Video Secrets: Finding the best professional editing software for you

Why invest in professional video editing software?

Looking for the right professional video software for your business? Trying to decide between free and paid software? If you‘re new to video editing, we’re here to help you understand the benefits of investing in a high-end video editing solution. Numerous options exist which offer some incredible features and benefits. However, it’s important to know how to choose the right program that suits 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.

Video formats

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 will work 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.

Performance

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.

Professional software will also leverage your computer’s graphic card for additional power. It's definitely wise to take advantage of hardware acceleration technology to enhance real-time performance and shorten rendering times for certain formats.

Editing

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, effects design, storyboard, timeline interaction, and authoring editing tools definitely make professional video production accessible for everyone.

Audio editing

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 that 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!

Export considerations

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.

Hardware

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.

Key advantages of professional video editing software

Workflow flexibility

An advantage of professional software is its flexibility – most consumer software limits you to a set number of video and audio tracks, while professional software usually allows for unlimited tracks, giving you the power you need to edit the way you want.

Timeline or Storyboard flexibility

Professional editing software often lets you use nested timelines, meaning you can work on a section of video independently of the main project, and bring that sequence into the project like any other clip. You remain free to edit that segment at will, and it updates itself in the main project!

Storyboards also allow for an easy way to pre-edit your video, with changes appearing automatically in the main timeline, so it’s there when you’re ready to start fine-tuning the edit.

Native color grading tools

Consumer or free editing software usually only comes with basic color-correcting tools, if any at all, so if you want to get a good color grade for your footage, you have to go elsewhere.

Professional NLEs have powerful suites of color grading tools included, so whether you want to correct color problems, create stylish looks, or even concentrate on changing a single color in your image, you’ll have what you need.

Visual effects

Professional software includes a wide array of pro-level VFX tools for compositing and image manipulation to match your vision. Consumer and free software tend to have much more limited options.

Rendering power

While consumer and free usually only utilize your computer’s CPU when rendering effects or final videos, professional software often takes advantage of the latest technologies to leverage all of your computer’s hardware, like your graphics card. A powerful GPU can give you much faster and much smoother renders than you’d get using only the CPU.

In short, choosing professional software over consumer or free software gives you far more flexibility, far more productivity, and far more power to unlock your creative energies and take your videos to the ultimate level.

And now that you know exactly what to look for, it’s time to introduce an editing powerhouse that ticks all those boxes, and more!

What to look for when choosing a video editing software?

Here’s a key list of features we believe are the top things to look for in a powerful video editing system.

Nested timelines that provides the power to better organize complex and long-form projects.
Color Grading Panel that streamlines your workflow in a quick, efficient, logical process that is cohesive, comprehensive, and easy to use.
HDR editing, including HLG support with a beginning-to-end workflow including HDR preview and delivery.
Optical flow technology that analyzes your footage and creates intermediary frames for for incredibly smooth slow motion.
GPU accelerated decoding for AVC and HEVC to make timeline playback smoother and quicker.

Everyone has a unique creative style. And after years of listening to the passionate, loyal VEGAS Pro user base, we’ve developed a solution that caters to all the needs of a professional video editor.

Introducing VEGAS Pro 17 Your best professional video editing software

Learn more

Editing. Work smarter, not harder.

A multitude of powerful video editing tools is important as they make professional video production accessible for everyone. But more importantly, they bring out your creativity, because ideas flow freely when you're not preoccupied with clumsy editing tools.

NLE (Non-Linear Editors)

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.

Nested timelines

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, making it possible for users to organize and work more effectively with long-form projects.

Dynamic storyboard & timeline interaction

Using storyboards, you can quickly create rough cuts and alternative sequences, making the whole production faster and easier. 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.

All Editing Features

Color Grading. Simple as a brush.

Powerful, professional-level color grading tools empower you to do your best work, providing the final perfect look of your film.

Native color correction tools

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 Pro competes 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.

HDR

This concept has been used in photography for years, but modern video cameras have begun offering increased support for HDR video.

VEGAS Pro 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, all in HDR. Get that final perfect look for your film in HDR!

All Color Grading Features

Visual effects. Captivate your viewers.

Add more creativity to your videos with amazing video effects! You should have all the room you need to get as creative as you want turning your travel footageinto amazing videos and truly cinematic experiences .

Mesh Warp

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.

Slow motion

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.

All Visual Effect Features

Audio Editing. Set the tone.

A great film needs great sound to underscore and intensify your visuals and create a moving auditory experience for your audience. Audio production, graphics, effects production, and other different elements are used in creating professional-grade videos.

Multitrack audio environment

Enjoy powerful 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 all built directly into the main timeline.

Extensive audio effects

VEGAS Pro supports standard VST interfaces. You can apply effects to tracks, individual events on a track, auxiliary audio buses and the Master Bus. Choose from more than 40 included signal and effects processing tools and automate effects with real-time envelope control.

All Audio Editing Features

Final Delivery. Render, don't surrender.

All your hard work would mean nothing without the ability to deliver it in the formats you need...and as quickly as possible.

GPU Acceleration

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.

Native proxy support

When working with older, less-powerful editing rigs, this feature enables you to generate 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 automatically generating proxies, so now you can deliver stunningly high-resolution files for super-large format projection or any other high-resolution need.

AVCHD or MTS

Many high-end cameras these days record in AVCHD video format (Advanced Video Codec High Definition) for high-quality video. You want to work smoothly with AVCHD 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 AVCHD for improved editing performance.