Videomaker by Doug Dixon

What family of video editing tools are you most comfortable with? There's Avid, with its extensive legacy in broadcast and film. Or Adobe, with its ever-more-tightly integrated Creative Suite, from imaging to video to the web. And Apple, with its Final Cut Studio expanding from professional editing to digital cinema.

And then there's Sony Creative Software, with a legacy based in audio from the acquisition of Sonic Foundry back in 2003. Instead of a collection of tools combined into an integrated suite, Sony has a small family of professional products that run on Windows, featuring Vegas Pro for video, plus two powerful audio tools that are suites in their own right: Sound Forge Pro for audio editing and mastering, and ACID Pro for music creation.

Sony Sound Forge Pro 10, released in September 2009, continues this legacy as a professional digital audio production suite, including audio recording, editing, processing, and mastering audio files - plus sound design, audio restoration, and CD creation for professional replication.

The new version 10 enhances the interface with a more customizable workspace combining floating, dockable, and tabbed windows, and adds interactive tutorials to help get started with editing tasks. It expands editing with event-based editing to work on blocks in a single window, support for musical instrument files, and extensive additional tools and effects. Sony also has integrated disc-at-once CD burning into Sound Forge Pro to directly generate Red Book audio premasters for professional replication. read more...