Review: Magix Vegas Pro 15

Encoding and Exporting

Another thing that set Vegas apart--especially from Premiere Pro and some other NLEs--is that they're still big into physical media exporting. So there's a lot of support in here for exporting to Blu-ray or DVD. And it's built right in here.

A lot of people, myself included, were upset for a very long time that Adobe got rid of Encore, their DVD authoring application. Because when they got rid of it, DVD authoring was still a pretty big thing. But like Apple removing the optical drives from their computers pretty early, Adobe was just getting ahead of the game and saying, "Look, we know this is going away. So we're going to go ahead and remove support for this application and get rid of it."

And unlike Las Vegas, what happens in this Vegas does not stay in Vegas. You can export by navigating to File > Render As. As you can see on the left in Figure 10 (below), you have categories of different types of exports. I’ve filtered this to show only video projects. It has some audio-only options, of course. But video-only brings up all these categories. Within those categories you have presets, or what Vegas calls "Templates." You can, of course, customize your template to change the frame rate, the dimensions, or anything like that.

Figure 10. The Vegas Render As dialog for encoding and exporting your video

I noticed something conspicuously absent from the export options: anything specifically identified as H.264. The closest thing that I found was MAGIX MP4. There's an HEVC codec, which is good. But I was able to get a good export at a reasonable filesize that looks comparable to the other exports that I was doing from Premiere Pro and the other NLEs I’ve tested in this series. The template I settled on was “Internet HD 1080p MP4.” And it says 25, but you'll note the little asterisk, that means I've changed it already. And if I go to customize the template, this is where I’ll find the ability to change all of my settings (Figure 11, below).

Figure 11. Customize your encoding settings here.

There I changed my frame rate to 24, which matches all my source video clips. You could change from a variable bit-rate to a constant bit-rate. You can also set it to two-pass, which I always use when I'm encoding if it's available.

Finally, in the Project tab (Figure 12, below), you can change it to make the quality is the same as what you're using in your editor, or if you want it to be better or worse. So if you're trying to just shoot off a proof to a client, you can change it to, Draft, or Preview. And then if you're using a 3D project, you've got those settings here as well. And by the way, Vegas does support 4K and stereoscopic editing.

Figure 12. Choosing quality settings in the Project tab

Once my settings are good to go, I'll click OK. I'll change my file name and my destination and hit Render.

A Few Additional Notes About Vegas

A few things to note about Vegas. When I first set it up and installed it, it had a couple of things it wanted me to set up as well. Those actually turned out to be optional additional plugins or filters--basically, third-party software. I chose not to set those up, because they weren't included with the version that I was given a license for.

So that's a quick look at MAGIX Vegas Pro version 15. Again, it's available for Windows only, in three different packages: Pro Edit, Vegas Pro, and the Vegas Pro Suite.