Defocus emulates soft focus of a lens, and includes the ability to blow out highlights and adjust the shape of its virtual aperture blades.

Glint, Rays and Starburst are sophisticated lighting effects that work well in both subtle and more eye-catching roles – check out the examples at. There’s a good helping of new creative features. The Production Assistant plug-in serves that purpose alongside various other useful tricks but, at £125 plus VAT, it’s not cheap. A better solution for AVCHD footage is to convert it to a less demanding format such as MPEG-2, but a batch converter tool isn’t included. It’s a smart idea, but we found that the frequent switch in quality was no less distracting than the dropped frames it aims to avoid. Various other tweaks aim to improve preview performance, such as an option to allow the software to adjust the preview quality automatically to prioritise smooth playback. The RAM limitations of 32-bit Windows meant that the software ran out of memory when we tried to render very complex timelines comprising multiple AVCHD clips, high-resolution images and lots of effects. It now supports Vista 64-bit, and that’s a sensible option for anyone planning to manipulate multiple HD streams. As with any editing software, Vegas Pro has its work cut out handling HD resolutions and demanding video codecs such as AVC. The preview monitor isn’t always so quick to respond, though. With response to user input taking priority, the preview window and timeline thumbnails refresh without delay.

The timeline is extremely quick to navigate and key functions are rationalised to a small set of mouse clicks and keyboard commands. Adobe and Apple offer separate audio-editing applications for use with their video editors, but Vegas Pro has little need for one.Īnother of Vegas Pro’s strengths is its streamlined interface. New to this version is a Mixing Console view, which presents audio track parameters in a way that will feel more familiar to musicians. This might seem like overkill but in fact it’s extremely liberating, allowing the user to tackle problems at source. It’s also possible to apply independent volume envelopes to tracks, and to fade clips in and out. The volume is adjusted and audio effects are applied at three locations: per clip, per track and at the master output.

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