You know what perplexes me?

Whenever I've explained my opinions on why I use Sony Vegas for editing, and why I prefer it over Final Cut, I am always met with sarcastic interest and am immediately dismissed, as if I'm some dummy who has no idea what I'm talking about. Most of these people haven't even heard of Sony Vegas, let alone use it. I have been an editor for many years now, and I have used both programs in depth. So why am I constantly met with this attitude when I am the only person with a valid opinion? Whatever the reasons may be, I'm putting an end to it now. Below you will find a comprehensive list of all the major problems I have come across with Final Cut, and comparisons with Sony Vegas. This is not nitpicking; these are major issues I either encounter on a daily basis, or really dumb problems that shouldnt exist. Before I jump right into the list though, I would like to quote some people from the popular CreativeCow Forum in the topic, Sony Vegas vs Final Cut. These people are veteran editors who have used every editor you can imagine, for many years. Ive shortened their long quotes to get to the point faster. Joe Mantaratz My editing history started in the audio field in the studio way back when. It was all Mac and
pretty much as I recall ONLY mac. They had the niche and charged on the average 3-4 times the price for everything connected to it It was a great tool but costly until the PC world caught up and directly competed with them in the desktop publishing world. Studios built their systems and trained their people around the MAC The end product is what counts and unfortunately you still have people who think if it does not come from a MAC it must be sub par.

Leslie Wand - I am an editor of 30+ years and have used them all at some stage or another. they all have their
good points (avid is certainly media management), and their bad. For me it's been vegas since 4, and every time I have to do a job on anything else, I really wonder why I bother. For me vegas is what I want from an editor sophisticated simplicity.

Chris Mannik - It's hard to describe my feelings for

these two. Vegas seems to be quick and clever, easy to use

and even when sometimes it has some bugs in it, I still love it. FCP reminds me more like an old man with a lot of knowledge but slow reaction. You can get everything done in FCP but it takes more time and sometimes you can't figure everything out yourself. Every time I have a question I look at help (haven't found anything useful there, yet) and then Google. Sometimes I get an answer but sometimes not because the info I'm looking for is so sophisticated. The learning curve for FCP is really shallow. A year later and still I don't understand everything about FCP. Most frustrating is that my MacPro should be the fastest and best on the market but still FCP is much slower than Vegas on my weaker PC.

In short, they all agree that all editors have their advantages. However, the only plus that anyone mentions about Final Cut is that it has more Templates. They bash it to a surprising degree, even naming some of the issues you will read below, and praise Vegas in almost every way. You must be wondering now, Whats the big deal? Its just an editor, and Ive had no problems with it. If its the only editor you have thoroughly used, then its hard to know how bad it really is. You have no idea how awful Final cut runs everything, until youve had something to

compare it to. Theres a big difference between something being bad, and being different; Final Cut is just plain bad. It can waste up to hours of your time every day, and in business, Time is money. Now, with that out of the way, let's start digging through the garbage. I've even named all the issues to help you remember them. One important thing to note is that these comparisons are made between a 4+ year old pc, vs. a brand new mac. (I did my own price comparison too. A good modern Mac Pro will cost $3800. To build a PC with the same parts, it costs around $1900, and thats being generous.) Mac Price Reference - http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MD771LL/A?#hardware PC Price Reference http://www.newegg.com/

1 - Snapping to Itself
This was one of the first problems I ran into with Final Cut, and it still blows my mind that it exists. Whenever you try to edit a video or audio clip by changing the length of one end, with snapping turned on, the clip's edge will begin to move with your mouse like normal, but after you move a couple pixels, the edge goes right back to where it was, creating a large dead zone where the clip refuses to move to. Unbelievable. If I wanted the clip to stay where it is, I wouldn't be trying to move it in the first place! I hate how it moves a little at first too, giving you hope that it's actually going to work, then jumps right back. The snap area that it gets stuck to is large as well; a big percent of my edits are done within this dead zone, which would force me to turn it off constantly. For this very reason, I often work with snapping turned off on Final Cut, only pushing N when I need a quick snap. Also, when editing keyframes, they still snap to stuff even when its turned off, which gets very irritating. Its a shame because snapping is such a great feature, but this is the worst Ive ever seen it utilized in any program. Sony Vegas isn't like this at all. When you edit the length of a clip, the snap zone is MUCH smaller, and as soon as you move the edge slightly away from its position, it goes completely free, and doesn't snap back to its first position when slid by it, which is exactly how it should be.

2 - Zooming is Garbage
I was perplexed when I first used Final Cut, and I couldn't figure out how to simply zoom in and out on the timeline to get a better view of things. Eventually I learned it was Command (+) and (-) that is the most efficient, but even with this shortcut, there is still a huge problem. If nothing is selected in the timeline when you zoom, it will center in on the playhead. That's fine, but if you have anything else selected in the timeline (a clip or empty space for example), it will zoom in on the selection, and ignore the playhead. It doesnt center on it though, the zoom seems almost random. Sometimes the beginning edge of a clip is off center to the left, and sometimes it zooms into some part in the middle, I don't know how it works. This causes great confusion when I'm trying to zoom up close on a specific spot. It's very easy to accidentally leave a clip selected somewhere else in the timeline, and then have the screen go to the wrong place when you try to zoom in. Then you got to zoom back out, click on an empty space, then zoom in again so it goes to the playhead. This is a constant daily occurrence for me, and wastes significant time. Why does it have to be inconsistent? Why can't it just always zoom in on one thing, like Vegas. In Vegas, you zoom using the mouse wheel. It makes sense, it's easy, fast, and ALWAYS centers on the playhead. Because of this combination, you can get from any location in the timeline to another location in less than a second, no matter how big your project is. It's so helpful, that it's painful living without it. I didn't even think zooming with the mouse wheel could be considered a feature until I used Final Cut and saw it didn't have it.

3 - Transitions
Just the subject of transitions alone create a whole slew of problems, so we will work with them one at a time. Let's say you want to put a short dissolve on the beginning of a clip so it fades in. With Final Cut, there are 2 ways of doing this. You can click on the effects tab(in the upper left in standard view), click on transitions, then dissolves, then drag the one you want onto a small specific spot on your clip, or right click on the edge of the clip and select Add Transition, then adjust it to the length you want. This may seem fine, until you see how Vegas does it. In Vegas, the top corners of every clip have a small triangle. When you drag the triangle, it creates a dissolve, right to the length you want it to be. There is a preset snap point one second

into the clip, which comes in handy. If there's a different length you prefer for your dissolves that you use often, you can easily change the transition snap point to any length you want in the system preferences. Once again, it's fast and easy to do. Also, if you right click on the dissolve, you get 5 options to choose how you want the dissolve curve to look like, displayed as images showing the curves, which can come in handy depending on how you want your dissolve to look. It's actually even more useful on audio transitions; if you are fading a song, changing the fade curve can help it sound more subtle and natural. In Final Cut, you cannot change the curve. You have to use an audio envelope to achieve similar results, but that has its own weird curve too that it forces you to deal with.

4 Editing with Transitions

Let's say you put a regular dissolve at the end of a clip, the most common transition next to cuts, and you want to change the length of the clip that the transition is on (not the transition itself). Usually when you hover over a clip's edge, your curser turns into an icon that looks like two arrows with a vertical line through them, to indicate you can edit the edge. But when you try to edit an edge with a transition, nothing happens. You can drag the mouse any way you want; it won't do a damn thing. In order to achieve the results you want, you have to zoom in enough (depends on how large the transition appears on your screen) until your cursor turns into a different icon that kind of looks like a horizontal %, then you can change the length. Honestly, why would they program it to work this way? I understand if they want to have a different icon to indicate you are editing a clip with a transition, but why make you zoom in to a specific distance just to make it appear!? Even worse, the regular edit icon still appears when you are zoomed in too; You have to move the cursor slightly away from the edge of the clip, towards the middle of the clip, for it to change to the % thing. I don't think they could have messed this up any worse; it's so pointlessly inconsistent and confusing, and a pain to zoom in every time. The "fast solution" I've seen some people do, is right click, cut the transition, edit the clip to where they want, right click again, and paste the transition back on, wow. This is another daily occurring problem that wastes a lot of time. Sony Vegas' solution is as it should be. Whether you have a transition or not, you can edit clip edges exactly the same. Grab, and slide.

5 - Cross Dissolves
With dissolves being such a common transition, it should be intuitive and easy, but it's far from that in Final Cut. Let's say you have edited two clips to a very specific point, and adding an extra frame will result in either clip showing something you don't want, like if the camera angle were to jump to something else within that clip. Now you want these two to fade nicely between each other. Well, too bad, because whatever method you use to place a transition like I explained in issue 3, you will have a jump cut right in the middle of your transition, making it look like garbage, because it forcibly extends the length of the clip beyond the point you edited it to. When this happens, you then got to delete the transition, delete a little from the edges on both, push them back together, and place another transition, and hope you deleted enough so the transition is smooth. If not, rinse and repeat the last step. This can waste so much time, and happens constantly. Vegas's solution is nothing short of brilliance. You simply push two clips together so they overlap, and that will create a cross dissolve, thats all; no accidental jump cuts. Want to change the fade curve of either clip? Simply right click the corner of the transition, and pick from TWENTY FIVE different options on the curves, all displayed as small square images rather than text, making it easy to find what you want. It drove me crazy when I would drag clips together in FC, and it just erased the footage I overlapped rather than transitioned. I can see now that it is possible to use it to its advantage, but its not worth getting rid of Vegas method. Vegas even has a setting to make it act the same as final cut, but rather than delete the footage, it just hides behind the clip, which is nice if you move a clip to the right, you dont have to re-extend the other clip so they connect.

6 - Inconsistent Alt/Option Grouping Function

My god this ones awful. Let's say you want to change the length of a video clip without affecting the length of the audio linked to it. In Final Cut, you hold down Option, and drag the edge, easy! Where it gets confusing is when you use try to apply the same thing to moving a video clip without the audio moving. If you hold down option, and drag the video clip, it creates a duplicate of it, and if you drop it on top of another clip, it SPLITS that video clip into two, and slaps the duplicate right in the middle (Time to Command Z). Instead, you are supposed to just Option-click the clip, let go of option, then drag the video. This highlights just the video without the audio, and allows you to move it. I get these mixed up all the time, because when you are trying to work fast, it's easy to mess up. But that's not all. The confusion gets significantly worse when you try to do this to a transition. See, when your video has audio linked to it, the transitions become linked too. When you try to change the length of just the video or audio transition by holding Option, it will look like it's working because only that transition moves with your mouse, but when you let go, both the video and audio transitions will move in sync anyway. Well that's just great, once again Final Cut tricks you into thinking it's going to work. The ONLY way to do this kind of edit is to turn off the LINK button on the right side of the timeline. Now you can change the length of your transition without holding option. But don't forget to turn the LINK button back on(you will forget it a lot), or else the Option key will do THE OPPOSITE of what it normally does when editing. So if you try to move video independently of its audio, it will move them in sync if LINK is off and you are holding OPTION. As a final bit of confusion, you can delete a video transition without deleting the audio transition if you Option click the video transition, and press Delete, which contradicts the last thing I mentioned because it seemed like option had no effect on transitions. What a broken mess! Why did they have to make it so complex!? Why did they make Option act so inconsistent!?!? Holding option should always allow you to do any independent action on a linked clip, but no, that would be too simple. Sony Vegas avoids all of that bullshit with some simple functionality. If you want to edit a video or audio clip independently, just click the one you want to edit, and press U. This Un-groups it, making it fully editable by itself. If you want to reattach it, just highlight the video and audio, and press G, and they are together again. If they are out of sync, you can right click the clip, and auto resync the clips. Additionally, you can highlight as many video and audio clips as you want, and press G to assign them all into a new group, so that all of those clips will move together, preventing any

accidental editing to a completed section of your project. Final Cut can't do ANY of this, except for syncing a single video clip to a single audio clip.

7 - Single Minded Functionality

Final Cut for some reason doesnt allow you to do multiple things at once. The main example I have is that when you are playing your project, pretty much anything you do will cause it to stop playing. Cant modify effects, cant move any clips, and cant even click on a track without playback stopping. Various other things can cause major slowdowns if they are happening, like if you turn on audio waveforms or video filmstrips, they have to load first which takes a long time on large projects, and causes lots of lag for some reason. But those are separate issues in themselves coming up later. With Vegas, its the opposite. It can do multiple things at once without stopping playback, and even on my pc, I can move around clips and edit things without causing any slowdown. Its another one of those things that is really nice to have, and you dont know its there until its gone because it works so well.

8 The CommandR
You just applied a special effect or unique transition to a clip and you want to view it. However, when you do, your preview monitor goes blank with UNRENDERED right in the middle of it. Above your clip is a red bar, making it impossible to view your clip at a normal speed. So you begin a render and wait and wait.. and wait. You better hope that this unrendered section is very small, or you could be sitting there as long as 10 minutes or more! And dont think about touching that clip again. If you do absolutely anything to it, you have to completely rerender it. If you place a video clip in the timeline that isnt exactly the same format as the first clip you put in the timeline, you have to render it, whether its audio or video. Who the hell cares if you mix XDCam and MP4 clips together, you have the codecs for them, just play the damn footage! This situation occurs very often. In general it just takes very little to make something need rendering. Ive even had to render a perfectly fine video clip after overlaying completely plain black text, what a joke! So have your hand ready on Command R, which renders your footage, because youll need that more than the play button. The only workaround for rending is to click on the tiny RT button in the lower left corner, and change playback from RealTime, to Unlimited. This allows all rendered footage to play at about 1 frame per second. Looks like garbage, and in most cases, you will need to render it anyway to analyze it properly.

When I first discovered rendering in Final Cut, I had no idea what it was, and I absolutely hated it, because Final Cut needed to do it ALL THE TIME! If you dont do the most basic of basic edits, youre going to have to render it. Apples site says it makes you render if the mac cant handle it, but even a mac pro with TWO 2.6 GHz six core processors still needs to render a simple glow on plain text. In Sony Vegas, you never have to render. Put as many effects as you want on a clip, it will never force you to render. If your PC cant handle it, Vegas will drop some frames, but keeps playing at a consistent speed. Of course though, you can render it if you want to play it back perfectly. You can even create a dynamic ram preview, which is pretty much the same thing, except it allows you to edit and move the clip without having to rerender it.

9 Special Effects
In Final Cut, you have to scavenger through menus in the upper left corner to find the right effect you want. You can drag and drop that effect onto the clips you want it on, but its really easy to end up editing the default effect from the menu rather than effect on the clip you want, because it appears exactly the same in the preview window, so you have to remember to double click your clip every time to load it to the preview window. If you want to apply an edited effect to multiple clips, you first have to copy the clip with the effect, then highlight all the clips you want to place the effect, right click, and select Paste Attributes, then check the boxes on the effects you want, and finally, they will be applied. But be careful, if you want to modify those effects on all those clips, you have to first remove them all by reselecting them all, and right clicking, selecting the option to remove attributes, select the boxes again, and then repeat the application process. This is a huge pain when you are, for example, doing color correction on numerous shots. Some of this sounds okay, but Vegas does it all way better. Vegas has a universal Special Effects button. This button is at the end of every clip in your project. Pushing will open a menu with every effect you can apply. On clips that already have effects, it brings you a menu showing all effects applied. One way of applying effects to multiple clips is the same as Final Cut, minus the clicking boxes, however there is a much better way. The same effects button on all the clips, is also on every track, allowing you to apply any of the same effects, to every clip in one track, making adjusting it super fast. Its surprising Final Cut doesnt have something like this, considering how empty the track bars are on the side. Want to

apply an effect to the whole project? That same button is on the main audio and primary viewer window. Luckily if you do just go the Copy/Paste route like with Final Cut, the effects just overwrite the settings of similar effects, while in Final Cut, it will keep adding more of the same effect, most likely messing up your video or audio. Even the effects menu in the upper left corner is better. When you click on an effect, it will visually display all the presets(Including your custom presets) and its effect on a video clip, in a nice animated panning effect. You can then drag the one that looks best to you onto your clip. I use this ALL THE TIME with my custom presets. In fact, I use everything mentioned above all the time with Vegas, and Final Cut is severely lacking in this way.

10 - No MP3 Support
Thats right, the most common music format IN THE ENTIRE WORLD cannot be properly played in Final Cut. It will be full of loud pops and skips that make it useless. So get out your converter, because thats the only way to fix it. In fact, Final Cuts support of video and audio formats in general is terrible. In only recognizes and exports a few different formats. Vegas supports every single popular format, including all the ones on mac. It can even export projects as them all too, with each format being completely customizable to just the way you like it. If you shoot video using Sony Cameras, you better believe the footage is drag-n-drop from the camera right into the Timeline. Final Cut requires extra software to convert the footage first, reducing the quality. And for those of you who have done converting before, I dont think I need to explain how ridiculously long that can take.

11 Two Mute Buttons

Have you noticed how few buttons there are on the left side of your timeline tracks? At most, there are 5 clickable things, 3 of which you will probably never use. Mute is the only commonly used button. However, in the lower left corner, theres a button that adds TWO MORE BUTTONS, WOAH!! These buttons are solo, and mute yes, a SECOND mute button. Except its like a faux mute button, because if you export your project, tracks muted with this special mute button will not be muted in the final export.

Honestly, have the creators of Final Cut ever made a video in their lives? Think about it, there is absolutely no reason for this button. The side of the timeline is already lacking many vital, useful features, and yet the only thing they could think of to add is another damn mute button. It was when I first discovered this second mute button that I knew the creators didnt have a clue what they were doing with anything, and I lost all confidence in Final Cut. In addition to mute and solo, Vegas also has a volume slider, pan slider, special effects button, Record button, audio meter, and even an Invert Phase button, plus more. And thats just for the audio tracks; video tracks have even more useful buttons and functions.

12 Audio Waveforms
Audio Waveforms are very useful. They help you to quickly pinpoint where you want to edit. However, the time it saves is quickly lost when you have to constantly wait for them to load. By default, waveforms are off. This seemed really dumb, until I turned them on and found out why. If you turn them on, they dont appear right away. Your audio will have a bunch of small Xs along it, and you have to sit and watch as it slowly loads from one side to the other of each track. While its loading, and everything else lags tremendously. If you play your project, the loading stops until you pause it again. Why is it so hard to load a waveform? This is the only program Ive ever seen that takes longer than a couple seconds to do it. On large projects, it can take around 20 seconds just for them to load. And if you zoom in or out at all, they have to partially reload again, wasting even more time. It takes twice as long as it should, because stereo tracks have a separate track for each speaker, so it loads one side, and then the other (more on this in a moment). Sony Vegas might take up to 5 seconds to load all the audio waveforms on a large project, at the most. Even then, it wont halt everything while its doing it. Like many features of Vegas, it works in the background without you noticing. And, waveforms are on by default, as they should be.

13 Two Tracks for Stereo

It makes sense at first, its stereo, so it should be in two tracks. However, when are you ever going to split up a stereo track? Because they are separate, that means pushing two mute buttons instead of one, two solo buttons, two lock buttons, etc. I commonly run into the issue

of them becoming separated, and having to move them individually, even with the LINK button turned on! Vegas just put both into one timeline, and still displays both left and right speakers. If you for some reason only want one speaker to be played, that can easily be changed by right clicking on the audio, and selecting the option. Right click is pretty much the cure-all for anything in Vegas.

14 Video Filmstrips
Another great feature gone wrong because of Final Cuts single task loading, *sigh*. By default, your video clips show one picture at the beginning of the clip to identify it. But you dont get any information about whats in the middle or the end. In Vegas, it displays 3 images of each clip, beginning, middle, and end, which is more helpful than you might think, depending on what you are editing. I found out Final Cut had this filmstrip function too, but not on by default (I wonder why..). I found it in the modify tab at the top, and can be toggled. When I turned it on, nothing happened. I couldnt get it to work, so I left it on and forgot about it. After starting a new project, suddenly it was on, and everything looked pretty awful. It loaded as many images as it could fit in each track, and each image is only separated by a one-pixel line. The clips themselves are also separated by a one-pixel line; you can hardly tell when one clip ends and another starts, making your whole timeline a giant clusterf%#&. And you have to wait for every image to load before you can do anything, just like with the audio waveforms. But its even worse, because if you change the length of a clip even by a single frame, they all have to reload! I worked with it on for a little while, until I couldnt stand it anymore. I turned it off, and closed my project (cause it seemed to not work if the project was already open?) Upon reopening my project, the filmstrip was still turned on. I looked up in the option, and sure enough, it was checked again. So I unchecked it, saved the project, closed and reopened Final Cut completely, checked to make sure it was still off(it was), and opened my project. Goddamn it, its back on!! There is no way to turn it off if you start a project with it on. It wasnt until hours later after finishing my project when I discovered I was wrong; right next to the audio waveforms toggle, is another toggle for filmstrips. And for absolutely no reason, this toggle will turn filmstrips on and off immediately. Why the hell do they have two toggles that do the same thing, but function completely different!? It seems the creators really did try as

hard as they could to make things as inconsistent and confusing as possible, while also trying to hide it.

15 Everythings Too Damn Small

This may sound like nit picking, but let me try to explain why its such a problem. Theres no reason for all the buttons, text, bars, everything to be so small. I find myself misclicking things all the time. The playhead can only be dragged and moved within that small timeline bar. The pictures on the video clips are so small you can barely see them by default. Trying to adjust tiny keyframes in a tiny space is a huge pain because a single pixel movement tends to cause too large of a result. Its just annoying in general. Combine this with mac increasing their screen resolutions to unnecessarily high levels, and soon you wont be able to see things at all *_*. Vegas seems to size things based on their importance, and very few things are single-pixel thin. You could try to argue that Apple made Final Cuts interface so small to give you more space to work, but in if you really look at it, there is a lot of wasted space and empty bars all over the place which could be used to make everything a bit bigger. Vegas has wasted space too, but it displays plenty more information and useful buttons at your disposal.

16 Dont Change the Project Frame Rate

Frame Rate is a pretty important factor when it comes to how your video will look when its done. But what if you want a different look, or set the wrong frame rate, you can just change it, right? Wrong. Changing the frame rate of your project will change all the In and Out points on every clip, change their size, move them out of sync, move all your keyframes, just about everything you can imagine messing up your nice project, making a bigger mess than 300 preschoolers in a playroom. Why does it happen? If your project contains multiple types of media, you dont even have the option to change the frame rate. People tried to find a loophole by creating a new sequence or project with the correct frame rate, and then copy everything over. Apple clearly didnt think this would be an issue, and never coded Final Cut to adjust the points properly, causing the endless changes.

In Vegas, it doesnt matter how many different types of frame rate clips are in your timeline; when you change the project frame rate settings, it changes everything to match it perfectly, and doesnt make any unwanted changes to your project. I once had to spend 7 hours, yes, SEVEN HOURS fixing a project in FCP full of hundreds of clips all because I didnt see the frame rate was wrong. All of which could have been solved in a couple seconds with Vegas.

17 Youve Made Changes, SAVE!!!

For some reason, Final Cut is very paranoid that you will forget to save your project, and have you return with it not exactly the same as when you left. If you open a project, no matter how insignificant of a change you make, it will ask you to save it if you try to close it. If you do a zoom, move the playhead, or highlight a clip, Final Cut considers this a VERY IMPORTANT change and will bug you to save the project when you try to close it. When you are searching through projects looking for something, and you have to do a quick zoom to see the whole project, it gets annoying to keep getting asked to save such trivial things. Luckily Vegas only asks to save your project when you actually make a real change to it. It may seem like a small difference, but when you are already disgruntled over all the other problems Ive mentioned, it adds to fire significantly.

18 Too many Tools

I grew to dislike the use of tools in Final Cut, because its easy to forget to switch back to another tool. Also, for some reason the pen tool looks the same as the regular selector arrow when using it, which has caused me to verbally display my frustration before I noticed I was on the wrong tool. It has a bunch of other tools, like roll tool, and slide tool, which can come in handy, but Ive had problems with those not working properly sometimes too. Vegas just uses keyboard shortcuts for all of those instead (remember when people used to say Mac was all about the shortcuts?). Instead of the blade tool, you just press S(Slice) which cuts whatever you have highlighted, right where the playhead is. Some people might like the blade tool cause you can click anywhere, but think of how many times you use it to cut on the playhead anyway. Also, all the other tools like Roll, slide, slip, etc. are used by pressing combinations of Control, Alt, and Shift, so you wont waste time switching between tools and forgetting to switch back.

19 Fonts Cause Crashes

This is especially true in older versions of FC, but can still happen with the newest version. When working on projects at school, Final Cut would consistently crash simply by scrolling through different fonts in the Boris 3D text. Not only did it lag every time I changed the font, but if I changed it faster than once per second, it would freeze and completely lock up, making me have to force quit. Of course one of the first times this happened, occurred on that one unlucky day I forgot to save my work. Because of how the Macs were networked, the auto save feature didnt work, and when the fonts crashed FC, I lost 3 straight hours of work.

This is the end of my major problems I have with Final Cut, but there are many minor things I just dont like about it, and Ill name a few quickly now. Final Cut just feels outdated. Everything is jumpy, like when sliding the timeline bar at the bottom for example, various aspects just feel so rigid. And the interface is so bland. Everything is some shade of gray or faded blue, and that causes some things to blend into each other. Its just not easy on the eyes. Vegas is much smoother. The interface has more contrast and color to it, making everything stand out easier. It may sound dumb, but its more pleasing to work with, and a happy editor, is a good editor. Too many things are text based in Final Cut. This is especially noticeable when editing effects. The dropdowns send you overly complex settings with tiny sliders and numbers to adjust, that all seem to clump together into a confusing list. Vegas uses lots of buttons and visuals to clearly display things as user-friendly as possible, and keeps things well organized. FCs Keyframes are such a pain to deal with. Points snap to stuff even with snapping turned off, and they are adjusted on that angled (/) line, which adds a lot of confusion sometimes, specifically when adjusting a clips speed. Vegas is really simple with keyframes. Your effect controls open in their own window, which have a mini timeline at the bottom where all keyframes are placed. And everything isnt microscopic making it tricky to click on.

Below are Vegass most notable and powerful features that Final Cut doesnt have. This section alone shows how much of an advantage it has over Final Cut

Interactive Tutorials
They are as they sound; tutorials that dont just tell you, or show you, but make you learn whatever it is you want to learn. Using a combination of text, on screen animations, and highlights, Vegas will guide you step by step on any basic editing, and advanced stuff you choose. I used this quite a few times when I first got Vegas, and it worked incredibly well. Im a visual learner, and any time I used the Interactive Tutorials to learn something, I never forgot how to do it. This is a brilliant feature, and is better than any kind of Tutorial Ive used for learning, including video tutorials online. I can only imagine how much easier complex programs would be to learn if they had this feature, like Adobe After Effects!

Editing in 3D space
Yes, Vegas has native functionality to let you edit within a 3D space to give a great perspective when using multiple layers. This is a powerful feature that is commonly used in Adobe After Effects, and can save you lots of time and hard drive space if you just need to use that feature. Also, Vegas can make Spectroscopic 3D movies. Even if you arent into the 3D craze, you gotta admit that thats pretty cool.

GPU Acceleration
Since editing is all about video, it makes sense that it should use your video card. Its very challenging to integrate GPU acceleration into a program, which is why not many programs have it, but makes a huge difference when its there. It speeds up everything as if it were a processor: playback, effects, rendering, all are completed with much greater speed. Only Final Cut Pro X has this feature, but nobody likes X anyway, so lets just pretend it doesnt exist.

Burns to Disk

Vegas can burn your project directly to a DVD or Blu-Ray. You cant create a menu, but this is nice when you just want to toss something onto a disk for simply showing someone, which happens a lot more often than you might think. This also preserves the quality of your project, because in Final Cut, you first have to convert the project to a video file, then that file gets converted again when being put onto a DVD. With Vegas it goes directly onto the disk, which saves lots of time waiting for converting, and space on your hard drive. Also, Sony has a program called Architect, which is for creating professional quality DVDs and Blu-Rays for $40, and it works in direct conjunction with Vegas.

Best Audio Editor

Pretty much everything Ive mentioned about editing video, works with the audio too. As a nice touch, audio can be edited anywhere in-between frames, and is not limited to just the frames of the video. Ive used many audio programs over the years, and Vegas is by far the best for audio editing. I can shorten a long complex song seamlessly in just a few minutes, fading to different points without you noticing, faster and easier than any program. Not only is it far better than Final Cut, but its a billion times better than Soundtrack Pro. I may bash Final Cut a lot, but my god, Soundtrack Pro is a complete disgrace to humanity, and is the worst program Ive ever used.

Summary
Final Cut somehow manages to be an oversimplified, overcomplicated, horribly inconsistent, painfully confusing broken mess of a program, lacking basic functionality making simple tasks challenging. Its a wonder how this program ever got popular. Sony Vegas literally outperforms Final Cut in every way. Its very user-friendly, and so intuitive, you dont even need a keyboard to edit efficiently. There are countless other little things that Vegas does which help make it so fantastic to work with that I didnt mention; youll just have to see for yourself. On top of everything, its only $600; Final Cut costs $1,000. So by getting a PC and Vegas, you save $2,300. Still think Final Cut is worth buying?