Life has settled down a bit for me and I can focus on my LightWave hobby again. I played around with the software a bit this past week and re-familiarized myself with the modeling and basic layout tools.
One of the main reasons for starting this site is to document and track my goals related to LightWave. Now that I feel comfortable using the software again, I want to start setting some short-term and long-term goals for myself.
In the very short-term, my goals are simple:
- Figure out my long-term goals and deadlines and post them to this site (deadline: Oct 6)
- Evaluate different compositing and non-linear editing (NLE) software to find a pipeline that works best for me (deadline: Oct 6)
I have used Sony Vegas in the past for both compositing and NLE, but it’s been so long that the last version I used was 6.0 (the current version is 12). After doing some initial research, I have found three different products to evaluate:
- Sony Vegas Movie Studio 12 Platinum ($99.95 or $129.95 with Sound Forge)
- Blender 3D (free)
- Lightworks (free or $60 for full codec support)
I am going to evaluate each product separately as a compositor and an editor, which means I may decide to use a different program for each function. However, my goal is to only spend money on one product (which ultimately means that I will not use Vegas as a compositor and Lightworks as an editor, which I believe is the only combination that would force me to pay for two products).