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Vegas 4: Even Better
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 | | (Click on graphic for enlargement) Vegas 4 now gives you a virtual control room full of test equipment. |
Also new for Vegas 4 is a highly refined set of software-based test equipment, with more variation than almost every television control room in which I've ever worked. Included in the arsenal is a waveform monitor, histogram, vectorscope and RGB parade, and all of them can be set to update in real time. There is a slight performance hit when monitoring all these scopes in real time through a TV monitor -- I saw about 25fps (frames-per-second) while running all four of the scopes, but that pops right back up to 30fps if you're watching on the computer screen. Even so, having this kind of monitoring and test equipment with this caliber of performance on a low-cost software package just knocks my socks off. Remarkable.
Another area where it's obvious that Vegas developers put in a lot of effort is media management. This feature, somewhat lacking in Vegas Video 3, has had a significant overhaul. The biggest improvement is the searchable bins, and their integration with the capture database. Now there are configurable and sortable fields where you can search and sort using whatever parameter you want. One of my favorite innovations, and one that I'm sure Avid users were asking Sonic Foundry to include in this new version, is the ability to highlight a clip on the timeline and easily find it in the media pool. Conversely, from the media pool you can find a clip on the timeline. That's not to say that the previous version was lame when it came to media management. A feature I really like is still there -- Use Count, which tells you how many times you've used a particular clip in your media pool.
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Effects and Transitions
 | | (Click on graphic for enlargement) Here's Vegas 4's user interface |
There are also a lot of new transitions. I noticed a few new 3D transitions, many with different looks from what you normally see. Standouts were a new way to depict 3D blinds, a unique white flash transition that can be used like a music video or like an effect in HBO's Six Feet Under, and a really cool one called Mondrian (a preset of the Portals transition), where outlined geometric shapes appear on-screen in between shots. Also new are some effects that are actually useful, like various film-look effects, a more sophisticated TV simulator complete with all the effects we spent years trying to get away from like bad sync, and that "space aliens are taking over your TV" look. Sonic Foundry tells me there's growing interest in writing plug-ins for Vegas, too, with Pixélan offering some new ones, and other free effects appearing on line, like those from debugmode.com, with other vendor's products forthcoming. Another powerful development I noticed is a new way to deal with motion blur, where you use "envelopes" similar to the way "speed envelopes" were (and still are) implemented in Vegas 3. This is one of the best ways to keyframe I've seen, where you use rubber bands to control the intensity of your effect over time. As you probably know, motion blur is a processor hog, so it really gave Vegas a workout when I started playing around with this one. But helping things along was that 3.06GHz processor. The nicest-looking setting I noticed was supersampling, giving me a butta-smooth effect that I could dial up and down according to where and how it was moving within the frame. And even though it was quite an processor-intensive playback challenge, I could still get enough visual feedback to tell if the effect was working or not. It's a really nice-looking effect. Someday, all nonlinear effects editing will be this way.
Speaking of envelopes, the speed envelopes are still in the software, and easier than ever to use. The speed controls in Vegas have always been the best in their class, in my opinion. But they required some knowledge, and to get the most out of them you had to flip a couple of switches here and there. Now, smart re-sampling takes care of all that for you -- it turns on by default whenever you do time stretching with the speed envelope. A carryover from Vegas 3, you can also hit Control key and when you edge-drag a clip it'll stretch the time for you.
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