Is it worth it to upgrade to VP 14?

Cliff Etzel wrote on 6/7/2017, 8:38 PM

I'm sitting on the fence about upgrading to Vegas Pro 14 - I just made the official switch this week using the last version of VP13 v545 and was wondering if others experiences felt the upgrade was worth it. I'm not shooting 4K (YET), not doing flashy titles, etc... My main work is short small business profile videos in addition to the multimedia storytelling work I produce for Non-profits/NGO's. Any advice would be appreciated as the steep discount to upgrade that MAGIX is offering right now has me interested.

TIA...

Comments

ushere wrote on 6/7/2017, 9:13 PM

dl a trial of it....

i did and didn't bother with it. icons are a nightmare, and gpu is still stuck where it was with 13. i've moved on to resolve, but i'm still looking forward to 15 in case it does address the shortcomings of 14.

Cliff Etzel wrote on 6/7/2017, 9:20 PM

@ushere - Resolve is just too convoluted for me TBH... I can't get my head around node based color correction/grading - but I do admit I'm having some concerns now as the recent $400 price cut to upgrade for Vegas Pro 14 and the url saying "EOL" (End of Life?) has me wondering if MAGIX is about to axe Vegas Pro and just continue developing the Movie Studio product line...

NickHope wrote on 6/7/2017, 10:07 PM

Is it worth it to upgrade to VP 14?

I'm not seeing any performance increase from VP12-14 so it mainly depends if you need the new features or not. Sales page on the new features here. Release notes on the new features here (scroll down to "BUILD 161"). Personally I'm not using any of the new features at all to get my general work done apart from the project-wide resampling mode, but some of those features such as ProRes rendering or trimmer hover scrub may be much more valuable to others who need them for their workflow. Note there are numerous bugfixes since VP13, but most of them are small irritations rather than showstoppers.

VidMus wrote on 6/7/2017, 10:09 PM

To get the latest version of Vegasaur which only works with Vegas Pro 14 and later, Yes it is. The latest version of Vegasaur helps me a lot with creating open captions on my Church videos. My speech hearing is extremely poor especially at Church. No captions = no Church for me!

Also, the smart zoom allows me to get a quick zoom in on something a person is holding without looking to poorly.

Of course, if you want continued support, then the upgrade is well worth it.

At first, I thought that it was not worth it at all for me until I had time to really use it. So for me, it got a really slow start.

I still start all of my projects with Sony Vegas Pro 13 because I do not have the funds to upgrade Plural Eyes. And I NEED Plural Eyes to synchronize my video and audio tracks. Once I get the tracks synchronized in '13' then I will load the project into '14', rename it to have a 14 at the end of it and save it. This way I can still open the original project in '13' if I need to because I might have forgotten something.

How much anything is worth it depends on what your needs are. But you really do not know unless you dive in like I finally did to see what is there.

More than once in my life I thought that something new would not be worth it for me only to find out that it was what I was really needing all along. There have been other times when that went the other way.

Anyway, I hope this helps.

www.thestoprock.com

JackW wrote on 6/7/2017, 11:34 PM

Still using Vegas 13 here and see no reason to move to 14. Like you, I'm not working with 4K and doubt that I will in the near future. "Support" has never been a component of Vegas so there's nothing to miss by staying with vers. 13 in that quarter. I work professionally with 13 nearly every day and have yet to find it inadequate for what I do.

Cliff Etzel wrote on 6/8/2017, 10:12 AM

Much of my work is pretty straight forward - shooting/editing small business profile videos and shooting/editing audio slideshows as multimedia storytelling projects. I have almost completely ditched Adobe products now - save for Audition which still is more efficient for me to edit and convert audio - albeit it's not near as fast in rendering out as Sound Forge is. Will take me a little getting use to wrangling audio in Sound Forge (Primarily Noise Reduction and converting to proper files for PluralEyes)

Tim Stannard wrote on 6/9/2017, 10:31 AM

Like you, Cliff, I'm in two minds. the price is now lower and I'm tempted, but it's still higher than we were used to for the Pro upgrade. I own Pro v13 (and have upgraded to every version since v7 after starting with Movie Studio v6) I'm considering just upgrading to Edit. I'm not bothered about Mercalli or Titler Pro (I already own the latter and have other tools for the former). I already own the NewBlue Tools I want.

So, if I don't need any of the add-ons, is there any reason to upgrade to Pro rather than Edit? Will it affect my future ability to upgrade to Pro?

Anyone know?

Cliff Etzel wrote on 6/9/2017, 10:42 AM

I don't own NewBlue Titler or Mercalli so the $50 price difference is looking good to me. Does edit have the built in stablizer that VP13 has? That's critical for my work while the titler is secondary for me. I didn't see any reference to the stablizer in the features list on the VP14 web pages.

NickHope wrote on 6/9/2017, 10:45 PM

Does edit have the built in stablizer that VP13 has?

Yes

3POINT wrote on 6/10/2017, 12:21 AM

Does edit have the built in stablizer that VP13 has? That's critical for my work while the titler is secondary for me.

If a good stabilizing tool is critical for your work, than Mercalli 4 plugin is worthwhile to upgrade to VegasPro 14. This plugin is far superior above the internal Vegas stabilizing tool (based on Mercalli2) and much faster. There is also a free script which automatically stabilizes all selected and trimmed events on a videotrack with ONE click with Mercalli 4. A real timesaver against the difficult use of the internal Stabilizer ( create subclip, add mediaeffect, analyze and so on.)