After looking at descriptions of sonys vegas, I realized should be able to buy the cheaper versions (ultimate instead of pro) and have all the features I want. Am I right? If so, that saves me much money. I want to be able to edit clips and cut them, add music, good effects, longer credits, and helpp with ggod audio. I was looking at ultimate. this good? What about pinnacle? Since they are around the same price, do they both do the same stuff? I think I can get a discount on pinnacle as I have a dazzle dvdrecorder, and keep getting emails about sales and am wondering if i should take advantage of this. What about their movie box? Should I get this instead of ultimate if I get pinnacle? Advice appreciated as always!!!
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editing software revelation
- Thread starter movieman1005
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Stay away from Pinnacle, from my experience, and I have had all versions from 7-11 Ultimate, on different computers, crash, slow to start up, slow to render, and when it does render, it is very poor quality. The customer service gets you a guy in India, and they can'thelp you. Pinnacle sucks, and I'm very disappointed that Avid even puts its name on it. Sony Vegas has never crashed on me and you can do most of everything you need to do with just the Platinum Studio version. You really only need the Pro version if you want to add more than 4 soundtracks, do high end video like BLueRay, and a few other things you probably don't need to worry about at this point in time.
Agreed. Pinnacle crashed too much for my taste. Vegas has been good to me. The main difference I know of between the Lite and Pro versions of Vegas is the number of layers. The Lite version is limited to three audio and three video layers. Pro was not limited (again, to my knowledge...of course computer processing capability could be a factor with too many layers). I am running an older version of Vegas Movie Studio, though...so newer versions might be different.
Glad to see it wasn't just me that had problems with Pinnalce, the support techs swore it was me, they said Pinnacle works great if you start in Safe mode, turn off 7 background operations, turn off video accelerator.....for the amount of money I put into Pinnacle between the software and add-ons, SFX Transitions, etc the damn thing should have opened itself out of the wrapper, jumped into my CD drive, and installed itself without any issues. But, fortunately, I discovered After Effects and Vegas, life has been good since then 
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This is the comparison matrix between all the various versions of Vegas:
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro/compare
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro/compare
I use Pinnacle to edit all my movies, but everyone is right. It is bad. It crashes and is very fickle about what video formats you can use. But I still use it because I'm the most familiar with it.
I've had two versions of Pinnacle.
The first one stopped working when I upgraded from Win98 to XP. I don't recall which version that was.
The second one (Studio 7) I kept installed, just so I could use the SmartSound software they'd bundled with it. (Computer eventually blew up - though I doubt Pinnacle was involved with that )
Studio 7 I recall as being fairly basic. I'm pretty sure that the editing software that comes with Windows was just as good. I sure as heck wouldn't have paid for it. I got both versions included free, with whatever the hell hardware I was buying at the time. (I think one of them came with a new video-card?)
Maybe their new stuff is better, with more bells & tricks, but personally I wouldn't rush out to try it.
I'm not sayin' it's bad - just that it never could do what I needed. (The renders seemed fine, I gotta say. Never had issue with that)
The first one stopped working when I upgraded from Win98 to XP. I don't recall which version that was.
The second one (Studio 7) I kept installed, just so I could use the SmartSound software they'd bundled with it. (Computer eventually blew up - though I doubt Pinnacle was involved with that
)Studio 7 I recall as being fairly basic. I'm pretty sure that the editing software that comes with Windows was just as good. I sure as heck wouldn't have paid for it. I got both versions included free, with whatever the hell hardware I was buying at the time. (I think one of them came with a new video-card?)
Maybe their new stuff is better, with more bells & tricks, but personally I wouldn't rush out to try it.
I'm not sayin' it's bad - just that it never could do what I needed. (The renders seemed fine, I gotta say. Never had issue with that)
SmartSound was the only reason I kept it after I switched to Vegas, it's such a cool technology, but after getting into Digital Juice, SmartSound music sounded like elevator music and not really as good. Of course if it's SmartSound that someone wants, you can just buy the full version of SonicFire which is where SmartSound comes from. Sony also has CineScores which does the same thing, but haven't used it.