What's New in Sony Vegas Pro 10?

Sony Vegas Pro 10 is here! After months of speculation about what would be in the latest full-step upgrade to Sony Creative Software's popular pro NLE, the new version has brought users new features and increased performance-without sacrificing stability. In this overview I'm going to cover many of these new features in Vegas Pro 10 that will be of benefit to event videographers; some of them may seem far-fetched, some of them may not be obvious, but they're all here for a reason.

We'll also lay the groundwork for the series of tutorial articles that will follow in my "Tips and Tricks" column, and the video tutorial series that will kick off this month on EventDV-TV. But first...

I'll Go Ahead and Say It
The perception of many ".0" releases of any software package invite cries of "Wait For the Service Pack!" Well, by the time the download link for this new release was live to the public, the version was already at 10.0a. This is an update to the planned release. Kudos to Sony Creative Software for continuing to test and improve up till the release date. In my opinion this is instrumental to the stability of Vegas Pro 10. If you're waiting for an update before you install it, fear not—it's already here.

DSLR Preview and Editing Improvements
First up on the feature list is improved performance for editing files from Canon DSLR cameras such as the 7D, T2i, or the new 60D. I'm told by Vegas product manager Matthew Brohn that this feature intended specifically for the H.264 format used by DSLRs, and provides upwards of a 300% improvement. I first tried it out on hardware that desperately needs to be upgraded to work with anything later than HDV: a 2.4GHz Intel Q6600 that plays back T2i footage, in Preview Auto, at about 5-7 frames per second (fps) under Vegas 9e. There's no way you could edit this natively, nor would you want to.

However, on the same hardware and OS, with Vegas Pro 10 32-bit, the same project file played back at full frame rate. It still had the occasional stutter, but it performed exactly as if I were editing HDV or Cineform intermediates. While I don't recommend using older hardware for editing DSLR footage-even with Vegas Pro 10-the comparison demonstrates that Sony's claims of 3X improvement do indeed pan out. read more...