Vegas Pro is a comprehensive, all in one post production “must have” NLE companion with everything you need to create high end projects. I have used Vegas Pro for more than ten years and yes, I am a Mac user, and yes, I have had Windows partition with BootCamp from day one on my MacBook Pro only for VEGAS PRO as that is my backpack studio. I use Vegas Pro a lot for my independent filmmaking, music and corporate videos and I’m quite happy with it because it gives me so much latitude and it is a truly comprehensive all in one set of tools that actually lets you finish the whole project from the beginning to the end within one software package. Really amazing!

This video was edited with Vegas Pro 14 on Mac using Bootcamp. Vegas Pro 14 is a Windows only application.

Vegas Pro will give you the ability to effectively tell the story, edit and grade the footage, color correct it, do audio editing and sound mix (5.1 and 7.1), without leaving the Vegas Pro timeline and with all of the goodies and VTS effects that you can find in the big 3 editing software and ProTools. And of course you can master the whole thing in whatever format you need and Vegas Pro has all of the existing audio / video codecs built in.

Something that always impresses me with Vegas Pro NLE is the speed with which you can accomplish certain tasks. Also, project rendering speed (exporting) in VEGAS Pro on the laptop is remarkable. It’s always hard to make direct comparisons, since rendering varies greatly according to the hardware, the video output format, the selected options and the video resolution, but I encourage you to try it out. Yet another reason I like Vegas Pro is that I can use it virtually anywhere without adding any additional equipment and have speed and tools at any location.

There is also full support for high definition and high frame-rate video formats. Another cool thing in Vegas Pro 14 is the ability to effectively “upscale” lower resolution video clips to improve their appearance when viewed in a higher resolution project. There is full support of Black Magic and RED Digital cameras and rendering in H265/HEVC video formats. I often use 4K and 5K out of the RED (dragon) camera and drop them directly from my SSD onto my timeline and it works great and it saves me a lot of time; no proxies needed. Which brings me to another Vegas Pro feature – the Video Preview which lets you set quality of your preview in real-time without pre rendering anything on your timeline; this is extremely useful if you are working like me with original media files or don’t have time to create proxies.

In this episode I go over some basic elements in Vegas Pro to get you familiar with the workspace and default layout. However, something you will not see in this introductory segment is how fluid and flexible it is to change the workspace any way you want and for it to fit your way of working and navigating. Through this short series I will re-create the trailer for my short film FINAL STOP, which was shot on the RED dragon in 5K and it was cut and mastered in Vegas Pro, and we will go through the whole process of putting it together, so you will see how I utilized Vegas Pro features.

You can watch the finished FINAL STOP trailer here.