Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9

Customer Reviews

Average Customer Review




Very Efficient, Doesn't Crash, October 22, 2009
By Daniel Limbach (Algonquin, IL United States)
I've used many video editing programs, from Ulead/Corel Video Studio, Pinnacle Studio, Windows Movie Maker, and Adobe Premiere.

Throw out Movie Maker unless you are only looking to do basic editing to the wmv format.

Most editing programs are resource hogs. They cripple even fast multi-core systems. Sony is the only program that doesn't seem to bog down the system while editing. Previews are fast. Effects are in real-time. I use a Dell notebook with a Core 2 Duo 1.8GHz processor and 2GB RAM. Vegas works like butta.

Renders are still time pigs, but that is to be expected.

Perhaps the top benefit of Sony Vegas 9 is it does not crash. How annoying is it when your editor crashes in the middle of working on a project? Ugh. Sony Vegas is solid. It's worth it for peace of mind alone.

My next PC will have an Intel i7 chip running Windows 7 Pro 64, 9GB RAM, a 320GB+ hard drive for the OS, programs, and personal files, and at least a 1 TB internal hard drive just for photos and video projects. E-SATA will allow me to add more fast drives in the future.

Sony Vegas will be my editor of choice in this system.



ALL that work for NOTHING!, October 4, 2009
By W. LEE (poconos)
I quit using Mac Final Cut Pro products, sicne Apple likes to sell you add on after add on. Sony Vegas was my choice for a replacement,a s I had read nothing but glowing reviews. of course, I shoot HD and so do alot of other pros. I was under the impression that this product was just what I needed. After all, Apple products didn't have the right codec to capture footage from my Canon XH a1 camera. I downloaded the trial version,and walah! It worked like a charm. Nirvana I thought! That is until I tried to render a final product for output to DVD, tape, web, heck, I'd even settle for a render to my hard drive. Well, I guess my honeymoon has just ended. And after going to the SONY site--not an Amazon page of glowing reviews, ah the truth! SONY VEGAS 9 PALTINUM has a major flaw: if you have HD footage, rendering a final project is hit or miss! Hit or miss? After capturing 19 hours of footage, and spending a week traveling the edit learning curve of the software, I can't get a final project? What!? Are you kidding me? After sacking my Mac G5 dual core, and upgrading to a Quad Core 8GB beast, especially made for video editing and gaming? Yes sir kiddos, unlike the happy go lucky folks writing the glowing reviews on this page, I go the real deal. You might want to go to the Sony site before your purchase, and don't make the mistake I did-buying after "user reviews" on this Amazon review page. I assume Sony execs troll these pages and drop in these wildly enthusiastic reviews. Maybe they need to spend more time making sure their products work. Anyway, last night. 12 hours of editing..Up until 5am working on edit, then discovered some wonderful software issues which brought the proceedings to a halt: I COULDN'T RENDER THE PROJECT. So, If I want people to see my masterpiece, I guess I'll have to invite all of them over to watch it on my computer screen because it ain't going anywhere!! Isn't it nice to buy two new computers only to find that the freaking software is the issue? Sometimes having the best equipment is trumped by idiot software companies who make incompetent products!Yeah, its pretty telling when their support forums are 100 deep with people complaining about the same thing, and the only people on the forum are people with the same issue. Of course there's always a "fix coming". And, there are always recommended codecs and fixes, but I didn't spend all this money on software to be told to go to a third party fix. Pathetic ain't the word buddy! What a mess!




Skip Pinnacle and Nero and BUY THIS instead!, September 24, 2009
By William W. Davis (Boca Raton, FL USA)
I am just a guy who has probably 200 hours of video on 8mm tape, mini DV tape, and now, mini HDV tape. All I've ever wanted in life is a video editor that wouldn't crash, burn, corrupt, and actually do what it's supposed to do. And never, ever, add a bunch of garbage utilites and programs to my computer that I don't need (yes, I'm talking to you, Pinnacle).

Score! Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum actually does what it's supposed to do - and my computer hasn't crashed, either!

I'm a graduate student, and I just finished making a 12-minute video using this product. I'm pretty pleased that although I have had NO training on using video editing software, this software package is intuitive enough that whenever I wonder what to do, often times I'll guess, and lo-and-behold, it works. I've accessed the Help file a few times, but mostly it's just been trial-and-error, and most of the trials have worked as I'd expect them to work. Whatever is frustrating to me now, I assume it's because I really have no idea how to do video editing.

I like that it lets me use 4 audio tracks, but I do wish it would let me use more. It's easy to find that you need more than just 4 audio tracks when you're doing a video with background music, narration, sound effects, more. Note: this product came with Sound Forge audio editor, and Sound Forge only lets you work with a single audio track -- it's not a mixer.

Having separate tracks for video worked well, too. I was able to add text labels as needed. The labels had some handy, easy-to-set features like shadowing and color fill, all of which were customizable. The one thing I thought this lacked was an ability to use text animation. Maybe it can do that, but if so, it's not apparent to me. So, the image text is static on the video.

I *loved* the way you could easily fade in/out anything -- audio, video, text. Very intuitive (drag the upper corners of the storyboard segment you're working with). I liked, too, how easy it was to increase or decrease the volume of an audio track. SoundForge was great for adding some light reverb so it my narration is more full-sounding (though on my video, I still added too much reverb). So many settings from which to choose, if you knew what you were doing, you could make a killer video!

I also liked that when I made a change to, say, and audio track, the program would open the audio track for editing as a "Take 2" version automatically. I didn't have to mess with saving to a separate filename. It also took my "Take 2" version and just inserted into my project without me having to do that.

This thing generates music! I used several program-generated music tracks in my video. When I needed to resize the music background to make it longer or shorter, it was easy to regenerate the music once more. The music it generates is terrific, and there are a ton of choices (although I thought a ton more would have been nice to have, as I still had to go outside this product to find a music track that was "just right" for my project).

All of these features would be meaningless if the program wasn't stable. But it is. Never had it crash yet. With Pinnacle, I was encountering problems within the first hour I tried using it.

This program also works with High-Def video. In fact, you control HDV cameras directly from within the tool (if you're using just mini DV, you have to use a separate utility to handle the import). To import from my Canon HDV camcorder, it was as simple as plugging in FireWire and clicking File, Import Media. Simple!

I'm actually not a fan of Sony products -- they're overpriced for the quality you think you're getting -- but Sony did right by putting Vegas together. I think it's the best video editor for a Windows-based computer.



AVCHD Nirvana, September 23, 2009
By JOHN DIMICELI (Annapolis, MD United States)
I am in AVCHD nirvana. After walking through the shadow of AVCHD death, I have finally arrived. And what a journey it has been! After several programs, PCs, MACs, and months of dead ends, it has been a pleasure to work with a program that does not crash or produce substandard results.

I bought a fairly high end PC for the very purpose of editing 1080 AVCHD movies from our Canon HF-10: Dell Studio XPS 435T, i7 cpu, 12gb ram, 64 bit Vista, 1TB hard drive, ATI Radeon HD 4800 w/1gb ram, blu-ray writable etc. My early experiences were nothing short of disaster. Hard as I tried, I could not get Adobe Premier Elements to do ANYTHING reliably. The program literally failed to work during every phase of development. Simply scrolling the file using the horizontal scroll bar caused the program to terminate. The loss of whole projects that became corrupt and failed to load became the last straw. (Read my Amazon review of Premier Elements).

We bought a Mac but that only traded one set of problems for another. Macs will work (reluctantly) with AVCHD files but the straw the broke this camel's back was that while both iMovie and Final Cut Express (yes, I bought that too in a vain attempt at video success) will convert AVCHD files, they will NOT work with files that have been previously offloaded from the camera (caveats here too, but our situation still prevented their use). So we bought Toast 10 and THAT was supposed to save us...until the audio de-synced about two seconds rendering the output unusable. We ventured into video conversion products that left our pristine 1080 movies looking jaggedy and blurry. Then on to de-interlace programs ad nauseum. By this time I was totally frustrated and dejected over our inability to do anything with our Canon movies. Our Mac is one beautiful machine but even IT could not save us.

My first experience with Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9 was also a dismal failure (frequent lockups and program shut downs)...until I discovered a gem of recommendation on an online forum that changed everything. By changing the memory flags of key m2ts program DLLs to allow them to use more than 2gb of memory, all the lockups went away. Imagine my delight when I produced three back-to-back blu-ray discs without a single lockup or failure OF ANY SORT... its like using a program THAT WORKS... how refreshing! Using a program called CFF Explorer, I changed the settings on these files: vegas80.exe, m2tsplug.dll, mcstdh264dec.dll, and sonymvd2pro_xp.dll (please Google it to verify and get all the instructions) and configured Sony Vegas to use the full 1920x1080 etc and it worked!

I could quibble over the interface and the idiosyncracies of Sony Vegas Movie Studio, but I'm not going to. The whole video editing experience has been so bad that frankly, I'm just glad the thing works. Now we have crystal clear, jagged edge-free, perfectly synced audio movies that were the whole reason for buying the Canon HF-10. Thanks Sony for producing a quality product.



Sony Vegas, September 15, 2009
By Casey Ginther
Very Good program with excellent capabilities, Although I have noticed it is not compatible with some rare types of movie files and have had some problems with .avi movies as well.