Magix Vegas Pro Review

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Hi, everyone. this is Paul Schmutzler for Streaming Media Producer. Today I'm going
to be continuing my series in looking at lesser-known
non-linear editors from the perspective of a longtime Premiere Pro editor. So
today we're gonna be looking at Vegas from MAGIX. And you might be familiar
with Vegas as a Sony product which it used to be. But it's now owned and
developed by the MAGIX corporation out of Germany. So I've got Vegas Pro version
15. One thing to note about Vegas is that it's Windows-only. So I actually have a
Windows computer and set up right now for review, so I was gonna do a review on
Vegas while I had this. So here on the right, I have a Dell Canvas which is a
27-inch touch display that uses pen and totem plus fingers. And then I have
everything running off of this laptop and then I have a 38-inch ultra wide
curved display as well. So the curved display is where I'm using most I'm
doing most of my editing, and then I'll have some other windows here like
effects and things where I might want to manipulate with the pen. And you'll see
how that works in a moment. So I'm running version 15, as you can see here.
That's their most current release, and there's three different options. You have
Vegas Pro Edit, Vegas Pro and then Vegas Pro Suite. The pricing is $400 for Vegas
Pro Edit. It is $599 for Vegas Pro, and the Vegas Pro Suite is $799. The
differences among those are basically some add-ons that you get. For just
pretty much any regular old editor, you're gonna be fine with just the Pro
Edit which is the $400 product. So let's take a look at the interface for Vegas.
It's fairly straightforward. This interface actually first reminded me a
bit of Resolve, so if you haven't seen the Resolve video that I did, search for
it on Streaming Media's site. And you'll find that video, and you can take a look
at the interface there. You have your clips on the left, and then you have your
program monitor on the right. Vegas doesn't have a source monitor per se
like you would in Premiere Pro where you double click on a file and it brings it
up in the window that's usually on the left. And then your program or your
timeline view is on the right usually. So you have a video preview and you have a
trimmer. The trimmer can be used in a couple of different ways, so it's more
than just a source monitor which is why I think they don't call it
just a source monitor. But I like the trim view, because you can actually
scroll your mouse over it and scrub the clip without clicking anything. And it
shows you, basically a vertical line or a timeline marker that shows you where you
are in the clip proportionally from beginning to end. And it shows you what's
going on in that portion of the clip. And when your mouse goes away from it, it
just goes back to the beginning. Right here, you can actually choose your in and
out points, which is also displayed up here on the screen with the lighter
shaded area in the center. If you just click, of course, it gets rid of that and
then I can adjust those in and out points again to bring those back to
whatever I need. The other thing you can do here is create sub clips which will
actually generate a new file or a new actual sub clip here in your bin. Or you
can simply choose to drop whatever it is on your timeline. As a reminder, I'm doing
the exact same edit, as close as I can, in each one of these pieces of software
so that I have the closest apples-to-apples comparison of how it is
to edit in any of these applications. I actually exported my EDL from Premiere Pro
which is my original edit that I've been basing all my other edits on. First
I tried to use a regular EDL file from Premiere Pro. It did not work. So then I
actually exported a Final Cut Pro EDL, and that worked like a charm. So I
brought it in. Every clip, all the music, the fades, everything was in there. It did
not import some plugins that I have in Premiere Pro that are not standard.
They're some aftermarket plugins. And what it did is it replaced it with the
closest approximation which is basically just a fade. So all-in-all it did a pretty
good job of bringing in an edit from another application into this one. So I'm
not really going to get into the actual editing of a project, but I do want to
show you how simple it is to make some of the changes here. Ok, first of all,
I love the scrubber in the timeline here. If you scrub here where the timecode is,
you'll notice that it actually does a scrub. Let me switch back to the video
preview. This is my program monitor here or my timeline view. So if I click here
in scrub, you can see it actually gives me an audio and visual scrub, which is
kind of nice. Some people love having that scrubbing.
They like to be able to hear what's going on not just see what's
going on. If I click here and scrub, it goes a lot faster and it does not use
the audio. So if you're trying to jump quickly to a point, you can do this. Of
course, you can just click as well to jump that to move the marker up quickly.
If I click and drag in an area here in the timeline, it actually creates in and
out points. So you can quickly make a selection for it in an out point just
like that. So one of the things I always do with my footage is I correct for
stabilization and color. My stabilization was a little bit tricky.
I found the stabilizing plug-in which you'll find under the effects in Vegas.
So let me bring that up here for you. I'll do that by selecting a clip and
creating some effects on that particular event or or piece of the timeline. So on
my main monitor here you can see that it has brought up all the effects available
to me. And I just easily found the stabilize plug-in, and then I added that
to the clip that I had chosen. Once I've added any effects I want, you can see
it's putting in a chain here at the top. I'll click OK. And then moving over to
the Canvas, my touch display, you'll see that it has added that effect to that
particular clip. So from here, I would want to change my preset or make
adjustments and apply it so it'll render. The problem is it's got a warning here.
It says, "You've added a stabilized plug-in to an event. This plug-in must be
applied to a clip or a sub clip as a media effect." So it's kind of odd to me
that that is even available in this interface if it doesn't work this way. So
since I already went through this, I actually went back and I
found how I needed to actually add that to that particular clip. I've actually
brought up the stabilization for a sub clip that I made of the trouble clip in
my timeline. So it's a little bit convoluted to try to do just a very
simple thing, in my opinion. There are a few presets which are basically just
light, medium and heavy stabilization. I just had to experiment to figure out
which one worked. And really, the presets aren't that useful, because all they do
is they set a specific smoothing and stabilization amount
right here. So the default that it's set to is 0.5 and 0.5, and then there's a
checkbox for rolling shutter correction which I didn't need. All it does is go up
or down both of those together: the pan smoothing and the stabilization amount.
You hit apply. It renders itm and then you can see the results. I found that the
light stabilization was enough for that trouble clip in order to clear it up
enough to where I was satisfied. It is a problematic clip that most stabilizers
have trouble, with so I don't expect perfection when I see it there. Now let's
look at how to adjust the color on the clips. What I did in Premiere Pro in
order to adjust color was I created a look that I liked with a combination of
several filters and effects. And then I copied all those and just went through
each clip and pasted, pasted, pasted onto each one. However it's a lot easier
if I have a look that I like just to apply it to the entire track if I'm not
going to make any changes. Or I can make it to the track, and then I can apply
counteracting effects to a particular clip in order to reduce it or modify it
in some way. So what I did in Vegas was, I created a track effect that would apply
to all the clips of my timeline. So let me show you that now. On the left for the
video track that I have here there's a little hamburger menu, as I like to call
them. And if you open that, you'll see there's a track effects, which will then
open right here in my main monitor. And you can see I applied some curves, some
RGB curves, some brightness and contrast, a hue saturation and lightness
adjustment. What you have here are basically like the effects window in
Premiere Pro. A little bit different. I like this a little bit because it
actually gives you everything right at the top that you can quickly select
between, instead of in Premiere Pro when you have lots of effects you have to
scroll and expand and all these different things to get to everything.
And it can be not a very good visual layout. So I like the way these can be
separated. They can be easily turned on and off of course. And then you have
multiple column views that you can change between depending on your
preference and your setup. Since my screen is so enormously wide, I can
certainly take advantage of that 3 column view and spread things out
farther horizontally rather than vertically. So all the effects here I
just played with until I found a look that I liked to everything and got it as
close as I could to match the other videos that I produced here. There are a
number of other things here at the left side of your interface. Media generators
would be just generating graphics of some sort. You have video effects which
is what we brought up in a different way, but it's it's also right here if you
need it. Transitions, of course, you would always use those in various ways. And
then you have a file explorer to import your media. Now one thing that sets Vegas
apart also especially from Premiere and even from some other NLEs, is they're
still big into physical media exporting. So there's a lot of support in here for
exporting for Blu-ray, for DVD and it's built right into here. A lot of people,
myself included, were upset for a very long time that Adobe got rid of Encore,
their DVD authoring application. Because when they got rid of it, DVD authoring
was still a pretty big thing. But like Apple removing the physical the optical
drives from their computers pretty early, Adobe was just getting ahead of the game
and saying, "Look, we know this is going away, so we're gonna go ahead and remove
support for this application and get rid of it." And unlike the Las Vegas what
happens in this Vegas does not stay in Vegas. You can export by going to "file"
and then render as. Okay, you can see on the left here you have your categories
of different types of exports. And I have filtered this to show only video
projects. It has some audio-only, of course. But video-only brings up all
these categories. And then when within those categories you have presets
or what Vegas calls templates. And you can, of course, customize your template to
change the frame rate or the dimensions or anything like that. So I noticed
something conspicuously absent from the export options. And that was anything
that seemed to resemble H.264. The closest thing that I found was this
MAGIX MP4. There's an HEVC codec which is good, but there wasn't just a
straight-up H.264. So I was a little surprised by that, but anyway
I was able to get a good export at a reasonable file size that looks
comparable to the other exports that I was doing from Premiere Pro and the
other software. And what I settled on was this Internet HD 1080p MP4 file. And it
says 25 but you'll note that little asterisk. That means I've changed it
already, and if I go to customize the template, this is where you'll find the
ability to change all of your settings. So I changed my framerate to 24 which is
what my video clips are all at. You can change from a variable bitrate to a
constant bitrate. You can also set it to two-pass, which I always use when I'm
encoding if it's available. Finally, the project tab, you can change it to whether
the quality is the same as what you're using in your editor or if you want it
to be better or worse. So if you're trying to just shoot off a proof to a
client, you can change it to draft or preview. And then if you're using a 3D
project, you've got those settings here as well. And by the way, Vegas does
support 4K and stereoscopic editing. So once my settings are good to go, I'll
click OK. I'll change my filename and my destination, hit render. And then you can
see I've already exported this, so I'm going to overwrite that file with a new
one. A few things to note about Vegas. When I first set it up and installed it
it had a couple of things it wanted me to set up as well. Those actually turned
out to be optional additional plugins or filters. Basically third-party software. I
chose not to set those up because they weren't included with the version that I
was given the license for. So that's a quick look at Magix Vegas Pro version
15. Again it's available for Windows only in three different packages: the Pro Edit,
the Vegas Pro and then the Vegas Pro Suite. [MUSIC]
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Magix Vegas Pro Review

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