. . er . let me think about it for a nano second .. yup! .. . got it . . . VEGAS! . . 'cos it's FUN! Oh yes and very Professional too - nearly forgot . .

Grazie

What's your budget and what do you intend to do your videos?

The consumer Version of Vegas is called Screenblast. It is very good for a beginner editor. It has a lot of the same effects as Vegas, but limits the number of tracks and leaves out professional features, like vectorscope, color-correction, bezier-masks, etc. The interface is the same as Vegas.


It allows you to make DVDs through a bundled piece of software that is nowhere near as good as DVDarchitect, but Screenblast Movie Studio is only $99. Then in a year or so, if you wish to move you can buy Vegas then. I believe Sony has a discounted upgrade price.

Here's a comparison chart for Screenblast and Vegas.

I am new to this all also. Back in april my wife bought me a new camcorder which would play my older 8mm tapes so that I could utilize the new computer (which I bought in Dec.) to capture & burn to DVD.

I began using Roxio & Sonic products with terrible results. Then I tried every trial download product like Nero, Cberlink, & Ulead. I liked the Ulead VideoStudio8 and completed a simple DVD with menus to chapter points successfully, so I purchased Ulead VS8. I used it for three weeks and after learning all I could about it, I made an awesome 20 min. video with scenes from my son's graduation party & graduation, along with music, neat transitions, effects, & sloMo. However that video took forever to complete & render because it acted as though I was still using an old 1995 era computer (ie P1 600 Mhz.). The computer would just like overload....you know......stutter,..........skip.........crash.........even after upgrading to a dedicated 180GB drive just for the storage, and upping my RAM to 1.5GB.
So I downloaded & tried the Sony ScreenBlast & actually spent a weekend re-creating the exact same video in ScreenBlast (that I had made previoully in Ulead VS8) and it went without a hitch.
At that point I returned the VS8 to Ulead for a refund, and tried Sony Vegas for a couple of weeks.................it was clear,..... I couldn't go back to ScreenBlast, just too many extras in the "Big Brother" to mention.

I figured that I was in this for the long haul and better go up than down, so I am one of the proud owners of Vegas5+DVD.... : )
The biggest problem now is that I spend every day trying to figure out how I can make a career out of this.
: ( .....................Seriously

Mike

Mike:

Glad to hear I'm not the only person to experience the nightmare that is Roxio!

Still, it makes me appreciate just how good Vegas is.

What doesn't kill us makes us stronger :)

Andy

I started with a horrible "Videowave" package that came with my firewire card. I then moved to Screenblast Movie Studio (Actually Videofactory, the pre-Sony version), and loved it. It was only when I moved to DVD authoring I was dissapointed; the DVD authoring (MyDVD) that comes with Screenblast Movie Studio is not good. I made do for a while using other DVD packages, then got a good deal on Vegas+DVDA. I like DVDA a lot; and while Vegas has more power than I need, more and more I find some features useful for me that are in Vegas and not Movie Studio.

As someone else said, the user interface is the same, so if you start with Screenblast Movie Studio you won't be wasting your time; what you learn will help you in Vegas. You can even read your Movie Studio project files directly into Vegas.

Really the question is money. If money is no object I'd start with Vegas+DVDA. For value for money Screenblast Movie Studio is great, but you need to add on something else for DVD.

Mark

Mike - welcome to the gang! Oh, and you too Brian.
Best/Tommy