Yes, as a Sonic Foundry shareholder and user of Vegas 4 +DVD, Acid, Sound Forge and MediaSite, I share your concern. These are all fantastic products but they are so poorly marketed and SOFO is in such dire financial straits, that the future must be in doubt. There is so little exposure of thse products in the trade press that they are almost subliminal. We are considering further MediaSite purchases wher I work but the precarious state of the company may prevent us from buying more units.

I have the full version of Vegas 4 +DVD and can highly recommend it. It will be useful for years to come, even if Sonic Foundry does not survive.

I agree VV will be around for a long time. You would not believe the aggrivation that I had wiht Pinnacle I started years ago with studio 400 the dc 10 then studo 7 than studio 8 all had troubles and they seemed to get worse instead of better. I lost hundreds and hundreds of hours trying to resolve issues. I stumbled on VV4+DVD and without even reading a manual burned two DVD's in the first two days without any problem. I went to the control panel and uninstalled Pinnacle and now am a faithful VV4 user. I even picked up Video Factory off ebay to play with it is a neat little program for doing straight copies of wedding videos to DVD for customerA that did not have the DVD option when they were married.

Several things are true here:

1) Vegas is an excellent product that will continue to exist even if SOFO tanks. Someone will buy the code.

3) A real danger is some schmuck company buying the source and then trashing the product. I'd hate to see Vegas get the reputation that Pinnacle's product has.

3) Worse than #2 (debatably), even if the product totally vanished, anyone with a copy of V4 right now has an excellent NLE that will last for at least two years.

Bottom line is that Vegas is a great product right now. It's stable and feature-rich. Even if SOFO isn't around, the very dedicated, almost religious, user community at the COW and other forums will be around to help.

-Maestro

The thing I would worry about is if SF goes out of buisiness, how do I install the software on a new computer when I upgrade to a better PC? The program and several components are node locked and requires access codes to unlock them. I would hope that someone will be there to supply them but there is no guarentee. I don't think the risk is huge but there is a risk.

Concerns for the future viablity of the company are realistic. That said, in my opinion, the price of V4 is chump change for anybody doing this professionally. Hence, if they tank and you are forced to a different NLE in a few years, so what? You will have benefitted in the meantime from a nifty editor.

Our previous 3-board hardware NLE tanked (as a product) more than 5 years ago as they obsoleted the product and came out with a new one. They subsequently (due to extremely poor marketing) became unviable as a company and ultimately were bought by Pinnacle. While Pinnacle's marketing prowess is undeniably more sophisticated and thus, better than FAST's feeble efforts, their poor customer support is reason enough to avoid them (again, just my opinion).

In any case, 'we' as a production comapny soldiered with our 'obsolete' 3-board NLE until recently when we effected a changeover to a zero-board solution, i.e. Vegas Video 3.0 (which we have, more recently still, upgraded to Vegas 4). Change is an inevitable part of life and obsessing about it is unproductive. My advice is do what works for you and let things you can't affect work themselves out.

Finally, and only for what it's worth, a few of my words about Vegas 4 are scheduled for publication in the March issue of Videography. Perhaps they will sway undecided, i.e. prospective, professionals to take the dive and purchase the product. I'm glad we did - I suspect you will be too.

As a guy who cares about this product and the survival of SOFO, I'm going to be stumping on the company's behalf. Vegas is such a great product that it's a pleasure to spread the word.

This app is too good to die, and we as Vegas users can help ensure SOFO's survival by converting the "unelightened." :)