What is the difference between Vegas Pro and Vegas movie studio platinum

[jbitakis]

I have both Sony Vegas Pro 8.0 and Vegas Studio Movie Platinum 9.0 on a trial basis. I can't see any difference between the two. Yet Sony Vegas Pro costs $550 and Vegas Studio Movie Platium costs $85. What is the difference??? The screens look identical.
James

[guns1inger]

For a complete comparison, have a look at this table

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro/compare

The big ticket items are

Unlimited audio and video tracks
Proper 5.1 panning and mixing
Videoscopes
Professional hardware and format support

These are all Pro only features.

On the Movie Studio front you get more consumer friendly features, such as the bonus sound effects and cinema scores (which you used to get as samplers in the Pro box anyway)

[schematic2]

I have dwelled over this as well. I had to break down and go with Pro 8 because I can't live without the "Video Scopes" found only in Vegas not Studio

[guns1inger]

FWIW, I am still using 7 because 8 offered nothing I needed (not yet moved to HD for filming). I don't like DVD Architect, but the bundle was the cheapest way to get AC3 5.1 encoding support and mpeg-2 encoding without paying for additional licenses. If you can find the older versions going cheap, you will get all the major items at a much better price.

[edDV]

I'm not sure about Platinum but Pro has vastly greater preference settings (including the encoders) vs. Vegas Movie Studio which is more template based.