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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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, making it possible for users to organize and work more effectively with long-form projects.
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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)
- Included as part of this offer:
- Boris FX Sapphire 2020 Render Unit (C$389 value)
- NEW! wizardFX Suite (C$53.99 value)
- Included as part of this offer:
- NEW! Boris FX BCC Optical Diffusion Unit (C$409 value)
- NEW! wizardFX Suite (C$53.99 value)
- Included as part of this offer:
- Boris FX Sapphire 2020 Render Unit (C$389 value)
- NEW! wizardFX Suite (C$53.99 value)
- Included as part of this offer:
- NEW! Boris FX BCC Optical Diffusion Unit (C$409 value)
- NEW! wizardFX Suite (C$53.99 value)
- Included as part of this offer:
- Boris FX Sapphire 2020 Render Unit (C$389 value)
- NEW! wizardFX Suite (C$53.99 value)
- Included as part of this offer:
- NEW! Boris FX BCC Optical Diffusion Unit (C$409 value)
- NEW! wizardFX Suite (C$53.99 value)
- Color Grading & Correction
- Understanding Color Grading vs. Color Correction
- Guide for Professional Color Grading
- Video Scopes for Accurate Color Correction
- Color Grading Panel for a Powerful Workflow
- Easy and Quick Color Correction & Color Grading with LUT
- Build Atmosphere with Filter & Effect
- How to Fix Image That's Too Dark or Bright
- Get More Details with HDR Color Grading
- Set Your White Balance Right for Effective Color Correction
- Special Effects & Image Editing
- Must-know Video Effects to Add Your Videos
- Guide to Chroma Key & Green Screen
- Types of Transitions & When to Use Them
- How to Add Motion Blur in Video
- Blurry Image Is Not Always Bad. Here's Why!
- 3 Techniques to Help You Have a Clean Key
- Remove Spill and Blocky Artifacts from Green Screen Footage
- Slow Down or Speed Up Video Footage
- 5 Advanced VFX Edit You See in Superhero Movies
- Video Editing & Workflow
- Get Inspired with Creative Cuts & Transitions
- Video Editing Tips to Edit like a Pro
- Flexible Storyboards for Efficient Workflow
- Motion Tracking and Video Stabilization
- Rescue Unusable Video Footage with Stabilization
- Make & Edit a Killer YouTube Video
- Storyboards: Make it Easy to Build Your Story
- Pro Audio Effects for Pro-level Sound Editing
- Fundamentals of Video Editing for Beginners
- How to Make Your Own Movie in Easy Steps
- How & When to Use Jump Cut Editing
- Record Your Screen for YouTube Video Tutorials
- Make Video Collage and Animate with Track Motion Tool
- Create 3D Moving Poster with Mesh Warp
- Split Screen Video with Crop Effect Tool
- Overlay Image on Video — News-Style
- How to Reverse a Video - It’s Easy, Fast, and Simple
- How Keyframe Helps Creating Stunning VFX
- Combine Multiple Clips Together Into One Video
- Creative Match Cut Examples for Better Storytelling
- Create Fun, Effective Text, Titles & Roll Credits
- Change Video Orientation (Rotate or Flip)
- Convert MOV to MP4
- 25 New Cool Text Animations
- Freeze Part of Your Footage for Dramatic Flair
- Learn Motion Tracking for Endless Possibilities
- Bézier Mask to Create Seamless Composites
- J-Cut vs. L-Cut Editing | How-To with Example
- How Nested Timeline Helps You Keep Organized
- Make Holiday Photos More Lively with Slideshow Creator
- Slideshow Creator Tool for Easy Video Montage
- Choosing your Software
- Find the Best Professional Video Software
- Best Video Editing Solution for Windows
- Best Solutions for Home Users & Aspiring Pros
- The Right Video Software from Beginner to Pro
- Video Editing Software for Beginners & Intermediates
- Video Editing Software for Professionals
- Video Editing & Post-Production Software
- Video Effects Software with Pro Effects
- Video Editor Comparison: VEGAS Movie Studio VS. Filmora9
- Video Editor Comparison: VEGAS Pro VS. Adobe Premiere Pro
- Video Editor Comparison: VEGAS Pro VS. DaVinci Resolve