Others say...

"Professional product at consumer pricing"
I know that there are lots of free or shareware programs out there that do many of the same things, but getting it all in one bundle is a really good deal. The best part of the deal, however, is the instant tutorial that will tell you how to do what you want to do on your very own project. You don't have to go to some faked-up tutorial project to learn. That is one of the best help devices I have seen on any software in a long time. Of coure, in all the free programs, the help section runs from fairly poor to non-existent.
The tutorial alone is worth the price of the product and the product works very well indeed.
I reserve the 5 star rating for the super top of the line pro products, otherwise this would have that rating.

"Rock solid on XP"
What a great piece of software. Installed easily (on XP), loads fast and handles everything I throw at it. I've had the unfortunate life experience of being a "software tester" since 1980-something. Vegas MS+DVD ranks way up there on my list of software that does a lot for me, without me having to do a lot for it.

Contrary to what I read in several product reviews, the learning curve was just about non-existant. If you have the computer skills to be reading this review, then you should be able to run Vegas just fine.

The one negative I had was my fruitless search for "velocity envelopes" (a controller curve that allows for variable play-back speed). The help menu indicates this feature is available. However after much searching, I've concluded that it simply does not exist in this product. I believe this was an artifact from the help menu for the higher end product.

Regardless, a great product.



"great product!"
This software is great. It delivers everything it promises. I had never done video editing before. I had tried Adobe Premier elements before and it was very confusing. The best thing about Movie Studio is the training DVD and interactive tutorials. If you spend a good 20 minutes with it you are ready to get started and the rest you can learn as you go. If you get stuck you can access the tutorial while you are working on a prject. The program is very stable. I have done 2 movies already and it has never crashed.

My only complaint is the extremely long time it takes to open up projects and render video when getting ready to burn a DVD. It took about 20 minutes to render my 1.5 hour movie. However, this is not exclusive to this software. Video rendering is very demanding on your system resources and so you just have to be patient. I have a camera that records in 5.1 audio (Sony SR-100) and thanks to Vegas 7 I'm able to keep my projects that way instead of downgrading to stereo. The video looks great on my HDTV. I strongly recommed this product over any other, especially Adobe's premier elements - I have tried both.

"Vista and AVCHD Codec only supported in Vegas 8"
Vegas 7 installed and worked fine with MS Vista, with some minor problems. However, Sony warns that Vegas 7 will never be supported on Vista, not even in a future minor version 7 update. Sony says on their web site that you need to wait for Vegas version 8 to get full MS Vista support.
[EDIT: The new Vegas 8 became available on July 2, 2007. Vegas 8 now supports Windows Vista and the AVCHD codecs for their HD Camcorders.]

But the bigger issue for me was that Vegas 7 Platinum doesn't work with the new AVCHD codecs used with my new Sony HDR-SR1 High Definition hard disk camcorder. I waited to purchase Vegas Platinum until I saw the new Vegas 7e update available that supported AVCHD, but the update turned out to only be good for the much more expensive Vegas 7, not this Vegas 7 Platinum which still has no AVCHD support, and won't until version 8.

I wasn't able to install the DVD Architect on Vista, but I didn't care at this point since I can't edit my files encoded with AVCHD.

What I was able to do on video editing tutorials and samples was easy and a lot of fun to use. The software gets great ratings in many other in depth reviews by others around the web with greater video experience than me.

I'll wait for Sony Vegas Platinum version 8 which is due out at the end of July 2007, which supports both MS Vista and the new AVCHD codecs. I'll have to junk this Vegas 7 Platinum software as a total loss, which is why I gave it only 3 stars.

"Don't Buy This Product if You Have Windows Vista"
I own four computers and have installed hundreds of software programs over the past several years. I have been trying to install this program for the past two days. Windows Vista tells me that I need to reinstall the program after uninstalling it. After doing so, I get the same message, trapping me into a circular hell that doesn't allow me to use the product. I believe it has to do with Sony's hyper-paranoia about copyright protection - I bought the Foo Fighters CD In Your Honor (which is on the Sony Label) and had similar problems rendering the CD unusable. I'll see how their customer support is, I'm not expecting much