Actually, the jump from VMS 4 to VMS 6 was very worthwhile, so you'll be getting that plus a little bit more.

Here are some comments I'd posted in the forum a long time ago about the new features in version 6, compared to version 4:

- Keyframes for pan/crop and for all effects. With ver 4, you could only specify a "start" value and a "end" value for effects and pan/crop. With ver 6, you can change values multiple times in an event. On pan/crop, for example, you can pan and zoom all over the place, change directions, etc., without having to break the clip into multiple events.

- "Reduce Interlace Flicker" setting (a "switch") can be enabled individually for each event. This helps when working with still photos, to get rid of the "shimmer" in fine detail, and to get rid of flicker and moire interference when zooming in or out.

- Reverse Video (or audio) events. At first, I thought this would be useful only for comedy -- show a person falling down, popping back up, etc. However, I find myself using the Reverse function quite a bit. If I have a video clip that pans from left to right, while I'm editing I might decide that a pan from right to left would look better. As long as nobody's shown walking in the clip, and no cars are driving by, you can reverse it and get the right-to-left pan, and nobody will even notice that you're actually playing the clip backwards.

- You now get 4 video and 4 audio tracks.

- You can do Parent-Child compositing, and track-motion, though I confess I haven't really used either of these features yet.

In addition, there are lots of neat little user-interface things: when you have a fade at the beginning or end of an event, or a crossfade between two events, VMS shows a little pop-up box that shows the duration. So if you want a 1-second fade, you can drag the fade and watch the exact duration -- drag it until it shows 0:00:01.00.

Version 7 probably has additional little improvements, but probably the most noteable is adding support for AC3 audio encoding for DVD's (still high quality audio, but takes up about 1/10th the space of the PCM audio format). If you do HDV (high def) video, support is supposed to be improved in version 7. Also, ver 7 adds support for 5.1 surround sound, although I believe it is a more limited implementation than what the pro Vegas has.

I think you'll be very pleased with the improvements and added capabilities. (Keyframed effects and pan/crop are significant improvements that we got with version 6.)

Tim L