Our resident Vegas Pro expert, Dr David Smith, has been exploring the new Vegas Pro 20. Here is the first of a number of articles, this one having a look at playing around with colour curves
I am thoroughly enjoying exploring the many new features in Vegas Pro 20.
One extremely useful feature lives in the Colour Grading group which is accessed by a little brightly coloured button beneath the timeline.
Fig. 2
Just for fun I thought I’d try using this system to ‘repaint’ my little Peugeot – or at least a photo of it. The car’s bright yellow, or ‘Sundance Yellow’ according to Peugeot.
First up you choose the HSL Curves tab, then click on the yellow button. A yellow dot appears on the horizontal line.
Fig. 3
Then you double click on that line at a couple of points either side of the yellow dot. The position of these new dots sets a limit on which colours can change.
Fig. 4
To change the car colour, simply drag the yellow dot up or down and watch the car change colour. How do you like my green Peugeot?
Fig. 5
It’s that simple. Having the preview set to BEST quality, you just save the file as a .jpg or preferably a .png and it’s done.
Fig. 6
I’ve used the split screen function to bypass the effect in the right half of the preview window.
Of course this Hue Colour Curve effect works brilliantly on any of your videos.
And while we’re exploring Colour Grading, check out the Utilities tab in the left hand group of options. This is a very simple and effective way to get your white balance corrected. Just click on the little target icon called ‘Select Neutral Tone’ and place it over a grey or white region in your image. The white balance will automatically adjust as shown.
Fig.7.
You can either do this with a single click, or you can drag the cursor over an area which will then be sampled as the neutral range.
These new tools are very simple to use and are great time savers. I’ll explore more of them soon.
VEGAS Creative Software (www.vegascreativesoftware.com) has announced a significant update to its flagship VEGAS Pro product line, its fourth major feature update since launching VEGAS Pro 19 last summer. With this update, VEGAS Creative Software adds a number of new features to enhance color correction and visual effects workflows, as well as support for the popular Apple ProRes codec.
ProRes is one of the most well-known and widely used video file formats for the content creation community and combines extremely high image quality with small file sizes for efficient editing and playback. The new update to VEGAS Pro offers support for all ProRes formats, including:
ProRes 4444 XQ: The highest-quality version of ProRes for 4:4:4:4 video sources. It includes an alpha channel for visual effects work;
ProRes 422 HQ: This version of ProRes gives the same high level of image quality as ProRes 4444 but for 4:2:2 image sources. The codec will remain visually lossless even after multiple generations of decoding and re-encoding during post-production;
ProRes 422: Offers nearly all the benefits of ProRes 422 HQ but at only 66% of the data rate. As a result, ProRes 422 offers even better real-time editing performance;
ProRes 4444: An extremely high-quality format for 4:4:4:4 video with an alpha channel;
ProRes 422 LT: This version of the codec has 70% of the data rate of ProRes 422 and 30% smaller file sizes;
ProRes 422 Proxy: Delivers full-resolution video but is even more highly compressed with a target data rate of 45 Mbps.
The update also includes a number of new features and workflow enhancements, including:
Color Grading Panel is now available at the media, track, and video output levels;
VEGAS Hub and Hub Explorer Windows are now included in the default layout for quick, simple access to media;
Optical Flow Slow Motion is now available for velocity curves and playback rate settings;
Timeline clip events can now be set to automatically adjust in order to show all frames, particularly when playback rate changes (fast or slow motion) require the event to resize
New AI Tab in the Video Plugins Window helps organize all Artificial Intelligence plug-ins as a group for quicker, easier access;
Option in Mesh Warp to more smoothly morph image between mesh points. Users have the ability to specify how moving one mesh point will affect surrounding mesh points, which can result in more organic stretching;
Unquantized Frame Indicators help users avoid unexpected results of event edges on the timeline which are edited off of a video frame;
Turn Off Video Preview during render helps render performance for those users whose machines may be under-powered or are not ideally optimized for rendering.
Additionally with this update, VEGAS Creative Software released a new BETA feature for testing and review:
Speech to Text functionality, including automatic subtitle generation and export of SRT, SUB, and TXT files.
The VEGAS Pro Lineup and Pricing
VEGAS Creative Software offers a focused product lineup that provides the tools users need for their specific workflow requirements and budget. The caliber and breadth of the software provides content creators all the tools they need to “finish” using the VEGAS lineup without the need to launch third-party apps. VEGAS Pro 19 is available in three options:
VEGAS Edit
Ideally suited for aspiring editors, novices and even consumer/enthusiasts, VEGAS Edit includes:
VEGAS Pro 19
20GB of cloud storage (available with subscription plan)
VEGAS Content: 20 royalty-free HD video and/or audio clip downloads per month (available with subscription plan)
Pricing:
$12.99 USD/mo
$249.00 USD for a perpetual license
VEGAS Pro
Designed for aspiring and professional content creators, filmmakers, social media influencers, YouTubers, and live event producers, VEGAS Pro includes:
VEGAS Pro 19
50GB of cloud storage (available with subscription plan)
VEGAS Stream for high-production-value live streaming
SOUND FORGE Audio Studio
VEGAS Content: Unlimited access to royalty-free HD video and/or audio clip downloads (available with subscription plan)
+Primatte chroma keying software
Pricing:
$19.99 USD/mo
$399.00 USD for a perpetual license
VEGAS Post
Developed for content creators who require a complete video/audio editing and high-end compositing and RAW image compositing workflow experience, VEGAS Post includes:
VEGAS Pro 19
100GB of cloud storage (available with subscription plan)
VEGAS Effects for high-end compositing
VEGAS Image for RAW image compositing
VEGAS Stream for high-production-value live streaming
VEGAS Content: Unlimited access to royalty-free HD and 4K video and/or audio clip downloads (available with subscription plan)
Vegas Pro version 19 from MAGIX is just around the corner and as is usual for the company when a new version is imminent, it is offering the existing version for USD$149 with a guaranteed free update to the latest vesion when it ships.
They say this offer is only open until 17th August, presumably the new shipping date for version 19, and more info is available at this lin – Learn more
This sort of snuck up on us. Ordinarily we are well aware of upcoming Vegas releases as since version 0.9, at Australian Videocamera we have been on the beta programs for testing.
This time however, for reasons only known to MAGIX, we were kept out of the loop until actual release time which was last night.
As such, we really haven’t had a lot of time to digest what is new (or fixed), but here is a summary to at least give you an indication of whether you should upgrade (or switch from another app even).
As before, there are four versions of Vegas these days – Edit, Pro, 365 and Suite.
Edit is the basic Vegas 18 with little in the way of bells and whistles in the form of extra plugins and so on.
Pro adds a few such as Style Transfer and Colourization (see below) and Sound Forge 14 (also below), 365 is the subscription version that everyone seems to be touting these days sadly (we are not a fan) and Suite is the whole shooting match which I’ll described a little later.
We have been sent the Pro version so will restrict our comments to that at this time but describe where we can what extras you’ll get in the Suite package.
Vegas Pro
Across the board, the UI has been tightened and streamlined which is a good thing as the original was starting to look a bit dated in my opinion. Improvements include separate tabs breaking the VideoFX into subgroups for example and the same treatment has been given to Transitions and Media Generators making it easier to find stuff.
There is also a new search system built in to assist in finding the plugin you need.
Speaking of Transitions, it looks like a swag of the stock ones in version 17 have been dropped in V18 – I am guessing these were just not used much such as the 3D ones which seem to have copped the brunt of the knife.
Other additions include what Vegas calls Project Location Persistence which saves the cursor timeline location when you save, a cleaner way of identifying event edges for trimming, expanded details in the render log, the ability to save and export preferences (hooray!!) and a new incremental project save system.
Style Transfer is a bunch of colour palettes inspired by famous artists (Picasso, van Gogh and Kandinsky etc) among other palettes (Floral, Leaf, Bark, B & W and even Rick and Morty) and Colorization uses “Artificial Intelligence” to well, colourise, original black and white footage by utilizing hardware acceleration from Intel OpenVINO.
Colour Grading has been improved the company says (although we haven’t had a chance to test this as yet) and the HDR support has also been beefed up.
Other tools the company says it has tweaked are Flicker Filter, Video Noise Reduction and Black Bar Filter.
Also updated are the Motion Tracking tools allowing data tracked to be transferred to plug-ins that have positional awareness.
A major addition is the inclusion of Sound Forge 14 into the package (Pro, 365 and Suite only). It is true that Vegas started out life as an audio mastering system and as such has a bunch of audio tools built in, but adding in Sound Forge 14, widely acknowledged as one of the Big Three of commercial audio editing apps (with Adobe Audition and AVID ProTools) is a great move we think.
Under the bonnet, Vegas Pro now configures the GPU for the ideal settings – a bone of much contention due to crashes if you believe all you read in the Facebook Vegas forums – and will automatically keep drivers up to date.
Vegas 18 Suite
In addition, if you buy the Vegas Pro Suite (not to be confused with Vegas POST Suite by the way), you also get ActionFX that gives your scenes “cinematic quality” as used so they say in series’ such as “Stranger Things” and “The Walking Dead”, BORIS FX Continuum (which we have heartily recommended for years and years and consider a must have), Zynaptiq (to remove excessive audio reverb and something we KNOW we can use) and New Blue Transitions 5 Ultimate.
Conclusion
Is it worth upgrading? This is always the BIG question no matter what package you are looking at and in what genre, not just video editing.
In my long experience, the answer is yes, because as well as all the new stuff you get, many of the glitches in the old that tend to appear the more you push the software as you learn more about it, are fixed
A school of thought does say why should you pay for fixes, but hey, that is just the way it goes in this biz, and you DO get the new goodies as well.
As I said earlier, if in doubt, download the trial version(s) and see for yourselves is the best advice.
From what I have seen so far, I like what the folk at Vegas Creative Software have done.
But wait, there is more as they say!
For buyers of version 18 (Pro, 365 and Suite) coming soon, I believe in October, is Vegas Prepare, a new integrated media management tool that interacts directly with your production workflow.
You will be able to structure footage and assets in libraries and collections, add tags and have searching and filtering built in.
At present I use KYNO for my media management, and despite nagging the good people there about Vegas implementation, this has not been forthcoming; perhaps this is it? We won’t know until we see it of course, but hopefully Prepare will be at least on a par.
I also hear rumours of a Live Streaming module in the near pipeline (but whether it will work with the fabulous Blackmagic Design ATEM Mini Pro is a moot point at this stage. I just don’t know. But here’s hoping).
I have used Vegas Post now for over a month, and if you are a Vegas Pro user I suggest you get the trial version and have a look. (It is at https://www.vegascreativesoftware.com/au/vegas-post/ and scroll to the very bottom of the page)
At first, especially if you are used “Toolbox” based applications, it might seem a little daunting to use, but once you have had a play, and I recommend doing a YouTube search for “Imerge” and “Hitfilm” tutorials (these are the original apps they are based on), you will quickly grasp the workflow.
Indeed, I plan on putting together some tutorials myself covering everyday stuff that video editors need to do such as creating alpha channels in still images (for product promotion videos), green screening basics and the like.
As an example of how Image works, and using the alpha channel example, the steps in Photoshop are to:
Open an image
Double Click the image to turn it into a layer and editable
Create a new transparent layer and make sure it is underneath the original
Select the top layer
Choose the Magic Wand tool
Click the area you want to be an alpha channel
Press delete
In Vegas Post Image, you simply import your image to a project, select a luminance mask or even easier, Remove Stock Background mask, and choose the colour range to be removed, followed by exporting the image as a PNG.
You can if you wish, view the matte for fine tuning.
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/
Earlier this week we looked at what was suggested as the perfect shooter’s kit based on product (hardware primarily) available over the last 12 months or so. Today I’ll visit with editing / video creation in mind.
NLE
Editing video is a very personal thing and relies on your
own way of doing things, especially the workflow, but also what ancillary
products are available for stuff the editor either doesn’t do, or is not
handled as well as, as creatively as or as efficiently as another application
or ideally, a plugin.
Also giving an edge to Adobe and BMD’s offerings are their cross-platform capabilities – which knocks out Apple’s Final Cut X which is Mac only. Corel VideoStudio and its sibling, Pinnacle Studio are both very able and capable editors, and have companion programs for image editing, but no substitute for motion graphics at this stage. And EDIUS has a very loyal following too of course.
I admit to be a fan of the Vegas family; after all I was an assistant with some documentation, have been in beta programs and written tutorials and other material since version 0.9 (its’ now at version 17) and because of this, it tips the scales for me in that direction.
However.
DaVinci Resolve and Fusion are not to be discounted and if your own NLE has got beyond the point of functionality for you or you are looking at “going up” from a “lite” version of something, they are seriously, seriously worth a look. If you like to keep everything inside the one system, the Adobe Creative Cloud is still for you, but the subscription only model does rankle a lot of people.
Vegas Pro
Motion Graphics
As stated above, a good motion graphics package should work nicely with your NLE, however if you are looking for a stand alone package then the contenders, as well as the aforementioned After Effects and Fusion also must include the venerable Boris RED. It’s been around a LONG time – as long as AE probably as I recall – and is very capable.
If you have never used a motion graphics package before and want a fabulous stand-alone app with its own renderer, then give the RED trial a go. AE is the industry “standard”, but it means you have to go into the Adobe Creative Cloud ecosystem as mentioned, which some are not happy about doing it appears. Fusion from BMD is free, but the learning curve can be a little steep as it uses a node-based metaphor which is somewhat different from that used by both AE and RED.
Vegas Image
Still Imagery
And here we go back to what works best with what, and so its Photoshop with Premiere, Vegas Post’s Image with Vegas. But really, any stand alone package that allows the creation of alpha channel imagery is suitable and this includes those put out by Corel / Pinnacle and MAGIX plus any other number of inexpensive or even freebie offerings.
I use Photoshop primarily, but am gradually migrating to the new Vegas Image as I learn more ‘bout it.
Fx, grading and correction plugins
This one is a toughie. Borisfx, Red Giant and NewBlue all have a suite of plugins for various tasks. Some overlap, others don’t. I reckon the best system is the one employed by Borisfx as you can buy the whole shebang or just “units” containing the functions you want as and when you need them.
As an all-rounder, I’d go for (and personally use) Boris Continuum. For more special-effects-y stuff, Sapphire is probably what you are after and if you are into serious motion graphics work, then you cannot go without MOCHA.
If all you want is a brilliant, brilliant transition maker, have a look at the plugins from Pixelan (the founder, Michael Ferrer wrote THE definitive book for Premiere way back when it was almost the only affordable NLE at version 4.2!)
But overall, your best bet sadly is to win Lotto, and get
the lot! They will all be used at some point in time I guarantee.
Titling
No contest. NewBlue Titler Pro. Just get it, no matter what NLE you use. If for some oddball reason you don’t like NewBlue’s offering, have a look at BluffTitler.
In the real world though, we cannot all know everything
about everything so if I need some serious audio sweetening done, then I’ll
pass it on to an expert in the field. Luckily, I have one in my sound engineer
brother who lives just down the road and eats noise gates, compressors, ring
modulators and decibels for snacks at 2am.
Music Creation
Unless you are a muso yourself and compose your own material (where I recommend Samplitude X as a DAW, but your preferences may sway to other apps such as LogicPro, Ableton, Bitwig or Cubase or even GarageBand depending on your operating platform), then SonicFire Pro is your best friend.
It works as a plugin for many NLEs and the range and breadth of music available is immense. Additionally, what you can do with a music track once loaded into SonicFire Pro is truly staggering and mind blowing.
I’d suggest SonicFire Pro is one of the rare “must have” apps for any filmmaker who hasn’t the time or the inclination to organise their own bespoke scores.
SonicFire Pro
Unless your partner, like mine, is a composer and musician
of course. (And of course the brother as mentioned, is a sound engineer so I
have the best of all worlds).
Other
To make the process of editing easier, there are a number of other things that can be employed and for me, first and foremost is the Contour ShuttlePro. This little device lets you program 15 buttons to dedicated operations for your apps and will switch from app to app automatically as you change – say Premiere to After Effects to Audition. There is also a dual jog / shuttle wheel for fine tuning timeline navigation.
If you are a dyed-in-the-wool DaVinci Resolve user then I highly, highly recommend the dedicated BMD DaVinci keyboard. Not inexpensive I’ll grant you, but once you have used one, you’ll never go back.
BMD DaVinci Keyboard
For a decent mouse, and we all need one, I am now utterly convinced after my recent carpal wrist surgery that the Logitech MX Upright (or one of its derivatives such as the MX Master 3) is the duck’s guts. Again not particularly cheap, but nor is surgery.
Trust me on this one.
And while we are touching on hardware, I have fallen in love with the ASUS 34” wide screen monitor for editing. Beats two (or three) separate monitors hands down in my book.
ASUS Widescreen 34.1″
A flutter with Grass Valley Mync led me very quickly to Kyno for media management, cataloguing, retrieval and archiving. I now find it indispensable with every bit of video, still and audio media I own sitting safely on a Seagate 8TB external harddisk and available with a mouse click, searchable by any number of parameters.
Again, a must have for the serious editor. I’ll say that
again, a must have.
Conclusion
There are a few more things that could easily co-exist with your basics depending on the stuff you play with. 3D modelling and animation programs (we use MAXON Cinema 4D), Microsoft OneNote I find invaluable for random note taking, brain storming, idea creation and a million other things, as it is auto-tragically synced between my desktop, laptop, Microsoft surface and Samsung phone.
And of course you could add storyboarding software, dedicated screen grabbing packages (we use Snagit and Camtasia from Techsmith), script writing programs (Final Draft is our recommendation) and teleprompter software (Teleprompter Pro for less than $9 for us).
Teleprompter Pro
If you do 360° imagery, then you’ll probably have an app
from the camera’s vendor and everyone uses Handbrake for file conversions, just
like VLC is the best media player.
But that pretty much covers it. I am sure if I have missed
anything glaring, someone will remind me very quickly!
While we have you, on our “Donate” page we have four options: $5, $10, $20 and $50 donation buttons via PayPal (which also allows payment via VISA and Mastercard etc. These are in US$ by the way).
If you decide we are worth a small ONE-OFF donation via this method, we would greatly appreciate it and will allow us to continue at the same professional level we have strived for for almost 14 years now!
More information as to WHY we have added this option is on the Donate page.
Until the end of the year, Sennheiser is selling its MKE400 video mic for only $129.95 (normally $289.00). Click here to go to the Sennheiser website to buy for Chrissy (or as a ripper gift for your film masking loved one(s).
Also for the adio buff, MAGIX has a special bundle saving over $700 on the Sound Forge Pro + ACID bundle. Click here for details on these packages – scroll down to the bottom of the page to purchase and get the special price.
As many people know, I have a soft spot for Vegas Pro as a video editing package. I was introduced to it w-a-y back when by my old mate Douglas Spotted Eagle when it was owned by Sonic Foundry. This was version 0.9, and indeed, I assisted with some of the earlier manuals and text books on the program (remember “manuals”?)
The Vegas family, which included Sound Forge, ACID and Movie Studio was then bought out by Sony and sold later again to German company MAGIX.
I am still involved with Vegas through its usage of course, but I have also written tutorials for its sister program, Vegas VR Studio and indeed even now, I am doing some stuff in regards to tutorials and such for Vegas pro 17 on MAGIX.
Anyway, this is a heads up to let you know that during this silly week of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, if you felt inclined to have a look at Vegas, there is no better time as you can download the fully working trials and then if you decided to purchase, get some ridiculous pricing on the program which comes in 3 forms – Suite, Pro and Edit, depending on your needs.
and you can save up to $499 depending on the version (with Suite being the full package including DVD Architect and all the fruit.
Oh and you need to scroll to the very bottom of each of the pages in the link to see the special pricing.
I have advised MAGIX this is not ideal.
(And yes, we do get a small commission on these before you ask 🙂 But I figure as we don’t charge for subscriptions, that is a fair deal, and anyway, doesn’t cost you anything 🙂 And having used and promoted Vegas for over 20 years, it shows I am not a “flash-in-the-pan” with the program’s promotion)
Firewire, otherwise known as IEEE1394 (or if you are Sony, iLink) is dead.
We all know that, and a number even lament it. SD cards are the new media king and MiniDV tapes are to be forever banished to the archives of video history.
Some folk I know still have a DV deck they can, if needed, get back the old footage when necessary or nostalgia steps in, but for most who transferred those precious tapes to a PC or Mac via a camcorder and Firewire cable, these same tapes are destined never to be used – or seen – again.
Or aren’t they?
Like many, I have a LOT of tapes from 10 – 15 years ago that mainly cover trips I was lucky enough to be able to take back then, such as my version of Top Gear’s Best Driving Road through Europe, taking in the UK, Germany, Lichtenstein, Switzerland, Italy and France in a fast Mercedes.
Or my two trips to Japan and one to New Zealand for media launches when such a thing still existed. I was also lucky enough to travel to Vanuatu, Fiji, Norfolk Island and do a motoring tour of Tassie among many, many others.
Thankfully, a lot of the footage I had the presence of mind to put to hard disk prior to my PC with a Firewire card dying a death and / or camera simply expiring. But many others I didn’t, and I simply didn’t have the resources or the time (or too much inclination) to get them professionally transferred.
So, I though they would stay in their airtight box forever.
Until yesterday.
You see a small package turned up from MAGIX in Germany labelled Rescue Your Videotapes and this contained a CD with some software on it, a couple of RCA cables, a SCART cable and most importantly, a USB based video converter.
I dug out my trusty old Canon HV20, found a tape of the white tiger show at Dreamworld on the Gold Coast from 10 years + ago and started to install the software from the CD.
It failed. Three times I got an error message.
Now, there is a lesson here my friends. If the dialogue screen says it is best to shut down all apps as otherwise the installation may fail, take my word for it, whilst sometimes it makes not a jot of difference, sometimes it does.
Similarly, if it says NOT to plug a device in before installing the software (and drivers), they might actually mean that too.
Once I had this sussed, installation went through like a cool breeze on a desert island in summer and all appeared well in the world.
Next, I hooked all the cables up, popped the tape in, fired up the software, selected the MAGIX converter as the source and pressed play on the camera.
And it worked. Really it did! First time.
I could capture the footage via the RCA out ports, and whilst not pure DV quality, it is pretty damn good!
There is an editor built into the package where you can then either save to your hard disk, export to a mobile device, burn to DVD or export to SD card or even connect straight to social media channels.
Beforehand, you can stabilise footage, rotate it, adjust colour, saturation, brightness and contrast as well as backlight correction, add some templates (if you must) or even increase or decrease speed (0.25 to 4x). You can reverse the video too if you wish.
Further, you can add a soundtrack, include photos or even different footage.
Formats supported for export are MP4, MPEG2 or Windows Media in either DVD (720 x 576) or HD (1280 x 720) or Full HD (1920 x 1080) quality.
Of course, I could then bring it into VegasPro (or whatever) for further editing. I also added it to Kyno for catalogue archive purposes.
Sure, it only captures in real time, but this is better than nothing when it IS the only option. And at the cost of professional transfer, the price of Rescue Your Videotapes at about AUD$150 (actually €99) considering you can also actually do any videotapes you have, I reckon it’s a bargain!
Film, Video & Virtual reality 