Boris FX Acquires Vegas Pro, Sound Forge, and Acid Pro – A Month Later, the Industry Consolidation Picture Sharpens

Acquisition

by Nino LeitnerMay 1^st, 2026

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Boris FX has acquired Vegas Pro, Sound Forge, and Acid Pro from MAGIX Software GmbH, picking up a long-running Windows NLE and two veteran audio tools, along with the AI technology behind them. A month into the new ownership, with Vegas Pro 2026 already shipping and NAB 2026 freshly wrapped, the deal looks less like an isolated headline and more like another chapter in the broader reshuffling of post-production software ownership.

We held off on covering this when the announcement first surfaced in late March, partly because it lived in a strange middle ground: a deal that mattered enormously to a specific user base, but did not change the daily workflow of editors on Avid, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, or DaVinci Resolve overnight. With a few weeks of distance, the new product tiers visible, pricing settled, and Vegas Pro 2026 actually in users’ hands, the picture is clearer, and the way it slots into a wider industry pattern is harder to ignore.

Vegas Pro’s third home in a decade

For longtime CineD readers, this is a familiar saga. Vegas began life at Sonic Foundry in 1999, was bought by Sony in 2003, then acquired by MAGIX in 2016. MAGIX kept it on a steady release cadence through versions 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23, with a string of updates covering ProRes support, AI masking, color grading, and cloud workflows. Then, in March 2024, MAGIX filed for insolvency, citing a confusing product portfolio (four versions of Video deluxe, three of Vegas Pro), shrinking revenue, and the punishing economics of a paid NLE market dominated by free DaVinci Resolve.

Russmedia Equity Partners, based in Liechtenstein, took over MAGIX in early 2025 following that self-administered insolvency process. Boris FX has now acquired the VEGAS Creative Software product line outright, while MAGIX itself continues as a separate company selling its consumer products. Financial terms of the Boris FX deal were not disclosed.

The development teams behind Vegas Pro, Sound Forge, and Acid Pro, based in Madison, Wisconsin and in Germany, remain with the products under Boris FX. Founder and President Boris Yamnitsky framed the acquisition as a continuation of the company’s multi-host plug-in philosophy, saying Boris FX intends to keep supporting every major NLE host while sharing AI technology across the combined portfolio. Gary Rebholz, the longtime Vegas Chief Product Officer, stays on as a consultant.

A plug-in company that no longer is one

This deal also marks a real change in what Boris FX is. The company built its reputation as the maker of Sapphire, Continuum, and Mocha Pro, with free standalone tools like Particle Illusion joining over the years. Through a steady run of acquisitions, it has added Silhouette, SynthEyes, Sequoia, Samplitude, CrumplePop, and Music Studio. With Vegas Pro now in the family, Boris FX owns a host application for the first time, and notably the same NLE that already serves as a host for Continuum, Sapphire, and Mocha Pro.

That is a non-trivial structural change. A plug-in vendor has every incentive to remain neutral across hosts; an NLE owner has incentives to favor its own platform, even when it claims otherwise. So far, Boris FX is going on the record with the opposite message, promising continued support for Adobe, Avid, Apple, Blackmagic Design, and OFX hosts. How that holds up across the next two or three release cycles is the real question, and it is the part of this story that cannot be answered yet.

Vegas Pro 2026 is already shipping with the changes

Boris FX did not wait to put its stamp on the product. Vegas Pro 2026 was released alongside the acquisition announcement, and it is a substantive update by any measure. The headline addition is the Continuum Title Pack, a set of 2D and 3D motion graphics and titling tools lifted directly from the Continuum plug-in suite, with 70 drag-and-drop presets, extrusion, deformation, and animation, all running inside Vegas Pro. This is precisely the kind of cross-pollination the acquisition was supposed to enable, delivered on day one.

On the codec side, Vegas Pro 2026 adds native, Apple-certified ProRes RAW support on Windows, with in-application control over color space, ISO, and white balance. Hardware-accelerated AVC and HEVC 4:2:2 decoding is now available on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, removing the need for software decoding for 4:2:2 footage on supported systems and improving playback, compositing, and rendering more broadly. There is also an Enhanced Z-Depth Effect, an AI-based depth model trained by the Boris FX in-house machine learning team, aimed at compositing tasks like placing text behind moving subjects without manual rotoscoping.

Local AI, with a subscription catch

The transcription and voice-over tools deserve attention because of how they are positioned. Vegas Pro 2026 includes offline Speech-to-Text supporting more than 100 languages, with text-based editing and automatic subtitle creation, and offline Text-to-Speech across 9 languages and 54 voices. Both run locally, with no cloud connection required and no usage limits, which is genuinely useful for journalists, documentary editors, and anyone working under flaky connections or strict NDAs.

The catch, and it is a significant one, is that both offline AI features are subscription-only. Perpetual license holders do not get them. This is a meaningful pivot from the MAGIX era, and it puts Vegas Pro on the same path Adobe walked years ago: keep the perpetual license alive in name, but quietly route the most useful new features into the subscription tier. The Storyblocks media library access is also subscription-only, which is more typical for that kind of inventory deal.

The new tiers and what comes with each

Vegas Pro now ships in three editions. Vegas Pro is the base NLE. Vegas Pro Plus adds Mocha Vegas planar tracking, Particle Illusion Pro for real-time GPU-driven 2D and 3D particle effects, plus motion graphics, audio editing, and AI audio cleanup. Vegas Pro Ultimate piles on the full Mocha Pro and Continuum plug-in suites, CrumplePop SoundApp as a standalone audio toolkit, and Optics for photo editing inside Photoshop and Lightroom.

Sound Forge and Acid Pro, the other two products in the deal, join the Boris FX Pro Audio division alongside Sequoia, Samplitude, CrumplePop, and Music Studio. Sound Forge keeps its place as a single-file audio editor for recording, mastering, and restoration, with up to 32 channels of simultaneous capture and the WaveColor visualization layer. Acid Pro continues as the loop-based music tool with hit-point markers for picture sync, multitrack recording, and a large royalty-free loop library.

The bigger pattern at work here

The reason this deal is worth revisiting now, rather than letting it sit as last month’s press release, is that it does not stand alone. In just the past few months, Apple acquired MotionVFX, bringing one of the most prominent Final Cut Pro plug-in developers in-house. Thomas Riedel acquired ARRI, reshaping the cinema-camera and broadcast landscape from the hardware side. Apple bundled Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage into the new Apple Creator Studio subscription in January, on the back of the earlier Pixelmator acquisition.

The Boris FX, Vegas Pro, Sound Forge, and Acid Pro deal slots into that pattern. The mid-tier independent software vendor is becoming a rarer species, and the surviving players are bulking up by acquiring each other, often with new licensing structures and feature gating arriving in the same breath. For working filmmakers, the practical takeaway is to pay attention to who owns the tools you depend on, because ownership changes increasingly come with new subscription tiers and new decisions about which features sit behind them.

Vegas Pro is priced at $17.95 per month or $99.95 annually as a subscription, or $219.95 for a perpetual license. Vegas Pro Plus runs $24.95 monthly, $149.95 annually, or $299.95 perpetual. Vegas Pro Ultimate is subscription-only at $39.95 per month or $199.95 annually. Upgrade and Support plans are listed at $143.95 for Vegas Pro and $199.95 for Vegas Pro Plus. MAGIX customers who own any previous version of Vegas Pro or Sound Forge can upgrade at a single simplified price until December 5, 2026 via the Boris FX webshop. To celebrate the launch, Boris FX is also giving Vegas Pro users free access to a new 22-part Vegas Pro Essentials training course, normally priced at $49.95, until the same December 5 deadline. Full details and the original announcement are available on the Boris FX press page, and product information lives at vegascreativesoftware.com.

Are you a Vegas Pro user weighing the jump into the Boris FX era, or are you watching this consolidation wave from another NLE? Don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments below!