It was mentioned recently in http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/showmessage.asp?forumid=4&messageid=945182

Ah yes... competition... within company company walls.... not good.

I remember when Avid bought Pinnacle who at the time had a pro version (Liquid) and a hobby version (Studio).

After a year or so Avid made the decision to kill liquid, offer its users a deal to move on to Avid MC, and keep studio for its hobby audience.

I remember all of this quite well because I was a Liquid user and decided to jump to Vegas instead of MC.

Tell me this isn't happening again!?!

Pinnacle is now with Corel who took over Ulead ...

So...based on that thread...no one knows what the future holds. Considering Vegas is much better known than Pro X, I would speculate that Pro X users will eventually be migrated to Vegas over the next few years not the other way around. Otherwise Magix would not have maintained the development staff at Madison and is currently looking for more developers. Plus you have Sound Forge which is still popular among the audio crowd. I think Sony threw in Acid just so they could get rid of it.

I suspect Vegas and ACID share a rather huge common code base. I'd guess that when the Vegas code was transferred it effectively included 80% or more of ACID anyway. So, there's probably no reasonable way to separate the products into individual IP sets.

We experienced something like that when our boss at previous $dayjob sold off one of the product lines without consulting any of us techs first. He kept three other products, and the common code shared among them was close to 95%. The order came down to "separate the product lines by the end of the month and make them independent." At the next staff meeting (which i called some 30 seconds after seeing the boss' email) we explained that to do so would probably require 6 to 10 programmer-years as most of what we were keeping would have to be re-written. End result was that we entered a collaboration with the purchasers to maintain joint development of all code sets, and the agreement that they would replace the IP they purchased from us with new code within 18 months. I don't see anything to indicate that happening between SONY and Magix.

FWIW , I tried out Magix just for S.A.G when they made the announcement a few weeks ago. Aside for the .mov support , there wasn't much there to brag. There are some nice things, even has the auto crossfades like Vegas. But you might as well compare it to Vegas 5. The rendering was horribly slow.

I agree with the other posts here : Vegas is Pro, Magix has a long way to go, despite the name "pro."