Nice Lady Productions

Musings on Sony Vegas Pro 11

2011 has been an interesting year for editors as Final Cut Pro received an iMovie-style facelift, Adobe Premiere picked up steam with a 1/2 price offer for people switching from Final Cut. Avid threw its hat in the ring with a software overhaul and a more ‘affordable’ price tag for Media Composer 6, and to little fanfare, Sony released an update to its own editing suite with Sony Vegas Pro 11.

I really wanted to write something about Sony Vegas Pro because I don’t hear a lot about it, yet I think it’s both feature rich and easy to use. Vegas immediately appeals to the broadcast community, event videographers, audio focused editors–since enhanced audio editing tools are built right into the software–and of course people who own Sony camera gear. The main thing holding Sony back I think is that the software is built for a PC and unfortunately its latest release is buggy.

Vegas Pro features 2k, 4k and 3D editing, offers broad format support for XDCAM, NXCAM, AVCHD, and RED without transcoding (yes support for RED ONE and EPIC, just pull the files onto the time line and edit), as well as multicamera editing from up to 32 video sources, 5.1 surround sound editing, closed-captioning and offers 64-bit software capabilities.

Cool features that stick out for me are one-click Blu-ray authoring right from the editing time line, the wicked white balance tool, the ability to read layered Photoshop files and in version 11, RAW camera files. The Vegas Pro suite includes a super intuitive Blu-ray and DVD authoring tool called DVD Architect which makes using Adobe Encore in comparison feel like you’re writing the Sunday edition of the New York Times crossword puzzle.

Part of the ability for Sony to offer all these features and keep up with technology changes is due to their rapid software releases. I find myself upgrading on an annual basis and it doesn’t cost much (less than $200). The software itself is only $600.

Sony Vegas Pro 11 - New Features

Vegas Pro 11 adds to this long list of features with new GPU-acceleration that works with both AMD and NVIDIA graphics card. I ran a render test to see the difference and I can tell you that the same clip rendered in Sony Vegas Pro 10, rendered in 1/2 the time in Sony Vegas Pro 11: now that’s impressive! The image stabilizer tool (similar to the After Effects Warp Stabilizer tool) has been significantly improved in version 11 and new 3D titling capabilities are also pretty cool.

Sony Vegas Pro 11 - Major Complaints

The recent release of Sony Vegas Pro 11 has not arrived without issues. To be honest, Vegas has always been a bit unreliable as far as bugs go. Having your software crash in the middle of editing (for no apparent reason) is never fun. Sony has already released a firmware upgrade to address some of the bugs, but the issues I’ve had have yet to be addressed. This has caused me to ask for a refund, which I received from Sony without any acknowledgment from them as to the outstanding issues.

One of the bugs is the inability to render .mp4 video files from the time line without being presented with an error. Since .mp4 files are what I use most for web video content, not having the ability to render them is a huge FAIL. I also realized that Sony corrupts audio files that are played back from a 3TB hard drive. Since I recently upgraded my external hard drive to a 3TB USB 3.0 drive, the inability to properly play audio files from it is maddening.

The bug problems and consequent fixes added in the latest firmware release aren’t just a Sony phenomenon. More and more I’m finding manufactures releasing products that are in the beta stages of development. The recent issues I’ve had with Sony Vegas Pro 11 have been off-putting to say the least and their inability to acknowledge the problems hasn’t helped (bad customer service goes a long way, if you know what I mean). I now find myself looking back to Adobe and forward to Avid to fill the void, which is honestly too bad because otherwise, Sony Vegas Pro is a great piece of software.