I Imagine what I want using vegas tools then proceed to make it happen and anything ANYTHING is Possible .

I just wish I wasent limited by my own creativity.
OH Well Vegas Cant do everything.

One of my early experiences...

While working at a public access station, I produced a piece for our awards show that was shot in 16:9 anamorphic. I edited it together in the Media 100 system we used. When I was already to print it out to tape, I looked for the feature to convert it to letterboxed 4:3. Doh! Our Media 100 system (very, very expensive) couldn't do this.

Our only options were to purchase hardware that would do it or have a person in another department import the project into After Effects, maniplutale it and then print it out. The first option was not appealing considering our small budget and the second option was not feasible due to time constraints. Alas, we showed it squished, which worked ok but was a bit frustrating as it didn't show it as intended.

A couple months later I purchased Vegas Video 3 for use at home. One of the first things I did was pull in the footage to see if Vegas could do it. Click, click, click, done.

To top it off, Vegas didn't crash. When working on our Mac with Media 100, you had to make sure you only gave it one command at a time. If you accidentally clicked too many times or failed to stop playback before trying to make an adjustment, well, odds were that a re-boot would be required.

Oh yeah, the Media 100 also only supported two video tracks, a graphics track and four audio tracks. Plus, you couldn't mix different media together including audio at different sampling rates. The more I think about it, the more I shudder.

Thanks you, Vegas, for letting me edit rather than pray.

Being able to put anything on the timeline. I was using Premiere when I was given a WMV file and I couldn't open it. I had the demo version of Vegas and I placed the clip on the timeline and it was there! Thats when I placed the order.

Stability...ease of use...great folks at the forum ever willing to help out the newbies with their basic/repeated posts and tolerate even the obnoxious .

Two words: COLOR CORRECTION.

You're replacing several thousand dollars worth of equipment with a Vegas 4.0 setup. Oscilloscope and Vectorscope, to be more exact. You also have so many options for color in Vegas. Printing to DV tape for a broadcast? Drag the broadcast color filter and you're done in one stroke. Need a special effect to change the color of someone's shirt? The Secondary Color Corrector's eye dropper makes you look like a Hollywood effects pro. Need to restore old film or VHS? Spin the dials and flip the knobs and you can get saturation and brightness that's better than the original.

Really, nothing else comes close.

Definately the time-based editing. It gave me fits when I first started, but now I would never want to go back to frame based.