Looking for the right professional video software for your needs? Trying to decide between free and paid software? You’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’re going to look at why you should invest in a high-end video editing solution, how to determine the right professional video editing software for your unique needs, and what makes one of our products,VEGAS Pro 17, an outstanding choice.
If you‘re new to video editing, we’re here to help you understand the benefits of investing in a professional video editing program. Numerous options exist which offer some incredible features and benefits. However, it’s important to know how to choose the right program that suit your unique needs.
To help you, we have come up with a few main points to guide your choice. Everyone’s needs are different, but here are some of the top things to consider when making your choice.
First, determine what video file formats you'll record your footage to. Different video cameras on the market have distinct types of recording formats.
Additionally, if you want to use stock footage and/or footage shot by others in your productions, you need to be sure that your editing system is capable of working with all those other formats as well.
Whenever you convert, or transcode, something to a different format, there’s a risk of introducing errors, losing data, or suffering a loss of quality. Native support is always better; look for software which supports the formats you’re going to use natively.
Most free versions of editing software only support a limited number of common, consumer-oriented video formats.
Yet another important consideration involves performance. Cheaper software relies only on your computer’s CPU for video processing, and can do so inefficiently, giving you choppy playback and long render times when you go to export your video.
So it's definitely wise to take advantage of hardware acceleration, technologies to enhance real-time performance and shorten rendering times for certain formats.
To unleash your creativity and provide major flexibility, it's also important to consider various professional features, modern effects for cinematic looks and an intuitive workflow to enable your dynamic editing at the highest level.
Powerful cutting, color grading, audio processing, effect design, storyboard, timeline interaction and authoring editing tools, make definitely professional video-production accessible, authentic and pleasant for everyone.
A great film needs great sound! To highlight and heat up your visuals and create a robust, expressive sound experience for your audience, audio processing is another important thing to consider.
Choose editing software which gives you a powerful set of tools for processing and punching up your sound right on your own timeline, instead of going to outside software to do the job. They say sound is 70% of what you see – make sure you’re getting great audio!
Is your professional editing suite going to run effectively on the equipment you currently have, or will you need to upgrade? To take full advantage of everything your software offers, and to get the best performance from professional-level video, you may want to consider moving up to a higher-end computer rig.
Depending on the type of work you do, options for export could be a decisive factor in your software choice. Most professional options will allow you to export in the web-friendly H.264 codec, or allow you to directly upload to trendy video sharing services like YouTube or Facebook. Look for software which supports the kind of exports you’ll most likely be doing.
Here’s a key list of features we believe are the top things to look for in a powerful video editing system. Simultaneously we introduce you an editing powerhouse that ticks all those boxes, and more!
It’s finally here. After years of listening to the passionate, loyal VEGAS Pro user base, we are proud to announce the release of VEGAS Pro 17.
- Many new features, and over 30 of them come directly from user feedback.
- Nested timelines provide the power to better organize complex and long-form projects.
- The Color Grading Panel streamlines your workflow in a quick, efficient, logical process that is cohesive, comprehensive, and easy to use.
- Leader in HDR editing, now including HLD support with a beggining-to-end workflow including HDR preview and delivery, all within the latest ACES 1.1 color space.
- For incredibilily smooth slow motion, optical flow technology analyzes your footage and creates intermediary frames for glass-smooth slomo.
- And with the GPU accelerated decoding for AVC and HEVC, timeline playback is smoother and quicker.
Each user has a unique creative style. Whatever yours is, VEGAS PRO works with you as a creative partner.
As a professional, you look for software with offers the features you want at a price range you’re comfortable with. Ideally that is developed by an established, dependable company that might offer better reliability, tech support as well as regular updates with new features. Naturally you want also to pick software designed for your operating system of choice.
Non-Linear Editors (NLEs) allow you to edit video in any order you want, for a fast, efficient workflow tailored to your own needs and preferences. They also work non-destructively, so your raw media files are unchanged no matter what you do on the editing timeline.
Nobody edits faster than a passionate creative with VEGAS Pro at hand. The timeline editing tools make editing fast and easy.
Provides the user the ability to have more than one timeline in a single project, so users can organize their projects into several timelines and then "nest" inside the main timeline.
You can then organize projects and speed up your workflow. Move easily between timelines within the master project, or access your nested timelines as stand-alone projects to work on them independently. This will make it possible for users to organize and work more effectively with long-form projects.
With storyboarding you can quickly create rough cuts and alternative sequences, making the whole production work fast and easily executed. The work you do in the main timeline storyboarding is dynamically reflected in the project timeline.
Dynamic storyboard and timeline interaction are improved in VEGAS pro and go way beyond what competitors are doing. Take your rough cutting to the next level by creating separate storyboards for each nested timeline in your project.
With so many new cameras shooting in logarithmic color profiles for post-production color correction or grading, choose an NLE with a robust set of color correction tools.
Here VEGAS is able to compete with the best in the market. Take your color grading and correction to the next level with the new unified workflow in the Color Grading panel. It brings together the most important color grading tools and presents them to the user in an easy-to-discover, easy-to-use manner, with great flexibility and power. Import and export LUTs, adjust colors with color wheels and curves, and much more.
This concept has been used in photography for years, but modern video cameras have begun offering increased support for HDR video.
VEGAS is a leader in HDR support among all competitors and supports it natively. Powerful, professional-level color grading tools empower you to do your best work, and the color grading workflow in VEGAS Pro provides fast, flexible options for everything you need to do. Get that final perfect look for your film, even in HDR.
From something as simple as mapping a video to the side of a building in another video, to creating crazy distorted video effects, the possibilities are endless.
VEGAS Pro includes a fun tool for interesting special effects, which can also be useful for correcting lens and other distortion problems. The Mesh Warp Tool allows you to distort an image, or portion of an image, using a highly customizable grid comprising of nodes and lines.
With high-frame-rate cameras, viewers are getting more and more used to seeing super-smooth slow motion. Editors are demanding the ability to create the same effect using normal frame rates. In the past, you’d have to go to third-party software to achieve it, but now, you can have it right in your NLE.
With carefully-crafted proprietary optical flow technology, VEGAS Pro creates new video frames to fill in between actual frames and give you incredibly smooth slow motion, even with 24 or 25 fps footage.
Enjoy powerfull video editing and robust multitrack audio in real time on unlimited tracks for the most demanding productions. No other NLE provides a digital audio workstation feature set as robust as the tools in VEGAS Pro - a complete audio environment with tools for professional audio editing.
When working with very high-resolution video, you want an NLE which can leverage your GPU’s hardware performance for playing back, scrubbing, and pre-rendering your timeline.
VEGAS harnesses the power of GPU processing from the most popular graphics cards to accelerate rendering of popular AVC and HEVC formats, giving you up to twice the render speed. This critical update is key to supporting, higher-resolution files, RAW files, and other formats that require heavy processing.
When working with older, less-powerful editing rigs, this feature automatically generates low-resolution proxies for smooth performance on your timeline.
Modern productions push the limits with higher and higher resolutions. VEGAS Pro supports up to 8K files from beginning to final delivery by generating proxies, so now you can deliver stunningly high resolution files for super-large format projection or any other high-resolution need.
Many high-end cameras these days record in ProRes format for high-quality video. You want to work smoothly with ProRes video files straight out of high-end cameras, so you can use the footage straight from the camera without having to transcode to a different format first.
VEGAS Pro gives you a leg up on other NLEs with full support of ProRes for improved editing performance.
VEGAS Pro 17 Edit
- NEW: Nested Timelines
- NEW: Complete HDR Color Support
- NEW: Optical-Flow Slow Motion
- NEW: Planar Motion Tracking
- NEW: GPU accelerated decoding for AVC/HEVC
VEGAS Pro 17
- NEW: Nested Timelines
- NEW: Complete HDR Color Support
- NEW: Optical-Flow Slow Motion
- NEW: Planar Motion Tracking
- NEW: GPU accelerated decoding for AVC/HEVC
- NEW: Boris FX Continuum Lens Flare 3D
- VEGAS DVD Architect
- World-class Video stabilization
VEGAS Pro 17 Suite
- NEW: Nested Timelines
- NEW: Complete HDR Color Support
- NEW: Optical-Flow Slow Motion
- NEW: Planar Motion Tracking
- NEW: GPU accelerated decoding for AVC/HEVC
- VEGAS DVD Architect
- World-class Video stabilization
- NEW: SpectraLayers Pro 6
- NEW: Boris FX Continuum 3D Objects Unit
- NEW: Boris FX Continuum Key and Blend Unit
- NEW: Boris FX Continuum Lights Unit (includes Lens Flare 3D)
- C$250 discount
- Included as part of this offer:
- NewBlue Transitions 5 Flow (C$139 value)
- C$450 discount
- Included as part of this offer:
- NewBlue Transitions 5 Flow (C$139 value)
- C$550 discount
- Included as part of this offer:
- NewBlue Transitions 5 Flow (C$139 value)