@DavidAllen23
Stay with it: that's exactly the path that I took (ie I used to use Vegas!) , and I made it, and now I love it.
What you need for your image manipulation is a DVE, but there may be an issue with the size of the image. Because of the way we treat images as "textures" for GPU acceleration, it may not work if it's bigger than around 8000 pixels along any dimension there could be an issue, in which case, you'd have to downsize your image (I'm just recalling something one of the developers said to another user today but cant' find it right now.