DJ Times by Russ Harris

Do my eyes deceive me? Did my laser eye surgery from a year ago suddenly go bad? I just installed the latest edition of Sony’s Vegas Pro 9, and I can see that this ain’t your daddy’s typical upgrade.

As a DJ, I’ve been a fan of all of Sony’s products—ACID, Sound Forge, and the CD and DVD Architect lines. With Vegas, I’ve made many of my promotional videos for my DJ company, I’ve produced video montages for my wedding events, and I’ve created my own ambient videos with my name in 3D.

I’ve also created many video mixes where I import a premixed set of music and line up the video on top of the music. This has been helpful when I know I will have sensitive eyes in the crowd and can edit out questionable scenes, if necessary. I’ve been using Vegas since its early 3.0 days and have seen it evolve into a pretty robust video editing program over the years. The following review is geared towards a DJ using this program, as I am not a professional video editor, but Vegas is an important tool that I use all the time with my DJ company.

First off, if you’ve used previous versions of Vegas, you’ll notice a complete overhaul of the GUI. After many years of being a very light grey, it is now a dark charcoal grey that is much easier on the eyes when staring at a video screen for hours on end. Also, the layout has been rearranged for better workflow. The preview screens are now at the top and the linear workflow tracks are underneath on the bottom half of the screen. Sony has also added a number of various default layouts in case you like to mix things up a bit or want a specific layout for Audio Mixing or Color Correction. Sony also went in and gave many options now for your keyboard and mouse working together in unison with different combinations while you are editing your projects. read more...