I would also say that if this is for a business, just go with Vegas Pro right from the start. It's likely that you will be missing features that you wished you had if you went with the Movie Studio versions.

I'm going to disagree with my fellow posters.

I think "Vegas Movie Studio Platinum Pro Pack" is a very rich editor at a great price.
I'd consider the full "Vegas Pro" only if full movie production, with special effects is your *primary* business.

If its not, and it sounds like videos are a secondary service, then I think the Movie Studio has all the features you could need without the complications of the Pro version, not to mention the money you save!

Once in a while, you might encounter something that Pro would be better at. But this should be relatively rare, and easy to work around.

My personal opinion is that you'll likely run into a need for extra tracks before hitting any other limitation of the non-Pro versions.

For instance, if you have a few moving text elements that you want to move independently, in a sort of "lower 3rds" fashion like you see on so many TV programs, you'll quickly run out of tracks.

The good news is that, if I recall correctly, Sony doesn't penalize you too much for buying a non-pro version and then realizing you need to upgrade. In other words, they have an upgrade path from other versions to Pro...

With only a week left for the upgrade sale of Pro-9 I am thinking the same.
I started on Studio .. then went pro with version 5 and 7...

Because of AVCHD I need to get one product with support (studio9 or Pro9)

I agree with above comment - that for 95% of what I do - only the 4 track limit is a problem (I find studio has almost all the features I need)

Any guess as to when Studio10 will be coming out - so I don't have to come up with money twice in a short time ..

Thanks
Allen

I just downloaded the trial version of Vegas Pro, and couldn't be less impressed on a bet... :/ I mainly use VMSP Pro, and there are few things that I can't accomplish there, as oppossed to Vegas Pro, and it's a lot less money. The main limitation of course is the number of tracks, but Sony will have to fix that soon, or other people like myself will look elsewhere for cheaper progams that do all they do, and more, with basically unlimited tracks. Having said that, if you read this board, you will find workarounds for the limited number of tracks. Good luck in your new venture. Cin

I'm not a professional but I do a lot of video with 2 or 3 cameras running, and cutting back and forth between these in editing is a pain in MS Platimum ( version 6). It looks like Vegas Pro 9 allows simultaneously watching the strereaming video from at least two tracks to simplify making the cuts switching between tracks. Is that really the case? It's hard to tell from the description of V Pro 9 if that is the case.
The other advantage would be I want to us Vegas movie editing on a 64 bit computer, and it looks like only V Pro 9 supports that. True?

Yes, the Vegas Pro package version 8 and later has built-in support for multicam editing. (In older versions add-on packages Excalibur and Ultimate-S provided multi-cam editing features, but not quite as described below.)

Basically, if you have three cameras you would put the footage onto three separate tracks and slide things left and right until all three are synchronized. Then you select all three tracks and click on Tools >> Multicamera >> Create multicamera track. Those thee tracks will be combined into one track with multiple "takes" on it. (always save a copy of the project just before you combine them into one multicam track because there is no way to go back once the track is created)

Once you have a multi-cam track you can toggle in and out of multi-cam view. In multi-cam view your preview window would show all three original source tracks in a 2x2 grid, or 2x3 grid, etc., depending on how many source tracks you had in the multicam track.

Now, as you play your video or as you scrub through manually, you can just click on one of the miniature views wherever you want to change to that camera. Clicking basically puts a "split" in the track at that location and changes the "take" to the selected source. I think if you ctrl-click you get a crossfade when switching cameras. Otherwise, if you want to add transitions you can manually do so at any of the splits, just like with any other pair of events.

If you toggle out of multi-camera view you go back to the normal viewing mode and can watch your video like regular, so you can see what the output file will look like.

Tim L

And does Vegas Pro 9 work OK and is supported on a 64 bit computer? I've seen in other part of the forum that MS Platinimum might run on 64 bit (some say not) but that that there is no technical support of it.

hbwerner: multicamera? check page 143 in the Vegas Pro manual from here: http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/download/trials/vegaspro

I have VMSP 9b finding it satisfactory except for the track limitation. It works very well with Soundforge 8.

I'm going to make the jump to VP9 when I'm satisfied I won't have to go back to any VMSP projects along with getting a bigger 64bit system.

Cheers.