Sonic Foundry Vegas 4

When Sonic Foundry launched version 3 of its video-editing application, it began to look like a serious competitor to Adobe Premiere.

With the release of version 4, the company has added a number of advanced editing features which will make it more attractive, particularly to those who are familiar with Sonic Foundry's audio products.

Top on the list of new features are advanced colour analysis and correction tools. Vectorscope, waveform and histogram charts, similar to those in Apple's Final Cut Pro, provide real-time monitoring of the video signal, and a new primary three-wheel colour correction plug-in provides a versatile means of eliminating casts and balancing clips from multiple sources.

A new Motion Blur envelope adds blur to each frame to simulate movement, while smart resampling makes an easier task of matching material with differing frame rates.

Parent Overlay Video Track mode allows a plug-in to control how a parent track modifies the tracks in its composite group, and can be used with displacement and height maps to produce mirror, water, fire and similar effects.

The colour-correcting tools, used in combination with the videoscopes and the split-screen preview window, provide an effective means of colour control with instant visual and graphical feedback. They ensure results look right and don't stray outside broadcast-legal levels.

The three-wheels of the primary colour corrector are used to adjust colour balance separately for shadows, mid-tones and highlights. Hues are distributed around the circumference and saturation increases from the centre towards the edge.

To make an adjustment you simply drag the centre spot to the appropriate location, view the results in the split-screen preview window and check the graphical feedback in the videoscopes.

Two eyedroppers below each wheel are used to add sampled or complementary colours to the mix, and saturation, gain, gamma and offset sliders provide further adjustment.

All three videoscopes can be displayed simultaneously in the window. The two most useful are the vectorscope, which displays the pixel hue and saturation distribution on a radial chart marked with broadcast-safe areas, and the histogram, which can simultaneously display luminance distribution for all three RGB channels.

Colour adjustments made this way can be keyframed and during timeline playback the videoscopes update in real time, so you can check that levels remain within limits for the whole production, rather than just the frame that was previewed while the adjustment was made.

New editing features include improved ripple editing, keyboard-based event trimming, storyboard-style event shuffling and split-screen previews.

Getting to grips with editing on the timeline is one of the biggest hurdles for newcomers, so these editing extras will help ease the learning curve.

Also, like Premiere and Media Studio, Vegas now has a linked DVD-authoring option in the form of DVD Architect, included in the optional Vegas+DVD pack.

Post-edit ripples can be applied manually or automatically and can be restricted to the edited event's track, or more widely applied to all tracks, markers and regions.

Cursor preview creates a two-second loop extending either side of the cursor so you can quickly check an edit. This is useful, but we'd prefer to see a split-screen display of the out and in frames of adjacent clips along the lines of Premiere's trim window.

The split trim mode of the preview window does this when you slip a single event on the timeline - simultaneously displaying the same function to edge trimming would be the icing on the cake.

Sound features have been revised, with the addition of 5.1 surround mixing tools that provide keyframeable panning. Unless you plan to post encode, you'll need the Vegas+DVD option, which includes the new Dolby digital AC-3 encoder.

Other additions and enhancements - including 10 new automated audio effects, support for ASIO drivers, new filters and transitions and searchable media pool bins - make this a significant upgrade that will find favour with existing Vegas users and newcomers, but it's very expensive.

Were the DVD Architect and the AC-3 encoder included in the original base price this might have been a real alternative to Premiere.

Contact: SCV 020 7923 1892
www.sonicfoundry.com

System requirements:

• 400MHz processor
• Windows-compatible soundcard
• 128MB Ram
• 30MB hard disk space
• DirectX 8