime usually adds in the conversion. That’s a show-stopper from the get-go in my opinion. This is not a case of “24p being for pros only”, because in this day and age a lot of cheap cameras shoot in 24p.
As much as iMovie does the very basics right, any modern user would hit a wall with it within a few weeks (in my case it was days — I started on iMovie). With Vegas that wall is further away. Years even.
Edited 2011-07-05 03:01 UTC
One thing that iMovie and OSX are both missing is native AVCHD support. Microsoft easily beats Apple at this. I’m disappointed with Apple’s neglect of H.264. I had to spend a few dollars to buy an addon to Finder just so I could see thumbnail previews of my AVCHD files.
My camera is an HG20.
Back in the day iMovie used to re-encode AVCHD and HDV footage in the Apple Intermediate Codec which was a disaster (a very lossy format actually). I don’t know if it does the same still, of it’s using ProRES instead now, but regardless, having to wait for re-encoding is not fun. Vegas Platinum 11 loads and edits these formats as-is, in real time. There is no waiting time.
The impression I always get with the iMovie products from Apple is the assumption by them that the end user will be either using the built in iSight camera or the camera in iPhone/iPod Touch – it pretty much goes back to the old adage that Apple products are great as so long as you keep within the narrow parameters of what they sell.
It makes me wonder though in the case of high end hardware vendors like RED why such a move by them hasn’t been made in terms of acquiring something like Avid so that they have their own in-house solution versus being dependent on third parties.
Have you tried Windows Live Movie Maker?
@Eugenia
A little late now, but for future reference: if you press [Alt] and [print scrn] rather than just [print scrn] then you get a capture of just the active window rather than the entire desktop.
This would have saved you having to edit out the captions on the task bar of your other, minimised, applications.
Edited 2011-07-05 09:38 UTC
S O N Y
After the rootkit attacks by Sony, and after the Playstation Linux bait-and-switch, there’s NO way I’m going to buy anything “Sony.”
This review will save a lot of people a lot of money.
I agree with the reviewer that Vegas is probably the most sane video editing solution right now, in it’s price range and high above. I like the features, the workflow and how the time line is implemented. However, I’ve been editing a lot of AVCHD footage from my Sony camcorder, yet I have never managed to get Vegas Studio (version 10 in my case) to do smart-rending. It is always reencoding everything, judging by the encoding times. I have no effects on the clips except for the occasional fade-in/out, or cross-fade which apply only to a small portion of a given clip. Also, I installed the WebM and Xiph codecs, and while I can output ogg/vorbis, I can neither encode straight to WebM nor ogv/theora+vorbis. That would save me tons of time, using the command line tools to get the desired quality is tedious. Any tips in this direction would be greatly appreciated.
Vegas does not have AVCHD smart-rendering. It only supports this for some AVI formats, DV and HDV.
Regarding webm/ogv, Vegas only supports Video for Windows and Quicktime, not the newer protocols, so only third party codecs that decode/encode in AVI or MOV are supported. Everything else must be written by Sony.
Given the site we’re on, how do free, open source, or other operating system alternatives compare?
I’d be very interested to know this too.
I’m yet to find a FOSS alternative that hasn’t epically sucked balls. But I’m sure (or rather optimistically hope) there’s at least one good package out there that I haven’t discovered yet.
It’s been discussed here and on my blog a lot of times in the last 10 years. Linux still has nothing that competes with the better Windows/Mac editors. The best one is KDEnLive, but it’s still not there. The Ubuntu guys even concede to the sad reality in various articles in the last two years.
Sad to say its true. I’ve fought it in the past reviews of Vegas, but Its time I just accept it. There aren’t any FOSS video editing solutions that really works well( As of a year ago). I’ve read that there is pro level software available at a pro level price. But that doesn’t really work for me.
The most advanced native linux video editor is cinelerra.
I know this not from experience but reviews. Just could not get the install to work on Ubuntu. It’s not part of the default Software centre options and has a lot of dependencies some of which is not present Ubuntu’s synaptic software section. Not a noob friendly install.
There is rewrite of cinelerra underway called Lumiera.
What about Lightworks ? http://www.lightworksbeta.com/
A disaster.
Could you please eleborate ?
Terrible usability, need to pay extra to get AVCHD support, and installs in the system the extremely buggy Matrox mpeg2 codec (which doesn’t return some calls, and so it hangs Sony Vegas that’s also installed on the system).
When they released the first public release they even had a stupid bug that made loading of the app impossible. Obviously very little testing.
If you need to do some real work, pay the money and get the right tool. That’s what I think about all this.
That’s what momma always said!
Does Vegas 11 have any decent media tagging/organization support? I have many hours of home videos I’d like to organize so I can make sense of what I have.
(Title should be “Managing Video Clips”, but editing the post title didn’t work)
Edited 2011-07-06 21:37 UTC
Depends what you want to do exactly. It lets you specify “bins” to put different clips in it, so for example, all the clips from a wedding reception go to one bin, and all clips from the church go to another bin. It also lets you rename and replace clips.
I’d like to tag each clip with who/what/when/where-type metadata, as well as some sort of rating as to what clips are worth sharing. Is this doable with bins, or is there a better tool for the job?
I believe that the Pro version used to have such a utility. I don’t think Vegas Platinum does. Premiere Elements 9 does this though.