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Vegas 4: Even Better
Sonic Foundry improves its nonlinear editing software, adds optional DVD authoring
by Charlie White
Page 1 of 4
 Sonic Foundry has done it again. The newest version of its powerful nonlinear editing software package, Vegas 4 (download for $489; boxed version $559) is on the loose. Now, without any DV hardware at all except for a 1394 I/O card which can be purchased almost anywhere for less than $30, you can edit video on a Windows PC in real time at a highly professional level. Here's our review.
Starting off your video editing festivities with the newest version of Vegas (the "video" part of the name has been dropped) will be the capture routine, which is similar to that of Vegas Video 3.0. The major improvement is that now the bins used by the capture tool can be exported to the main part of Vegas with a simple right-click on Add to Media Pool. This makes your captured clip visible in the media pool, a conveniently-located window that looks and works like Windows Explorer, but is sitting right at the bottom of the Vegas interface, just under the timeline. From here, you're able to drag and drop your clips onto the Vegas timeline. This new synchronization between the capture database and the Media Pool database lets you do some neat new tricks, like if you're running multiple instances of Vegas you can move bins between the different projects.
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 | | (Click on image for enlargement) Is this Final Cut Pro? |
Look at what else the new Vegas has brought -- is that the color correction interface from Final Cut Pro? It looks similar, but the best news is that Vegas 4's new color correction toolset is a major improvement over Vegas Video 3. This new interface brings all the power of Vegas's color correction under one roof, and adds some new features, too. Before there were about a dozen color controls scattered all over the place, but now everything is in one place, and it's a lot less confusing and easier to use than before. With the former group of color correction plug-ins -- which you can still use if you want -- you could enjoy a lot of control, but that often meant you had to use multiple filters and deal with a lot of extra complexity. Now the three wheels, one each for the low, mid and high color ranges, is a whole lot more user-friendly. As you drag the mouse over the wheels, you can adjust gamma, saturation, gain, offset, hue angle and more in the low, mid or high color ranges. There's another even more sophisticated part of this new color correction suite that lets you execute secondary color correction. As with the highest of the high end secondary color correctors included in editing and compositing software from Avid and Discreet, these pro controls allow you to create and tweak a mask, and then color correct only what's within that mask. Then you can stack up an unlimited number of these masks and change the color information within each of the masks while watching it in real time on a TV monitor. When I was playing with these controls and stacking up mask after mask, the playback got rougher and rougher, but still it was smooth enough for me to tell if my effect was working or not. Meanwhile, I could load the preview into RAM and as time went on playback got smoother and smoother. I created a test effect with a zoom-in DVE and color correction on one shot and then dissolved to a second clip, also with a zoom-in and color correction, and with my Dell Precision Workstation 340 3.06 GHz machine, things were playing back well enough for me to easily adjust the dissolve timing.
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Related sites: • Broadcast Newsroom • Creative Mac • Digital Post Production • Digital Producer • Digital Video Editing • DTV Professional • DV Format • IBC News
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