By Brady Betzel

Many of you might remember the nonlinear editing software Vegas Pro from its Sony Creative Software days, and prior to that Sonic Foundry. Well, since being purchased by Magix in 2016, the company has continued development with an eye on making it even more pro-friendly.

The Updated Vegas Pro 18

At one point, Vegas seemed ready to take on the independent and YouTube creator nonlinear editor marketplace, much like HitFilm, but a few things happened to derail that path. One of those things was Blackmagic cutting the price of Resolve Studio from $995 to $299 — along with offering a free version. These days there are a lot of factors to consider when deciding what NLE will work for you in your specific workflow.

Prior to this update, I did think Vegas had some positive offerings, but felt they needed to improve in order to compete with the Premieres and Resolves of the world. So I was eager to test out the newest version of the software to see how far they’ve come.

For this review, I’ll be taking a look at the new features Magix is offering in Vegas 18. A lot of the newest updates are under the hood, like the new AI-supported color correction features, like Style Transfer, but some are more technical. One of those is the adjustable skin tone line on the Vectorscope, which is very interesting.

What’s even more interesting is that Vegas Pro 18 seems to be the gateway to Vegas Pro’s future. It appears that they are setting up what could be the first cloud-centered nonlinear editor project manager.

Colorization: Sawyer and Pringles

When talking with Gary Rebholz, Vegas’ product and site manager, he was very aware of what his current and prospective end users are dealing with during the pandemic. Once he heard how interested I was in their cloud-based workflows he shared with me that in late 2020 they are hoping to produce multiple solutions for users. More on that in a bit…

In addition to the AI-backed Style Transfer, Vegas Pro 18 has added a Colorization effect to instantly colorize black and white images and footage. It’s a cool concept, and it was surprisingly accurate when I applied it to a black and white photo of two of my three sons playing in the rain. It was able to make the bushes and leaves green, a toy basketball hoop backboard white and even a Lightning McQueen umbrella red! While it won’t quite get to the level of one of my favorite colorization and restoration artists, Marina Amaral, (Twitter: @marinamaral2, Instagram: @MarinaArts), but with time it could do some interesting stuff.

Color Grading Panel
The Vegas Pro 18 Color Grading panel has been updated with a more natural interface — similar to Resolve. The exposure is now logarithmic instead of linear, so adjusting exposure feels much more natural. Crushing the blacks will now logarithmically affect the midtones and highlights — much better. What’s interesting is that Vegas doesn’t have a dedicated contrast and brightness control in the color correction panel itself.

Color Correction Panel

There are many ways to go about primary color grading: brightness and contrast adjustments, curves, hue wheels and more, but I typically like to have easily accessible brightness and contrast controls under the hue wheels — especially for less advanced colorists or editors who just want to pump the contrast up a touch without adjust the Lift/Gamma/Gain (Shadows/Midtones/Highlights).

You can easily add the Brightness and Contrast filter from the video effects panel if you would like these controls inside of the effects panel. Either way, the color curves and color wheels work easily and work well. The Color Curves feel great now that they are logarithmic and it’s easy to get a nice S-Curve look quickly. Keep in mind that the Color Grading Panel works like a plug-in, so it is easy to enable/disable, add, adjust or delete.

In the FX chain, you can move the color correction before motion tracking, after certain effects, or however you want to work. But overall the most intriguing update to the color panel is the adjustable skin-tone line. While there has been a consensus of where that line is typically placed — because of the color of blood under the skin and not necessarily the skin tone — there are nuances that need to be accounted for, and Vegas is future proofing this. It’s a very interesting update.

Sound Forge

Sound Forge 14
One of the bigger additions to the Vegas Pro 18 lineup is Sound Forge Pro 14, which is now included with the purchase of Vegas Pro 18. This is a great addition. Many solo-media creators are comfortable with Sound Forge already and now you can access it directly from the timeline by right clicking on the audio or simply hitting Ctrl+E. It great having these powerful tools at your disposal.

Motion Tracking
The motion tracking interface has also been updated in Vegas Pro 18. On paper it is supposed to be easier to use, but it still feels a little clunky to me. While it could that I’m just not comfortable with the interface, I motion track and mask all day long. I am constantly working in Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects, Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve, Avid Media Composer/Symphony, BorisFX’s Mocha Pro and more. Unfortunately, the Vegas motion tracking doesn’t come easy to me and could probably be updated.

Motion Tracking

In addition, the editable functions of Motion Tracking and Color Correction are not accessible in the video effects panel and have their own panels, and on a laptop this means many windows open at once. Sometimes fully obstructing my view even when working at a high resolution like UHD (3840×2160). When motion tracking, the frame-by-frame tracking worked comfortably, but once I wanted to track forward, Vegas brings up a progress bar and stops any realtime tracking. I think Vegas needs to do some industry research on planar trackers and find a more standard workflow.

Cloud Management Tools
What’s in store for the future of Vegas? As I mentioned earlier, cloud-based media management and media organization may be the most exciting part of Vegas’ future, and the functionality will be included with your Vegas Pro 18 purchase via Vegas Hub. All Vegas Pro 18 cloud-based media management and collaboration tools will be offered initially as free services to Vegas Pro 18 subscription customers. Pricing for cloud-based services for perpetual license customers will be announced when the services become available beginning in October 2020.

Tracking

Vegas Hub is a cloud-based project management app that can act as assistant editor and traffic cop for your teams working remotely. It works via Microsoft Azure, and if you are bored and want to calculate what the costs could potentially be, check out the Microsoft’s Azure Pricing Calculator. It is surprisingly lower than I thought it would be.

Vegas Transfer will be an app for your iOS and/or Android phone that will allow you to transfer mobile files to the Hub. From phone footage and stills to GoPro footage downloaded to your phone via the GoPro app. With this ability you can now transfer footage to your editor via the cloud from different locations. This is a really forward looking concept that I think will really catch fire once 5G implementation becomes standard and increases mobile upload and download speeds.

Vegas Prepare will act as a digital media asset management system, allowing the user to create of library of media files, further organize that library by creating collections, and tagging these individual fuels for easy filtering and search. This is just the beginning; it sounds like there will be much more to come.

Vegas Pro Hub Explorer will allow users to embrace the organizational structure they created through collections in Vegas Prepare directly inside of Vegas Pro. No need to leave the application.

These types of cloud-centric workflows are currently available but not at a low price. From the Avid Nexis to a homegrown SAN or even technologies like BeBop and HP’s ZCentral Remote Boost. The fact that Vegas is essentially giving you the software side of this is a big bonus. For any streaming content creators, Vegas will be launching its own OBS-type competitor included with Vegas Pro, called Vegas Stream. Allowing anyone looking to stream their own content professionally, adding transitions, graphics, and more from their Vegas Pro GUI. That timeframe is still TBD.

Color Panel

Summing Up
In the end, Vegas Pro 18 is a capable video editing solution packed with bonus features, like Sound Forge 14. There is AI-boosted performance, GPU-accelerated encoding/transcoding, technical features like GPU driver checks, color grading enhancements like HDR 10 and HLG color correction updates, and the new and easily searchable plug-in browser with new plugin-ins like Flicker Reducer, Black Bar Fill and Denoise.

But it’s the future of Vegas Pro that intrigues me the most. The Microsoft Azure-backed Vegas Pro Hub with Transfer and Prepare included with the $19.99/month subscription to Vegas Pro is a great deal.

As 2020 comes to an end, production and post have been thrown into the deep end of remote workflows, whether everyone was ready or not. I am really excited to see if Vegas can pull off the cloud-based, remote workflow at such a low-cost entry.

Check out more of what Vegas has in store on their website, and make sure to watch Gary Rebholz’s tutorials and product run-throughs on YouTube. He takes deep dives into Vegas Pro’s vast feature set that I have barely scratched the surface of. Gary explains the product very well, so hopefully there will be more to come.

Brady Betzel is an Emmy-nominated online editor at Margarita Mix in Hollywood, working on shows like Life Below Zero and The Shop. He is also a member of the Producers Guild of America. You can email Brady at bradybetzel@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @allbetzroff.