The first major novelty is the full support to Windows Vista, mantaining the compatibility with Windows Xp SP2, while the oldest versions of Windows Xp are not supported any more.
Besides Vista support, we have the support for .Net Framework 3 (automatically installed on the system during the setup) needed by some of the new features.

Sony decided to mantain its classic approach about the look of the GUI (in my opinion this is the right choice) for not disorientating old users and to welcome new users with its classical user-friendly GUI.
The unusual interface have always been disorientating for users coming from other NLE softwares, but now Sony helps them positioning by default the timeline in the lower part of the screen and the preview in the upper, taking advantage of a feature already introduced in the release 7.
Besides this little variation, all the graphic elements remained almost the same as before.

Starting from the project setup window we find two new important functions: Digital Signagne and 32Bit Image Processing.

Digital Signage
With Digital Signage we refer to all the electronic walls made by LCD monitors or Plasmas that we now see almost everywhere.

The main problem in making videos and digital contents for these devices is that often the LCD monitors are positioned in vertical while our project in Vegas is normally horizontal.
Sony helps us with the new function Output Rotation which allows to rotate the project by 90° steps and set the preview consequentely.
This function has been extended to the clips also, in fact, if we click with the right mouse button on a clip we find the Rotation function that works the same.

Besides the “official” use of this function, we found that it is used also with videos shot with Mini35 adapters, which most of the times produce a video rotated by 180°.

32-bit Floating Point Image Processing
In the past releases Vegas used an 8-bit image processing, with all the limits connected with it. Some VideoFx where internally processed at 10-bit, but the final result was scaled to 8-bit.

Now at last it is possible to use a 32-bit floating point processing that, first of all, allows the processing of SDI 10-bit video with better precision, but brings also significant improvements to 8-bit videos editing because transitions and Video Fx are lossless and don’t generate banding effects on colors.
We must pay attention to those VideoFx with a little blue square close to the name because they don’t support 32-bit processing, but only 8-bit.

Multi-Cam
That’s one of the major and most interesting new fatures in Vegas Pro 8: the Multi-Cam.
In the previous releases it was possible, thanks to the power of scripting, to use multi-cam systems, even very complex ones, with 3-rd party products (Ultimate-S ed Excalibur): now Sony decided to implement this function natively in its NLE software.

The system allows to control up to 32 sources simoultaneously (depending from the power of the PC) and the direction, after activing Multicam (CTRL+SHIFT+D), is very intuitive using the preview window annd the keyboard shortcuts or clicking with the mouse directely on the preview. Using CTRL during selections, we can set a dissolve transition instead of a simple cut.

Despite what happens, for example, with Ultimate-S, the resulting video is placed on a single track and the pieces of unused video are mantained as additional takes in order to make further adjustments quickly and easily.
In fact, the pieces of unused video don’t phisically appear on the timeline, but are accessible at any time from a contextual menu clicking with the right mouse button on the specific clip under the name “TAKE”.

Another interesting feature is the possibility to play, during the multicam playback, a single audio track or all the tracks of the various shots together. This is useful, for example, when shooting a dialog or an interview.