I must admit, I think I'm addicted to Sony Vegas.

No, Vegas has nothing to do with gambling. Vegas has everything to do with digital video editing. I had heard great things about Adobe Premiere and the state of digital video editing, but the mid-range software is far better than I expected. This weekend I tried out Sony Vegas (formerly Vegas Video by Sonic Foundry) and have fallen in love.

It shouldn't be surprising, but it still feels weird: if you spent ~$1,500 on video equipment today, you can do ten times more than you could with $25,000 ten years ago. I run into this sort of 'leap' a lot in software development, but it's rare that it hits home just how far we've come in other technology areas.

In high school, I was the lead video editor for our school's television studio. In order to create professional-looking video, it required all sorts of clever tricks and hours upon hours of your life. Now there are no such requirements. So much work is now done in software that near-professional-quality is just a few minutes away.

I can't wait to get home and play with it some more. 

Categories: Geekery