If you are a Vegas Pro user and look enviously at those with an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription and wish you had access to the graphics toys like Photoshop and After Effects, then be jealous no more.
Y’see, there is a new kid on the block specifically designed for Vegas Pro and called – tara! – Vegas Post.
In actual fact, Vegas Post is three applications in the same tin: Vegas 17 Pro, Vegas Image and Vegas Effects and these roughly correspond to the Premiere / Photoshop / AE combo.
Vegas Image
With Vegas Image, you get a super powerful application with which to create multi-layered composite images. Geared toward the video creative market, nonetheless it is also suitable for say photographers or those that create catalogues, newsletters, brochures and magazines. Or to put it another way, graphics artists and any type of image manipulators.
Its is chock full of masking and keying, colour grading and adjustment functionality and image creation and manipulation tools all using a drag and drop metaphor into a workspace. Where it is different from similar packages like Photoshop or those from Corel or even MAGIX themselves is that there is no “toolbox” to choose a tool from to create or modify something. This means you may take a little while to get your head around the workflow, and I strongly recommend you download the PDF manual and spend some time having a read of the 140 odd pages therein.
Vegas Effects
Vegas Effects is a like the compositing mode of Vegas Pro on steroids that has also drank a large bottle of red cordial mixed with a few litres of an energy drink.
Out of the box there are over 800 effects and presets ready to go for anything from fire and laser blasts, lightning and explosions, swirling black holes, 3D model and 360° video manipulation and effects, retro looks, text and titling and even heavy duty colour adjustment and grading.
If you must, it will even export vertical oriented video for your Instagram followers to drool over.
But don’t be fooled, Effects is not just to create whizz bang, eye popping special effects as under the bonnet there are serious, serious motion graphic and imagery adjustment tools.
You can use Effects as a stand-alone tool or it integrates directly into the Vegas Pro interface too by the way.
Conclusion
I have spent the better part of a week playing with these two new applications – more so with Effects than Image I admit – and they are truly incredible packages that fill any gaps that Vegas Pro stand alone may have had in video creativity workflow.
Like anything complex, there is a learning curve, especially if you have never used similar applications beforehand. Thankfully, if you know where to look, there are multitudes of tutorials out there in Internet land as in truth, both of these packages are collaborations between MAGIX and UK based fxHome, the creators of HitFilm. Most of the tutorials from there are easily adapted as a result from iMerge Pro 5 (for Image) and Hitfilm Pro (for Effects).
Vegas Post is available now from the Vegas Creative Software website for USD$999 or on subscription for USD$21 / month. There is a free trial version available as there is for most of the Vegas packages and Post can be obtained from https://www.vegascreativesoftware.com/us/vegas-post/
Film, Video & Virtual reality 