Lost Video Island

[Brooke]

is Sony Vegas Pro worth it?

And what really is the difference between studio and Pro?

I am thinking about buying it but I don't know if I really really need it.

[Aislynn]

My advice is that, if it's affordable to get Pro, definitely go for it! I'm always on the lookout for older versions of Pro that might hopefully be in my price range but so far I haven't had much luck. But if one of them ever does come up, I'll absolutely get it!

Some of the things I know that are different from Movie Studio to Pro:

1. Movie Studio has a maximum of 4 video tracks and 4 audio track; Pro has an unlimited number of both.

2. Movie Studio doesn't have the masking feature in the pan/crop tool that Pro has, so Movie Studio can only cookie cutter a shape from one clip into an other. If you're trying to put an irregular shape like a person into another scene, you'll unfortunately catch a lot of the background of the original scene. With the masking feature, you can create a point-to-point mask that cuts precisely around the person and eliminate that tell-tale background.

3. Movie Studio has one compositing track function, Multiply. That means when you're trying to use a texture or other sort of artistic overlay, it's going to make it very, very dark and thus will only work with certain types of clips and textures or its just a dark mass of nothingness. Pro has a bunch of different compositing abilities that gives you a lot of choices around that problem.

4. Movie Studio doesn't have an audio editor, Pro does. (Movie Studio can't even raise the volume on a clip, while Pro can, just to name one use that that feature gives you.)

5. Movie Studio has limited color correction abilities, Pro has Secondary and Advanced color correction controls. One obvious example of something Pro can do that Movie Studio can't is to take all of the color out of a scene except for one, such as leaving somebody's shirt red while the rest of the scene is black and white.)

Granted, newer versions of Movie Studio may have some of the bells and whistles now that mine doesn't have (mine is 6.0). For that reason I left off saying that Movie Studio doesn't have an HD rendering option because I'm fairly sure that later versions do.

That's just what I can think of off the top of my head but hopefully it's helpful in answering your question a bit. Here's Sony's site where they do a head-to-head comparison of Movie Studio (which now comes in several version, each of which have a few different abilities) and Pro.

[tjmack1986]

I have Movie Studio Platinum 9.0. While it has a few more features than the older verisons of movie studio, most of what Aislynn mentioned is still left out of the movie studio edition.

You can now render in HD, and there are a few more coloring options. You can edit audio to some effect. You can increase or decrease the volume or add a reverb which is pretty much making the audio echo.

One function that it doesn't have that I wish that it did is the secondary color corrector. It's one of my favorite ways to color a video *grew to love my free trial of pro 9.0*

But as Aislynn said, in my personal opinion, there isn't enough of a difference between them to make me put up the cash to buy pro.

One way for you to see which one better suits you is to try out a free trial of each, and see which one you like better.

I got my movie studio from amazon for like 50 bucks, and I've scoured that site and a few others for a cheap verison of pro, and the cheapest i could find was 400.
_________________