Vegas Pro 8 Summary

The Vegas Pro 8 timeline. Layout is totally customisable and this screenshot only shows a fraction of the available tool windows and displays.
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Vegas has always been one of the best kept secrets of the NLE world. It is a strange paradox that once you own Vegas it appears to be one of the most popular NLE's around, mainly due to the exceptionally helpful and widespread userbase on the internet. Yet when you mention that you use Vegas to many people they confess to never having heard of it! In fact if you look around the internet so many people appear to be actually using Vegas that I am starting to suspect I am supposed to use a secret handshake or gesture to indicate to people I am conversing with that I also use the program!

This could be about to change with the release of Vegas Pro 8 however. Note the subtle name change. Perhaps a play on Final Cut Pro, but hey I bet the Madison guys put their tongues firmly in their cheek when they came up with that! The addition of 'pro' on the end of the title does help to further separate the high-end version of the package over the more consumer orientated Vegas Movie Studio.

Vegas has always had a habit of hooking people once they have used it. Those that are prepared to forget their Premiere and Avid workflows that is. You see Vegas edits video much in the same way as an audio editing package. There are no source/record windows in Vegas. Everything can be adjusted right on the timeline itself. Operations that take several steps in Avid or Premiere can often be done in one in Vegas. This is why I like to call Vegas the Final Cut Pro of the PC world. It is a nice friendly package that gets the job done. And if you take the time to learn its simplicity of operation it will reward you in spades.

So what is new in Vegas Pro 8?

At first boot-up nothing much appears to have changed. The Vegas interface has changed little in terms of looks over the years. This has led some to accuse it of looking a bit dated. I have to say that I agree. It could do with some tarting up to give it a fresher feel. I have always believed that a nice looking interface makes working on a computer a more pleasant experience. That isn't to say that the Vegas interface is hideous. It isn't. The Vegas interface is very functional, and this is where the Madison guys are coming from. However I still feel that it could do with some modernisation.

The Vegas Pro 8 Project settings dialogue.
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One of the big changes to Vegas 8 Pro is the ability to process video in 32-bit colour space. For years users have been asking for 10-bit processing. Well, the programmers have gone several steps further on this one. Video can be processed in both 32-bit linear space or 32-bit logarithmic space. 8-bit is also available for standard video handling, although 32-bit processing helps hugely for adding gradients, fades etc. What this means is that colour grading and compositing in Vegas is now up there with the big boys. Not even FCP can lay claim to being able to handle colour with this precision. In addition 10-bit encoding when previewing or capturing from AJA SDI video cards is also supported.

Another addition is smart rendering for HDV and XDCAM HD. Most editing systems have to rerender footage from HDV cameras or XDCAM HD even after a cuts only edit. With such formats you want to minimise any recompression, or render out to a master file in a different format. But what if you want a finished edit on your format of choice? Well, now Vegas will only re-render the parts of the video that have changed. So lets say that you have edited an XDCAM HD project, and all you have done is add a few cross disolves and no other filters. When you come to output your project Vegas 8 will only have to render the cross disolve sections and will leave the rest untouched. This not only means your footage stays as high a quality as possible, but your render times are reduced to practically nothing at the same time. Of course if you grade your footage this will not help you. But many people working on fast turnaround projects that do not require grading will love this feature.

The highly versatile audio mixing console in Vegas Pro 8.
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Vegas 8 also introduces a new audio Mixing Console. The audio capabilities of Vegas have always been world class, and it rightly has a great reputation for this. In fact there are some people who use Vegas purely as an audio editing application! The Mixing Console basically gives you a full mixing desk, placing all the functions of Vegas' audio adjustments at your finger tips in one place. You can monitor all track audio levels alongside the master, add audio FX and envelopes, add and control bus tracks, you name it it can all be done from here. The Mixing Console is so comprehensive that it deserves an article or two on its own. Busses can be routed to assignable effects as well as to multiple sends via the console. Vegas 8 can now also send tempo information to tempo aware audio plug ins.

Vegas 8 finally has the ability to edit multi-camera projects out of the box. Yes I know that users of other NLE's will say that they have had this ability for a while now. Though to set the record straight Vegas was one of the first NLE's of this type and price point to have this ability. How come I hear you ask? Well Vegas has always had scripting abilities. Scripts are one of the strongest points about Vegas. If a person needs a new function, such as multi-camera editing, they just write a simple JS script to do it. The most popular commercial script that performed multi-camera editing is from a company called VASST. Called Infinitcam it can edit, well, an infinate number of cameras! Such scripts were first written for Vegas long before the other manufacturers had added multi-camera editing to their packages. Vegas 8 now adds the function out of the box and can handle an impressive 32 different camera angles. More than enough for most users needs.

While scripting is one of the best parts about Vegas (a quick search on Google about this should inform you as to its versitility), Vegas 8 has gone a step further and added Extensions. These are very similar to scripts, but they have added functionality such as being able to update information in realtime as a project is being edited, as well as having the ability to control playback. There are some intriguing possibilities with this new function and I excitedly await a new generation of scripts exploiting these additional capabilities.

New to Vegas Pro 8 is the superb new titler.
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One feature that many Vegas owners have been asking for is a decent titler. Well they now have one! The ProType Titler as it is called can be found in the Media Generators tab. The capabilities of this are pretty amazing, and I imagine more features will become available as time goes on. Text can be given a number of attributes, all keyframeable, from opacity, shadows, glows, gradient fills, resizing etc. Text can be made to fly in, fade in, follow beziere paths. Characters can be rotated and zoomed for all kinds of effects. And all this is just the tip of the iceberg. Just like the audio mixer this feature deserves an article of its own and I shall be adding video tutorials for this very soon. Put simply it is the titler that Vegas owbers have been waiting for.

XDCAM import export capabilities are here too, and mostly unchanged from Vegas 7. One important addition is the ability to perform partial imports of files over FAM (firewire). This means that you can edit a project using the low resolution proxy files, and then conform the project to the high resolution files by only importing the parts of the video that you have used. This saves both disc space and import times. Vegas has always had the best XDCAM interfacing of any NLE and there isn't much else that could be added. I would like to see head and tail regions added as part of the partial file import though to allow fine tweaking of the edit after the high res files have been conformed.

As a stop-gap until true Blu-ray authoring comes into being, Vegas 8 offers the ability to burn the timeline to a Blu-Ray disc in MPEG2 format. This isn't ideal and does not follow any standards compliant authoring dictates, but for those wanting to play their HDV footage on a Blu-Ray player this feature allows them to do it. Not all players will be compatible with discs written this way though. Nice addition none the less.

Conclusions

A great NLE just became greater. The new features that have been added to this version of Vegas are exactly the sorts of things users have been waiting for. The 32-bit colour processing alone should give many professionals a reason to pause and consider this package. As per always Vegas is much more inexpensive than its nearest rivals, yet it offers so much more. Unlike Adobe Sony don't charge through the nose for overseas customers. You can purchase boxed versions or download. Purchase the download version and you pay exactly the same as US customers bar the addition of VAT, which they have to charge by law for UK purchasers. The same cannot be said for Adobe who prefer to make up to a 4x profit on their European customers.

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