Digital Video - January 2008 - (Page 20) REVIEW VEGAS MOVIE STUDIO 8 PLATINUM EDITION Above, from left: Vegas 8’s edit window and trimmer window. BEATING THE ODDS SONY’S ENTRY-LEVEL NLE OFFERS A POWERFUL OPTION FOR USERS WILLING TO BRAVE THE INTERFACE. BY J.R. BOOKWALTER D isclaimer: I’m not a Windows virgin, but I have — prior to this review — only limited exposure to NLEs on such systems, compared to my extensive use of first Adobe Premiere, then Media 100 and, lastly, Final Cut Pro on the Mac. Enter Vegas Movie Studio 8 Platinum Edition, Sony Creative Software’s latest entry into the expanding world of home video creation. While Sony is bringing a lot to the table with this release (including HDV and AVCHD editing, 5.1 surround, export to PlayStation Portable and follow-along tutorials), the result is powerful only for those willing to wade the murky waters of the program’s interface, which sometimes leaves a lot to be desired. INSTALLATION & CAPTURE SCORE VEGAS MOVIE STUDIO 8 PLATINUM PROS: Big value for the low cost, HD and 5.1 audio support, easy to transfer projects to DVD, feature set mostly trumps more expensive alternatives on either PC or Mac. CONS: No way to recapture with different media settings, basic interface isn’t always user-friendly. BOTTOM LINE: Newcomers to nonlinear editing will love it. MSRP: $129.95 packaged, $119.95 downloadable CONTACT: www.sonycreativesoftware.com/products The program installed without a hitch on my HP s3100n PC, which is tied into a Samsung 50” HDTV by way of the VGA port. That system came with Windows Vista Home Premium Edition preinstalled, and, despite a lot of the griping that I’ve read on the blogosphere, Vista has mostly been a positive experience for me. After launching Vegas Movie Studio and completing the registration, the program notified me that a downloadable update (8.0c) was available, and that too installed without incident. The printed manual covers only the basics of the program — the rest is featured in the online help functions — which was fine for me because I’m a “figure it out on my own” kind of guy who later reads the manual cover-to-cover. Conveniently, my wife just returned from a month visiting family overseas, so she had almost two hours of HDV footage shot with our Canon HV20 that I decided to use as my test subject. The first order of business was capturing this footage in standard definition, first to get a feel for the way most folks would use it, but also because it would make a good experiment to recapture the material in HDV later on. (Or not ) The first hour of footage I captured using the advanced mode to set in and out points, which works as expected. The second tape was captured using the basic “load entire tape” method, which splits up clips as it goes. I only experienced one incident of dropped frames, during the second tape capture — an anomaly I’ll chalk up to something running in the background during capture, as I didn’t have this problem again. INTO EDITING Once the footage is captured, it lives in the Media bin, where you can double-click to insert the entire clip onto the timeline at your desired edit point, or drag it to wherever you’d like. There’s also an option to set the double-click to open your media in the Trimmer window, where you can set in and out points and then drag www.dv.com 20 dv january 2008 http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/products http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/products http://www.dv.com
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