Speaking strictly in terms of software functionality of Vegas & DVDA, there is no difference, other than cost.

There may be differences in included "extra" programs, as that changes periodically.

the extra programs are normally done by the company selling them. Tiger Direct offers V6+DVDA3 with more goodies then what we got from sony for a few hundred cheaper.

I wish I was in school right now: I'd buy $600 worth of copies & give them away as christmas gifts. I know some people who would LOVE the program, mostly for audio though. :)

I thought Sony killed off Academic versions of Vegas. IS this not true?

They did for awhile, and then brought it back.
--Scott

Good decision. Hook them while their young. Vegas needs this kind of thing to complete and get the word out. Glad to see the Sony people can admit they made a mistake and correct it.

Steve, just keep in mind that if you were a student it would be acceptable for you to buy multiple copies of the academic license, but it wouldn't be acceptable for you to provide them to non-students. They would be required to use the full license even if it was given to them as a gift from a student.

I started with the Academic version of Vegas 4 and it was the same as the regular priced full retail version.

My 12 year old son has been using Vegas for some time. We got V4 last March and recently Sony allowed us to upgrade to V5 and DVDA2 for free, as we had bought V4 Academic just a few days before V5 was announced.

Our upgrade path is the same as the full licence now as there does not appear to be an Academic upgrade price.

Rob uses Vegas to make films for school as homework projects, as well as animated feature films using Lego and stop-motion techniques.

just found out that a friend of mine is using vegas moviestudio to do a bunch of stuff for the youth group at our church - ahhhh to be 15 with all the time in the world and no budgets to have to constrain myself to (in terms of hours).

He makes some pretty PHAT stuff (that's a good thing to you who aren't in the know ;-) )

Dave

I just found this message and the thread is old, but if anyone reads this later (as I just did), then they should know that there are differences between the academic version versus the full, commerical version of Vegas.

Sony doesn't seem to provide a clear list, but there are messages scattered throughout the help files saying that a particular feature is only available in the full (retail) version. I didn't realize this until after I bought a copy for my daughter.

If I find a concise list, I'll try to post it. Or, if anyone else knows of a place to get the list, please post it.

Regards,

Frank

as I recall, that's used for things like limited copies of products, such as Vegas 3.0 LE & Screen Blast Sournd Forge 1 (not deluxe). It has no bearing on the academic/"full" versions of the products.

Frank: are you sure you're comparing the academic version? It has been reported repeatedly that the academic version is identical to the full versio in every respect. On the other hand, Vegas Movie Studio (not the academic version) is missing some features of the full version and the manual and help files do have many messages saying "this feature available only in the full version".

I'm sorry guys. I was mistaken and what I said was wrong. I misinterpreted what the help file was saying when it said that a particular feature was available "only in the full version of Vegas software". I kept going into Help to try to read and learn about something and those messages kept showing up.

I thought that Sony had used the Hhelp file to tell me what was different between the academic version and the full version. It appears that there must be some sort of trial version or something that they are comparing it to. It never said what version didn't have the feature, only that a certain feature was only available in the "full version". Please accept my sincere apologies.

Let me state for the record:

The academic version has ALL of the features of the retail version.

By the way, Chienworks, I really like your work. I've downloaded some of your sample projects to try and learn some things. You do awesome work! Thank you VERY much for sharing so much of it with others. I truly appreciate it! I'm think I'm going to get some DVD training materials and go through that, but I will also keep looking at your sample projects because they are inspiring.

- Frank

Thanks to the academic pricing, at 22 years old I'm a complete Vegas addict, after all, I've been using this software for 1/5 of my life :)