Competition among low-cost video-editing software has been hotting up in recent months, but Avid Studio and CyberLink PowerDirector couldn't quite knock Vegas Movie Studio Platinum off its A-List pedestal. Now it's Sony's turn to put Platinum even further ahead.
Its close ties to Vegas Pro are demonstrated by the arrival of 3D editing. The implementation is closely based on that of Vegas Pro, although Platinum doesn't include 3D Track Motion for rotating and animating media in 3D space. As such, it's more of a platform for editing clips from a twin-lens 3D camera, rather than creating 3D effects from scratch. There's a simple 3D effect that can be used to raise text out from the screen, but otherwise, 3D footage passes through the editor much like conventional 2D footage.
This isn’t a criticism, though. Format support is comprehensive, and so too are preview options, with red/green anaglyph glasses included in the box and support for Nvidia 3D Vision displays. 3D export options include 1080p uploads to YouTube, complete with the necessary tags for the 3D effect to be handled correctly.
It's even possible to generate a disc that conforms to the 3D Blu-ray standard. This uses independent, full-resolution video streams for the left and right eyes; other editors simply generate standard Blu-ray discs with the 3D effect rendered as a split-screen or anaglyph. However, 3D Blu-ray authoring is possible directly only from the timeline (the accompanying DVD Architect Studio software is unchanged in this release), so these discs lack menus. They're also restricted to two fixed render templates – 720/60p and 1080/24p. The Blu-ray 3D specification also supports 720/50p video, and its omission here could be annoying for European users.
A new Titles & Text editor introduces 24 animations with names such as Fly in, Action Flip and Earthquake. They look smart but they're not the easiest to incorporate into a project. Animations are picked from a dropdown list, but adjusting their pace or combining different ones for text as it appears and disappears is clumsy and unintuitive. The old system, whereby static text objects are animated using the same Pan/Crop controls used for video, has its limitations – most significantly, the inability to animate individual characters – but at least the controls are straightforward and consistent with the rest of the software. That method of working is still available, though.
While the Animations dropdown list is a little crude, animating other parameters – the text colour, position, drop shadow and so on – is more sophisticated. It's done using keyframes but, unlike Vegas Platinum's effects, the Titles & Text editor has individual keyframe lanes for each parameter, plus Bezier curve-based editing. This makes it easy to animate a text object's size and position, for example, without clogging up the colour parameter with redundant keyframes.
It's a feature we've been imploring Sony to implement for years, so it's great to see it finally included, even if it's only for the Titles & Text editor and the new 3D effect. We hope Sony gets around to converting all the other effects to this system soon.
For us, preview performance is the single most important measure of a video-editing package's success. Vegas Platinum was already a leader in this area, playing back four simultaneous AVCHD streams in our standard test on a Core i7-870 PC. However, version 10 was considerably less successful at handling QuickTime 1080p AVC files from digital SLR cameras; one stream would play smoothly but overlaying two resulted in lots of dropped frames. For version 11, preview performance for these files is transformed. We tested using footage from a Canon EOS 600D and Nikon D7000 and managed smooth playback of four simultaneous streams.
That's a fantastic improvement, but it's disappointing that Vegas Platinum is still only available as a 32-bit application. Vegas Pro 10 comes in both 32- and 64-bit builds, and the latter gives a significant boost to preview performance in our tests.
Version 11 also introduces GPU-accelerated AVC encoding, with support for both Nvidia CUDA and ATI Stream technology. Whether this delivers faster encoding depends on the specific processor and graphics card – with our Core i7-870 and Nvidia GeForce GTX 275, encoding was actually about 50% slower. Frustratingly, the software used GPU rendering by default, and overriding this involved some serious rummaging through advanced settings. A representative from Sony told us the software should automatically choose the fastest method, and admitted that the feature may require additional fine-tuning.
Another frustration is that Vegas Platinum still lacks background rendering to help deliver smooth previews of complex sections of the timeline, or a proxy file system for substituting HD footage with SD copies to speed up performance while editing. These features make a big difference to rival packages' performance on slower hardware or when combining lots of effects and overlays. The introduction of GPU-based rendering would have been the perfect opportunity to implement these features, letting the graphics card produce background and proxy files while the main processor got on with editing. As it stands Vegas Platinum's preview performance is excellent, but these features would raise it even further.
There's a smattering of smaller improvements, including the ability to apply effects to individual audio objects, plus an improved Render As dialog box that helps users find export templates that match the project's settings. Overall, though, this is only an essential upgrade for those working with QuickTime AVC or 3D footage.
Then again, we've no qualms about keeping Vegas Platinum in our A-List. The improvements aren't as dramatic as we'd hoped for but this is still the most elegant, streamlined and rewarding editor available for less than £100.
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