VEGAS Pro
Description
I have a weird loyalty to VEGAS Pro that I can’t really explain. I started using it back when it was still called Sony Vegas, probably around version 11 or 12, because a friend that edited skateboarding videos swore by it. I tried Premiere a couple of times since then. I tried DaVinci Resolve. I even messed around with Final Cut for a week on a borrowed MacBook. And I keep coming back to VEGAS, partly out of muscle memory and partly because the timeline still seems more intuitive to me than anything else on the market.
Quick history for anyone who doesn’t know: VEGAS began as an audio editor developed by Sonic Foundry in the late 1990s, and later became a full video editing suite. Sony purchased it in 2003 and operated it for more than a decade. Then in 2016, the entire thing was bought by MAGIX — a German software company. That ownership shuffle left a lot of longtime users nervous, and, honestly, the first couple of MAGIX-era releases were rough. Buggy, felt like they were working out the codebase. But the more recent versions, especially from version 20 onwards, have been a real comeback. The latest builds feel polished in ways that Sony-era VEGAS frankly never did.
The editing workflow is where VEGAS has always stood apart. The timeline is drag-and-drop in a way that is almost reckless compared to Premiere — you grab a clip, throw it on the track, trim it by dragging the edges, and crossfades happen automatically when clips overlap. No need to choose a tool, no razor blade icon, no separate trim mode. You just grab things and move them. It sounds messy and I have accidentally rippled whole projects by clicking in the wrong place, but once your hands get the hang of the shortcuts it is genuinely the quickest rough cut workflow I have used. I edited a 45 minute documentary on VEGAS and the assembly cut took half a day. A colleague doing similar work in Premiere said it took him almost twice that.
Color grading used to be one of the weak spots in VEGAS, but the last few versions closed that gap significantly. The color grading panel is now embedded in the timeline workflow, so you can adjust curves, wheels and LUTs without switching to a separate workspace. It is not quite DaVinci Resolve level — nothing is — but for the kind of work that most YouTubers and independent filmmakers are doing, it gets the job done without needing a second application. They also added ACES 1.3 and OpenColorIO support, which is important if you are dealing with LOG footage from cinema cameras and want a proper color pipeline.
The multicam editing feature is one of those things I did not appreciate until I had to use it. I did a three-camera interview last year, and synced the feeds within VEGAS and cut between the camera angles in real time by simply clicking the preview of each camera while playing the footage. The entire process took perhaps twenty minutes for a forty-minute interview. It was almost too easy, as if I was cheating somehow.
Now, the problems. VEGAS crashes. Not all the time, not every time, but often enough that you get into the habit of hitting Ctrl+S every ninety seconds like a nervous tic. I have lost work to unexpected freezes at least three or four times over the years, and every time it happened during a render, which is the worst possible time. The stability has improved with the recent updates and enabling GPU acceleration via DirectX 11/12 does seem to help, but I wouldn’t say it’s rock-solid. If you are the type of person that leaves a project open for eight hours straight while working on other things, save constantly.
The AI features that MAGIX has been adding is a mixed bag. The automated masking and subject tracking works reasonably well for simple shots but falls apart on anything with fast movement or multiple overlapping subjects. The text to speech and speech to text tools work but are not as accurate as dedicated transcription services. It feels like MAGIX is checking the AI box because every software company has to right now and some of these tools will probably mature over the next couple of versions. For now I use them occasionally and do not rely on them.
Pricing is actually one of the strongest arguments of VEGAS. You can subscribe from around $20 a month for VEGAS Pro Edit or pay $199 for a perpetual license that you own forever. The Suite version, which includes both SOUND FORGE and ACID as well as additional effects and stock footage, is $299 perpetual. Compare that to Premiere Pro, which locks you into a Creative Cloud subscription with no perpetual option at all, and the value proposition becomes clear pretty fast. For freelancers and small creators who don’t want to pay Adobe rent every month for the rest of their careers, VEGAS is one of the few professional-grade alternatives that allow you to buy once and walk away.
The biggest honest downside is ecosystem. Premiere has After Effects. DaVinci has Fusion built in. VEGAS has. Integration of Boris FX and some bundled plugins that are decent but not industry-standard. If you need heavy motion graphics or compositing, you are going to need another application regardless, and the bridge between VEGAS and third-party tools is not as seamless as the Adobe pipeline. This is the main reason VEGAS never fully broke into film and television post-production — the surrounding infrastructure just is not there.
Should you use it? If you are a YouTuber, a wedding videographer, an indie filmmaker, or anyone who edits video on a regular basis, but doesn’t need the full Adobe ecosystem, VEGAS Pro is an underrated choice that punches well above its price. If you work at a studio that already has Premiere and After Effects on every workstation, switching would cause more friction than it resolves. But if you are starting fresh and want a capable NLE without a subscription hanging over your head, give the 30-day trial a shot. The timeline alone may convert you.
