VEGAS Movie Studio 16 Platinum Steam Edition

I'd like to start this review with something I learned about buying online software and reviews. Reviews on games are generally straight forward, most people will have no problems figuring out how the controls work (unless its a really, really, poorly developed game), and the reviews are more focused on game play, storytelling, ect. Sometimes you'll have reviews like "GRR GAME TOO HARD GAME BAD!", and the general public would just think that persons bad at the game, and not that the game is bad. Now, when it comes to software I've learned its the opposite. When it comes to something that reflects a persons artistic/creative ability, people are much more likely to put the blame on the product instead of their inability to create or lack of knowledge on how to use the software. So please take the negative reviews with a grain of salt when your looking at buying something such as this. That being said S16 has problems of its own, but the pros out weight the cons. I've been looking for a video editing software that wouldn't break the bank or that was too cheap. I've had S16 Platinum on my wishlist for sometime and decided to buy it when it went on sale. I was skeptical to buy it because of the reviews on the previous version. Steam only gives you two hours to play something before it is non refundable, so i only barely skimmed the surface and chickened out and ended up returning it. Afterwards I desperately tried to find another software to use, but there was nothing that fit that price point i was looking to spend, so I decided to give it another try and if I lost my money, oh well. After getting some practice and watching a some Youtube tutorial videos, Movie Studio 16 Platinum is a BEAST for the price. You can do some pretty incredible stuff once you know what you're doing. I've spent the last week playing around making videos and absolutely love it! If you're willing to put the time in and figure out how it works, you wont regret it. If you've never done any video editing before and buy it and expect to make epic animations/videos with tons of layers and effects without any experience you're gonna have a bad time and get frustrated. Here are some pros and cons that I've gathered with the time I've spent on Vegas MS 16 Platinum: Pros: - Plenty of tools and effects. For the mid-tier version you'll get plenty of effects and tools that will bump your videos to the next level. This product is great if you're trying to get away from having to use free video editing software. - The UI is fairly friendly and even with next to no experience you'll be making videos in no time. However I highly recommend youtubing some guides. Not that S 16 doesn't explain things well, but more practice and studying = you understanding it much quicker. - Multiple versions. There are several versions that fit your individual needs. There is a low/medium/high tier, each of which are different and come with more tools depending on which one you purchase. This may seem frustrating, but it beats having to drop $200 or more on some program that all you'll only end up using to trim and use a few effects on. I bought the $45 version (which was on sale, i believe its normally $70ish), which is a steal in my opinion. - One time purchase. My biggest requirement I was looking for was that it had to be one time purchase. Monthly subscriptions are wonderful if you only want to use it for a bit, but not spend a grand on some software you're not going to be using it all the time. Now it seems you no longer have the choice to either buy the software for full price value or rent it monthly, its all just subscription based now. I hate the idea of never owning the product and I'm just "renting it", for a monthly subscription. With S 16 Platinum: you buy it, its yours. Cons: -The price. I said earlier that the price was a steal for $45. The non sale price for this version is $70, which I think isn't too bad, but if the price was lowered just a little I think more people would consider buying it. -Crashes. I have only ran into a few crashes in my 45 hours of playtime. One of the features Is that each time you make a change the program saves the file, but unfortunately that was that the case for me. I don't lose much progress but it was still frustrating. -Adding in pictures. This was really frustrating for me, and i spent many hours trying to resolve this issue with no luck, but fortunately I figured it out. When you add in a picture, for whatever reason it adds the image in the "picture in picture" layer, which will leave part of the image cropped off. The image needs to be in a video layer, click the crop/pan icon, then right click match source aspect ratio. I asked several other people if they had the issue with photos automatically being dropping into the picture in picture layer, but it seems its only me. However, if you don't match source aspect ratio on an image, if you try to move around it will most likely have a very limited range of where you can move it before it gets cut off. If this is a bug for S16 Platinum I would like to see it fixed, it's highly confusing for new people who are not familiar with S16. All this being said, Vegas Studio 16 Platinum is great and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to take their movies to the next level. Even if you miss the sale, it's still worth it at full price! This is a little off topic and more of a rant than a review, but: Don't try and run this off a 2001 dell optiplex with a duo-core processor with 2g of ram. Yes, there are some people running into legit problems, but while i was looking for a solution to one of my problems I would encounter threads like "Why does S16 keep crashing?!", and list their specs of their ancient desktop. You will have bad time running this on something that doesn't meet the required specs, period. The render times will be insane if you do so. It will crash a ton and you will encounter tons of problems. Don't run it if it doesn't meet the required specs! Please be more clear on steam to users on what they're buying from each version. Please add something like this that you have on your website (https://www.vegascreativesoftware.com/us/vegas-movie-studio/product-comparison/) It was difficult to tell what exactly I was getting from the version I bought, so I had to tab out of steam and do research online. Oh woe is me, I had to tab our and look online boo hoo. I know it seems silly and a little over dramatic, but I think some people would get confused and not think to look online, and just decide not to buy it because they're unsure what they'll get. The official website (https://www.vegascreativesoftware.com/us/) is highly buggy. When I was doing research or looking for questions on the forums, I would encounter dead end links provided by admins themselves, or insane loading times. The surface of the page is fine, but as you dig deeper you'll start to notice images not loading in properly (or at all), and some official pages just timing out. I'm assuming the server is located in the US, so I have no clue why each people takes a good 10+ seconds to load. The basic version is $50 ($35 on sale). The basic version is a VERY bare boned version of S16 Platinum, it lacks too many features to justify the price. Allow more video/audio layers, add a few effects/transitions. No one will want to upgrade to next version after spending $50 on something that only allows a few video layers, especially considering there are a few free programs that do that. If the entry S16 was, lets say, normally 35$ and 20$ on sale, I could see much more people buying it and later upgrade to the next version. $50 is just too high for something that lacks so much compared to the other versions. Some of this may seem a little harsh, but I only say it because I really enjoy S16 and want other people to buy it too. I think people are feeding in to the negative reviews a little too much instead of giving it a chance.