Magix Vegas 17 Review

[Mike Martin]

I'm taking a page from our friend Craig Anderton and I'm going to use the forum here to write a rather lengthy review. This review is going to happen in steps over the next few weeks, if you have questions I'll do my best to help - I'm also going to try to get some of the staff from Magix over here to answer questions too, if I can't answer them myself.

 

Vegas 17 from Magix, formally a Sony product but the legacy goes back to many of the products from Sonic Foundry. I worked at Sonic Foundry back in the day as the Director of Training. Sound Forge was (and in many ways still is) my weapon of choice for sample editing and I had the pleasure of traveling the country for a year teaching music store employees, musicians and producers, DJs and broadcasters and even law enforcement the capabilities of Sound Forge. I was at Sonic Foundry right up until the launch of ACID which was a game-changing product at the time - I left Sonic Foundry for a job at Kurzweil Music Systems.

 

Vegas has been a multi-media editor of choice of mine since the beginning. Certainly a ton of familiarity for me simply due to the amount of time I spent with Sound Forge and Acid. The workflow, appearance, shortcut keys are all very similar. So for me it has always been the easiest choice for video editing. Sony unfortunately let the Vegas product line go stagnant before Magix took over. Myself and I think many other Vegas users were looking for other solutions for a while. I've personally spent a lot of time using BlackMagic's Davinci Resolve the last couple years but kept finding myself coming back to Vegas when there was a more complicated edit.

 

Magix claims Vegas 17 is the "The fastest NLE. Vegas 17 brings a lot of new things to the table. For passionate creatives." Features include:

• Nested Timelines
  
• Unified Color Grading
  
• HLG HDR Color Support
  
• Optical-Flow Slow Motion
  
• GPU accelerated decoding for AVC/HEVC
  
• LUT Support
  
• Planar Motion Tracking
  
• Storyboard Support
  
• "Auto Looks"
  
• 8k Video
  
• Many new transition effects
  ....and much much more

 

Is it "The Fastest NLE". I think in some ways, yes it is. In some ways it may not be but I'll be doing some comparisons along the way.

 

Magix is offering a subscription pricing model called Vegas Pro 365. At $11.67 per month it is an easier pill to swallow compared to Adobe Premiere Pro which is $20.99 per month. Magix also has a Free Trial that may help you follow along with this review if you're interested.

 

I'll fully admit that video product is not my area of full expertise, that being said I've personally shot and edited almost everything Casio has produced in the last 11 years so I have enough working knowledge to be dangerous. That is where I'll leave it for now. Through this review I'll be editing the MPN Nashville Keyboard Summit which due to the way it was shot, has its challenges from an editing perspective. More on that soon...

 

[RichieP_MechE]

Looking forward to your review Mike! I'm pretty much a straight Premiere Pro user for editing at work (though I will use Resolve on occasion) but it will be interesting to see how this software works for your edit.

[J. Dan]

I'll be keeping an eye on this. For a while I had my eye on Vegas when it was Sony. Coincidentally, as an interim solution, I got a cheaper software from Magix pre-vegas. I believe it's something like Magix Movie Edit or something. Hard to say if it's my computer or the software - I AM running light on processor and memory. When I first installed it I did a few projects that worked well, but I've also had some crashes recently. Best I can tell, the things that are crashing it are when I try to bring in different formats of video. Seems like if I use an external converter to make sure EVERYTHING is exactly the same: size, resolution, frame rate, audio bit depth and sample rate, file format - it works. But it seems like if even the smallest thing is mismatched it locks up. Back when I got this and Vegas was part of Sony, they specifically advertised different formats, different timelines, etc.

 

So I would be interested not just in that, but if you have the ability to test it on the minimum specified requirements, both hardware and OS, I would be curious how it performs.

 

Also want to verify that there is an option to buy/install and that the ONLY option isn't subscription. I might use video editing heavily for a week or two a year. Don't want to pay monthly - that's a non-starter, unless I could only pay for the months I use it, which are few and far between.

[Mike Martin]

They definitely have non-subscription options.

 

As far as performance I'm running this on a i7 2.5GHz with 16MB RAM.

 

Based on past experience, Vegas products run well on slower systems. There is the option to choose resolution and quality for the "preview" window. The biggest issue I think you'll have is rendering time. While Magix / Vegas claims it is the "fastest" editor I would agree in many respects for the editing itself but definitely not for render time.

[Theo Verelst]

Apart from which handy edit interface facilities and deep technical montage tools, it interests me that only pro tools are going to give you the possibility to make high definition "film" with some professional results in the directions of color trueness, resolution use that gives a real feeling about dimensions, and even harder: making motion that can at least compete with 1940s cartoon movies, instead of all the lame "optimizers" and motion killers out there.

 

T