As my hunt for a good screencasting solution continues, I’ve become painfully aware that to edit video on a Mac you basically HAVE to buy Final Cut, in some form or other. Now I’ve always been Sony Vegas man. Vegas is perfect for editing together multiple sources that are different resolutions, a video screen capture from here, a jpg from there, a video imported from your mobile phone.

The reason Vegas is so good at this is because it can render these things in real time. In Final Cut, if I decide my video is going to be 720×576, anything I import that is not at that precise resolution must be rendered before it can be viewed. And if I decide to move it to a different location, it must be rendered again. Painful!

So I got to wondering if it might be possible to run Sony Vegas on my Mac. I could setup a dual boot using Bootcamp, but I’d rather not. The only other potential solution is virtualization software such as Parallels or VMware Fusion. Searching around for users running Vegas using either of these applications, you might be forgiven for giving up before even trying them, but here’s the really amazing news. They both work!

OK, they’re unlikely to work on all machines. My CPU is a Quad-core 3Ghz and supports virtualization (I don’t pretend to know the first thing about virtualization so do your homework before trying any of these). Quad and 8-core CPUs are getting more common nowadays, and they definitely have the power to run demanding programs on one OS, from within a completely different OS. Colour me impressed!

In the end I plumped for VMware Fusion, simply because I had a few audio crackles in Parallels, but nothing you couldn’t workaround. I’m pleased as punch to be using Vegas again, which, in my most humble opinion, is much faster and easier to use than Final Cut. Until Sony release a native Mac version (which will be never), I’ll be using VMware Fusion quite happily.