Vegas Baby!
I already own SoundForge and Acid, two audio editing tools made by Sony (although truth be told, they bought Sonic Foundry to acquire them), so when I recently got into doing some video stuff it was a no-brainer to also buy Vegas, the video editing tool that not only shares a manufacturer but the same familiar user interface as well. Well, call me stupid… Knowing the prices of both Acid and SoundForge, I didn’t really think I was in the market for an expensive video-editor. Off to work I went with Windows Movie Maker. If you ever have tried to do anything with Movie Maker, you know that NOTHING can be done with Movie Maker. On my system (and that’s a machine that shouldn’t be laughed at, spec-wise) I was not able to create a video longer than 3 minutes without something seriously going wrong. I could edit video but not export to anything playable outside Windows Movie Maker or, I would lose the picture after adding more than 11 video clips (visuals are kind of important to a video) or, it wouldn’t import MOV files or, it would lose titles I just created or, or, or…. You get the picture!
Well I am new to this video thing… I wasn’t even planning on owning a video camera, but armed with a gift card loaded with a nice chunk of change and a wish to buy a new carrying bag for my GPS, I found myself at Best Buy. Lo and behold, digital video cameras cost practically nothing anymore. I heard that in some countries they give them away with new cell phone subscriptions!
Ok, so a month later I find myself being the lucky owner of not only a nice digital video camera, I also managed to shoot about 500 video clips. Sitting in front of a PC looking at your life in 10 second increments gets old really fast. There has to be a way to somehow edit this into more consumable chunks. Well, Movie Maker isn’t it! Turns out that the cheapest version of Vegas (they call it Vegas Movie Studio) only costs 55 dollars. I bought it! I am in love! I will be a little busy going through 8 gigabytes of raw video footage, but once I have made my masterpiece (although I realize not everyone is interested in 30 minutes of me walking a dog), I will be back reporting on yes another fun adventure in technology.