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[Humble Bundle] Vegas Pro Creative Frontier (Vegas Pro 19 Edit, Sound Forge Pro 15, Music Maker 2022 Prem) - €22.82

Kirean

By Kirean
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aidan o driscoll

aidan o driscoll

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6 minutes ago, Sistine said:

I would prefer the pints to the updates, really! ? 

There are so many updates that give more trouble and pain than joy IMHO. But YMMV! ?

I use and have been using Soundforge and Vegas pro from the 90s I would say. So good deal for me .. def better than 4 pints which I get from the offy any way rather than pub .. craft beers and IPAs etc

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PavlovsCat

PavlovsCat

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I can afford to spend the price for Cyberlink Director. It's a business expense, not for home movies. I want to produce a series of YouTube videos. Around 5-10 minutes  of stock footage, TV commercials, print ads, and voiceover (me). I've spent my career using agencies for video, but I'm not looking to go Mac and Premeire. I need something easy to use, that can deliver pro/polished results and that's easy to put together a collage, say of photos, videos edited together, along with a voiceover and music. 

Considering all of that, what do you guys think are the best choices? Is it still Vegas? 

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Kirean

Kirean

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10 minutes ago, PavlovsCat said:

Considering all of that, what do you guys think are the best choices? Is it still Vegas? 

I'd probably pick Vegas up for ~25 and see how it goes. However, I'd still vote for DaVinci as it is widely used in productions big and small, and it's free with a paid option if you ever need to get more features. It might have a slightly steeper learning curve at first, but once you figure out how to use one software it's not too hard to pick up another.

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Starship Krupa

Starship Krupa

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Hmm,

4 hours ago, Kirean said:

Vegas Pro 19 Edit (latest is 21)

Sound Forge Pro 15 (latest is 17)

Last HB issue of these was Vegas Pro Edit 18 and Sound Forge Audio Studio 16.

Worth it to me to update my Vegas to the later version. Odd to switch to Sound Forge Pro and drop it down a version.

28 minutes ago, PavlovsCat said:

what do you guys think are the best choices? Is it still Vegas?

Since you're coming from a DAW skill set and familiar with the paradigm, Vegas Pro is worthy of your consideration.

My video editing skills and needs are pretty light, and I find that Vegas scales down to my level while still potentially able to handle just about anything I can throw at it (although I haven't found a way to produce a slitscan effect). I know that I'll never outgrow it.

It's probably not the easiest to use, but I've found it to be the one that's easiest for me to remember how to use when I go a long time between video projects, because its workflow is so DAW-like. It began life as a DAW and there are still people who use it as one. Its main working area has video and audio tracks, and fades and trimming are performed in a similar fashion on audio and video clips. VFX can apply to an entire project, a track, or an individual clip, just like with audio clips.

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mettelus

mettelus

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+1, there are a lot of basic editors that have the DAW-like workflow to them. Even the Corel HumbleBundle is still alive (all current versions), which includes PaintShop Pro and AfterShot Pro that you may find useful for the picture work you want to do. All of the brushes in that bundle are for Particle Shop (plugin for PSP) or Painter (which is included for the top tier). Basically any editor with multiple tracks available will do what you are asking (which most have these days). If you do buy that one, spend the extra $0.51 to get Painter, since that is the most expensive software in that bundle.

While DaVinci Resolve (free) will do just about anything, I am always hesitant to recommend that to anyone new. You will spend a lot of time just learning the GUI, but if you invest that time, it is an incredibly capable program. It even asks you on install what workspace layout you prefer, and "like Adobe Premiere Pro" is one of the options. For someone new that can be overwhelming.

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Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann

Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann

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1 hour ago, PavlovsCat said:

Considering all of that, what do you guys think are the best choices? Is it still Vegas? 

I was a Vegas user for a long time, and used other similar editors from time to time. A friend who used to work in Pro Moviemaking & TV Commercials told me to forget about "Prosumer" level,  and switch to DaVinci Resolve. I first tried it on my PC which had a "decent" graphics card and I couldn't get it to work reliably. Then I got a new PC with a better graphics card. Resolve started working well and I haven't looked back.

The free version is generally more than enough for personal use. It has a pretty sizable amount of options and at first I did find the UI slightly less intuitive compared to Vegas, etc., but it was very easy finding tutorials on YouTube for pretty much everything I've wanted to do. In general it felt like the prosumer/consumer oriented products made things easier by putting the common operations at the forefront (at the expense of having to dig through more menus for less commonly used options). DaVinci Resolve feels "flatter" and in general I don't need to "dig" much, but there are so many options that it took me a little learning until I knew where to do the common tasks.

I understand being cautions about free products and the "you get what you pay for" principle, but DaVinci Resolve is one of the exceptions. Blackmagic Design makes its money elsewhere (if you look at their main webpage, the vast majority is not about DaVinci Resolve). You could argue that the model is not free but freemium, but set up so that the free part is really powerful.

My suggestion is: if you have a machine that meets or slightly exceeds the recommended requirements for DaVinci Resolve, then give it a serious try, otherwise look into Vegas, etc.

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PavlovsCat

PavlovsCat

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1 minute ago, Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann said:

I was a Vegas user for a long time, and used other similar editors from time to time. A friend who used to work in Pro Moviemaking & TV Commercials told me to forget about "Prosumer" level,  and switch to DaVinci Resolve. I first tried it on my PC which had a "decent" graphics card and I couldn't get it to work reliably. Then I got a new PC with a better graphics card. Resolve started working well and I haven't looked back.

The free version is generally more than enough for personal use. It has a pretty sizable amount of options and at first I did find the UI slightly less intuitive compared to Vegas, etc., but it was very easy finding tutorials on YouTube for pretty much everything I've wanted to do. In general it felt like the prosumer/consumer oriented products made things easier by putting the common operations at the forefront (at the expense of having to dig through more menus for less commonly used options). DaVinci Resolve feels "flatter" and in general I don't need to "dig" much, but there are so many options that it took me a little learning until I knew where to do the common tasks.

I understand being cautions about free products and the "you get what you pay for" principle, but DaVinci Resolve is one of the exceptions. Blackmagic Design makes its money elsewhere (if you look at their main webpage, the vast majority is not about DaVinci Resolve). You could argue that the model is not free but freemium, but set up so that the free part is really powerful.

My suggestion is: if you have a machine that meets or slightly exceeds the recommended requirements for DaVinci Resolve, then give it a serious try, otherwise look into Vegas, etc.

I have a machine that was built for video editing and DAW use a couple of years ago. My concern is that $200 or 300 USD is nothing to spend if the difference is the more expensive product is easier to use. If a product is free, but not easy to use, I'm not going to invest the time. I'm a business owner who has very limited time to do the videos.  If it takes off, I might have an expert handle things and just write the scripts and do a voice over. So having talked with one friend who told me about DaVinci and having found every review cites that it's not easy to use, takes it out of my consideration set. I don't plan on dedicating my life to video. I want something easy to use to get really good results. If that means spending a few hundred bucks more,  that's a good tradeoff for me. It's for my business anyhow. 

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Soundwise

Soundwise

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2 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

I have a machine that was built for video editing and DAW use a couple of years ago. My concern is that $200 or 300 USD is nothing to spend if the difference is the more expensive product is easier to use. If a product is free, but not easy to use, I'm not going to invest the time. I'm a business owner who has very limited time to do the videos.  If it takes off, I might have an expert handle things and just write the scripts and do a voice over. So having talked with one friend who told me about DaVinci and having found every review cites that it's not easy to use, takes it out of my consideration set. I don't plan on dedicating my life to video. I want something easy to use to get really good results. If that means spending a few hundred bucks more,  that's a good tradeoff for me. It's for my business anyhow. 

Since you are looking for something easy, try Filmora.

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Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann

Eusebio Rufian-Zilbermann

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For me, DaVinci Resolve is a better tool regardless of price. If Vegas, Cyberlink and Premiere were free too, I'd still choose DaVinci Resolve.

For a video that combines a few clips with images and a voiceover, if you just skip 4 out of 7 pages in the UI it's actually quite fast and easy:

(1) Skip "Media" and "Cut" and go straight into "Edit". Drag-and-drop clips and images into the timeline and tweak there the starting and ending point (e.g., make your still images be displayed longer or shorter). Drop them into the same track for clean cuts, or onto a new track if you want to be able to overlap them e.g., for transitions. Drag the little white markers at the track corners for creating fade-in and fade-outs. Drag effects into the fade-in/out if you want something other than a simple fade. When tracks overlap, the one "above" will generally cover the one below unless transparency is used (fades, effect clips with transparent backgrounds, etc). This means that for crossfades you generally want to overlap and add fades in the tracks above, not in both tracks like you'd do for audio.

(2) Skip "Fusion" and "Color" and go straight to "Fairlight" for recording your voiceover.

(3) go to "Deliver", choose your options (e.g, YouTube video), add the job to the render queue and click "render all"

Why am I calling this "less intuitive"? (same as many reviewers saying the same thing) Because as a beginner there are too many choices and pages. For me, until my friend (and watching a couple of tutorials) convinced me to start by ignoring half of the pages, I was getting into "choice paralysis". It also has details clearly designed for a professional workflow where e.g., using jobs and render queues makes sense. For a small project and if you're new to the product, after selecting all the delivery options and clicking the button for adding it to the render queue, you would expect it to start rendering, and would probably get annoyed that instead nothing happens (until maybe minutes later, when you finally notice "that render all button" on the right hand side of the page)

It's not that many details and once you've seen them, it's not complicated at all and they won't slow you down significantly. It's simply a collection of little annoyances that can trip you up when you're new (and, as we tend to do nowadays, we want to start using software without reading anything or even watching a tutorial). After the initial "speed bump" I actually find it better and faster to use than the alternatives or even some DAWs (I wish dragging the scrubber cursor forwards and backwards worked in Pro Tools as well as it does in DaVinci Resolve)

Anyway. I've been writing too much. If you end up spending 5~10 min trying the steps outlined, to find out if it works well for you, that's great, but if you aren't really interested and would rather not spend time on it, I won't insist.

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Brian Cadoret

Brian Cadoret

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9 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

I'm looking at video editing software right now. Any opinions on the various options for Windows. I'm looking at CyberLink PowerDirector Ultimate. 

I've been using the perpetual license for PowerDirector for about five years, solid as a rock, intuitive, DAW like feel about it, excellent list of export types.

No I'm not trying to sell it just an honest opinion.

Brian

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