Sumit Rai, Chief Product Officer for VEGAS Creative Software, told us about the company's goals, talked about VEGAS pricing policy, and shared the plans for the future.
VEGAS Creative Software released VEGAS Pro 19 back in August, providing improved video and audio editing, color grading, effects, live streaming, and cloud-integrated content management and acquisition.
We asked Sumit Rai – Chief Product Officer for VEGAS Creative Software – about the company's goals, its stand on pricing, and future plans.
VEGAS Goals
The fastest-growing segment in video creation right now is the Creator Economy – this is a massive community of creators ranging in skill levels from beginners/enthusiasts, YouTubers, musicians, and gamers to higher-end professionals who may not be creating Hollywood blockbusters, but they are earning a living from their craft. And while many of the more advanced offerings today are targeted at that high-end Hollywood filmmaker, we feel there’s an opportunity to serve that massive audience of people who are not quite beginners but who are aspiring for something greater. And we want to enable them on that journey. That’s the whole impetus for the new VEGAS.
Last summer, the VEGAS Creative Software team embarked on an ambitious strategy to empower aspiring and professional content creators with a clear, compelling new product line-up with broadly accessible new pricing. Beginning with the launch of VEGAS Pro 19, this newly-refreshed product line delivered improved video/audio editing, color grading, effects, live streaming, and all new cloud-integrated content management and acquisition. Together these components are designed to enable content creators of all skill levels to achieve their creative goals with what we feel is a fast, efficient and integrated workflow.
The caliber and breadth of the software provide content creators with all the tools they need to "finish", using the VEGAS lineup without the need to launch third-party apps. We’re very excited to be a part of this Creator Community!
Pricing
When the Creator Community asks about price, what they’re really asking about is value. "What value are you delivering, and is it enough to make me want to either make a change from the status quo to something new? Is it worth it?" When the VEGAS Creative Software team set out to rebuild the VEGAS brand, delivering value was – and is – our number one priority.
We also realize there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution, that we need to be adaptable and flexible to the needs of our customers – and to grow along with them. As their skills evolve, so too should our offerings. This is why we’ve packaged the VEGAS Pro 19 suites the way we have – to deliver the highest possible value based on our customers’ requirements.
To begin with, we have solutions for those who are just getting started and who need straightforward – yet powerful – editing tools that don’t break their bank account but also don’t overwhelm them with over-bloated feature sets. We call that VEGAS Edit. And it’s only $12.99 per month. We start with a valuable, tailored tool and then make it as accessible as possible to help make the decision to embrace the VEGAS experience that much easier.
With VEGAS Edit, you get:
- 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)
For those creators who are further down the road with their skill set and perhaps are creating content professionally – be they indie filmmakers, social media influencers, YouTubers, or live event producers – there’s VEGAS Pro.
With VEGAS Pro, we focused on delivering even more valuable features and tools, like our live streaming software, VEGAS Stream, powerful audio design tools with Sound Forge, Academy award-nominated Chromakey with BorisFX Primatte, as well as unlimited access to royalty-free HD video and/or audio clip downloads. And all of this for only $19.99 per month. Here’s everything you get with VEGAS Pro:
- 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
And then for our high-end users, we offer 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 delivers significant value with a breadth of features, tools, and capabilities including:
- 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)
- SOUND FORGE Audio Studio
- +Primatte chroma keying software
And all of this, in one suite, only costs $29.99 per month.
So it’s our hope that the community is not only seeing the value of what we’re offering but also seeing VEGAS as a viable alternative. While we feel we have the technical expertise to support the Hollywood market, that’s not our goal. Our goal is to make this massively expanding Creator Community feel like they have options – valuable options, not just inexpensive.
Roadmap
When the VEGAS Creative Software team launched our new strategy last summer, there was another key point in that announcement – and that was a commitment to non-stop, continuous development. Gone are the days of waiting a year for a major new version release to deliver new features or fixes to customers. We made a commitment to aggressive development and a continual release schedule – one, in which we would laser focus on key new features our customers were asking for and ones that we promised, and deliver them as they are ready. Since VEGAS Pro 19 launched, we’ve already had three major feature updates, and a fourth is just a few weeks away. This aggressive new schedule is a significant departure from our legacy behaviors, and our customers are already seeing the benefits.
Very soon, in our next update, we’ll be delivering features like Speech-to-Text on top of our very powerful, multilingual Text-to-Speech capabilities for creating voice-overs in any language. We’re also looking at big advancements to our color grading workflows by adding panels on multiple FX levels, like Track, Media, and Video Output. We’re also adding an Optical-flow resampling mode, which allows an automatic optical-flow slow motion for Velocity envelopes and playback rate changes. We’ll be adding new format support like Apple ProRes RAW, BRAW, and so much more. And as I mentioned, we’re no longer waiting for big annual release dates to deliver new value – we ship new features when they’re ready, so we’ve been coming out with new releases every 2-3 months. That’s a significant change, and our users are loving it.
As for partnerships, in fact, one of the ways we were able to significantly expand our capabilities was by partnering with FXHome – the makers of HitFilm – to develop VEGAS Effects and VEGAS Image, which are part of the VEGAS Post suite. It’s because of this collaboration that we were able to deliver high-end compositing, VFX, and RAW image editing tools. These capabilities really round out our offerings to the higher end of the market and make VEGAS an attractive, accessible alternative for content creators.