The Vegas Pro UI needs to be fixed

martin-2098 wrote on 12/22/2025, 10:26 AM

I've been using Vegas Pro for over a year now and, while some of the initial frustrations have subsided, I still feel that Vegas Pro has one of the most infuriating UIs I’ve encountered in a professional software.

A program that is as powerful and has as many features as Vegas Pro will always have a steep learning curve. This is not about that. This is about Vegas Pro making it difficult to do simple things and frustrating the user with unnecessary friction and weird quirks at every opportunity. And these are not a product of it being a professional software. These are problems that could be easily fixed without breaking any of its existing functionality.

Here are some of them:
1. When trying to write a video onto a file that's in read-only, there's no "Try again" option; it just fails and the user has to start all over again.
2. After a failed render or after another edit, the name of the file previously entered is gone and the user has to enter it again.
3. Clicking "Close program" by mistake and then clicking the window’s X (expecting to cancel) closes the application anyway. This is diabolical.
4. Exporting with custom frame dimensions requires far too many clicks. Simply enable the Width and Height fields by default and, when you enter a number, it automatically jumps the "Frame size:" field to (Custom frame size).
5. What in god's name is going on when you're using the mouse-wheel to zoom out of the video preview? The camera position jumps all over the place.
6. Handling video clips that are on top of each other is quite frustrating. If two clips are on top of each other the "fx" and "..." menus for one of the tracks often just disappear and it's impossible to select the clip underneath.
7. Many UI elements that adjust rectangles (masking, pan/crop, event position) resize symmetrically around a center point instead of just moving the edge selected. This makes applying a mask (or any other action involving this UI) very cumbersome. The UI to adjust the clip position in the Video Event FX UI... I don't even know.
8. This is a big one: The mouse-wheel zooms in on the timeline at the playback position instead of the mouse-cursor. This is one of the most infuriating things about navigating Vegas Pro.

Again, this is about removing entirely unnecessary friction from the user experience without sacrificing any of Vegas Pro's power. I don't believe that these are intentional design choices, so I am wondering how some of these haven't had the necessary priority to be addressed in all the time Vegas Pro has been on the market and why its users are ok with them not being fixed.

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Comments

Gid wrote on 12/27/2025, 10:49 AM

Another disadvantage, I forget to mention, when editing just one huge project instead of editing several subprojects. At least I always discover a mistake in my finished project when watching on my TV. Instead of re-rendering the whole project again, I only have to re-render the subproject after correcting the mistake and merge the subprojects again.

@3POINT But do you not have to render the merged finished project again once you've corrected the mistake in the sub project?

I like to have the full project on the timeline, but I do render out certain sections 'To a new track' & remove the originals if they're a bit more complicated, esp if I've used Mocha Pro to mask something. My projects are fairly simple end to end clips with a few subtitles or pics though.

3POINT wrote on 12/27/2025, 2:25 PM

Another disadvantage, I forget to mention, when editing just one huge project instead of editing several subprojects. At least I always discover a mistake in my finished project when watching on my TV. Instead of re-rendering the whole project again, I only have to re-render the subproject after correcting the mistake and merge the subprojects again.

@3POINT But do you not have to render the merged finished project again once you've corrected the mistake in the sub project?

I like to have the full project on the timeline, but I do render out certain sections 'To a new track' & remove the originals if they're a bit more complicated, esp if I've used Mocha Pro to mask something. My projects are fairly simple end to end clips with a few subtitles or pics though.

Yes but merging several videofiles into one videofile with Shutterencoder is not a destructive render but an action to chain videofiles into one videofile. It's very fast, lossless and much faster than normal rendering. For example the first part of my France travel video contains 6 subprojects of HEVC 10bits 4k50 video in total about 30 min. Merging those videofiles into one videofile took about 3 minutes. The result I uploaded today to YT. If interested: remarks: subtitles are in German and video is made this time with Davinci instead of Vegas as a personal training.

As you see my projects are also fairly simple with a few subtitles, pics and music underscore.

Gid wrote on 12/27/2025, 2:56 PM

@3POINT Ah I see, you're not using VP to render the whole amalgamated final project together 👍

3POINT wrote on 12/27/2025, 3:01 PM

@3POINT Ah I see, you're not using VP to render the whole amalgamated final project together 👍

With VP I work the same way, render all subprojects separately with VP and merge them together to one final file with Shutterencoder.

Gid wrote on 12/27/2025, 3:13 PM

@3POINT 👍 Good to know.

Don't think that would work for me though as my projects are fairly simple, averaging 20clips to make a 20min project & there often isn't really a point where breaks could be made to create individual sub projects + I put a 15fr crossfade between each clip, I prefer that to the hard cut you prefer as you've mentioned in another post, so I won't go into that. (I don't now if ShutterEncoder does crossfades)

But like I say good to know, I'll keep that in mind 👍

PS. My 20min UHD projects render in about 10mins, that's fast enough for me.

3POINT wrote on 12/27/2025, 3:27 PM

@Gid yes I know that your projects are differently and will not benefit from working with subprojects. I hope for you that the issue will be solved with the stuttering crossfade between events with the same source media.