Hello world.

I'm a 3d character animator/modeller, fx/ videogame artist. I've directed and edited cinematics for videogames etc.

I''m about to start editing a few projects and with the recent release of v5, i've decided to compare the competition to vegas5 and 4

I love Vegas. However i'm finding that i have a major gripe with it and V5 has upset me greatly. I will explain but first let me review the competition. My complaint will become very obvious (i promise :) )

First the compeition....

[Avid Express Pro]:

Avid express pro is one hell of an editor.... The performance of the editor is incredible. Its fast, full of great plugins. The bins are simply brilliant. Clips in the bin contain subclips etc. Simply drag all of the clips that contain subclips into the timeline, and avid creates a nice rough edit. Avid Express handles prerendered data so intelligently. Apply an Effect, render it, move it, apply another effect, render, move it.... Undo any step of that process, and avid brialliantly remembers each one of your rendered clips. Thus saving time, and it edits fluidly. The key benefit to this is simply having the abilty to render an effect on your clip, and being able to move it to any point in the timeline without losing your rendered data. (try that in vegas)

Avid Express Pro, isnt without its problems though. It can be unstable, the editing workflow is tedious at times, powerfull but tedious and overly complicated. The audio capabilities of the program are a joke.

Avid Express PRo also lacks a similar feature to Vegas's Velocity curves and this is by avid's choice. They simply cut Express Pro's balls off when it came to time warping effects and simply added a few lame, useless presets that ramp from 0% to 100 and 100% to 0% There are a few other lame time warp presents but none of them will give you the same incredible control you'll find in Vegas's velocity curves. ALTHOUGH... Avid Express Pro intergrates with Boris RED and now Boris Comtinium? which features Boris's optical flow technology which is similar to "twixtor" and "Retimer HD" in that it will track each pixels motion and create new frames with accurate motion blur. Its a time intesive process but the results are outstanding. I hope Vegas includes this feature into its velocity curves in the near future. Boris Red intergration in Vegas is just lame. The fact that it cant obtain the lenght of each clip, makes it virtually useless and time consuming to work with. I beleive this is a limitation of Vegas and not Boris Red. (is this fixed in v5?)

Avid Express Pro has NESTED TIME LINES.... Oh i wish they were in vegas...

-conclusion

Avid Express Pro is a great editor though and it does the basics so well, so fast, and its full of plugins that make it one hell of an editor. What kills it for me is the workflow of jumping in and out of segment/splice, segment/overwrite, and trim modes. Layering things for effects is also headache compared to vegas. Frankly i find it anoying. But there is power in it since every "layered" effect in avid is a nested effect within the clip. So moving a single clip, moves all of your "layered" effects. Very nice indeed.

Premiere Pro:

Well well well. Premere Pro. I started editing with Premiere years ago and i hated it then but i love it now.

Premiere Pro has come a long way. It shouldnt even be considered "premiere" anymore. Its much more like avid now, without the anoying segment/trim modes. triming, rippling, slipping, moving, etc are so nice in premiere pro. Vegas could learn a thing or two from Premiere Pro. For example. When you have two clips next to each other and you want to trim the beginning of the second clip.... Premiere will show you the last frame of the previous clip, and the first frame of the next clip that you're currently triming. Thus allowing you to judge screen position for conitnuity etc. Very nice editing tools. Premiere does cutting/triming etc nicer than vegas.

Premiere Pro also has incredible data management. Like avid, it handles rendered clips effortlessly, fast and intelligently. It remembers each level of undo, and you can move the clip without destroying the rendered data. Vegas simply sucks at this and it angers me greatly. This is a BIG deal in my eyes.

Premiere Pro has incredible after fx plugin support as one would assume :) But Premiere Pro lacks the quality fx/transitions, found in Vegas. Frankly i greatly dislike Premiere Pro's included fx, including their color correction which is slow and bloated. Vegas handle's color correction far better than ANY of the others at FASTER interaction speeds. VEGAS and SONY deserve a whopping crapload of respect in this area because It has secondary color correction and it is one of the features that i love about Vegas. More on this later...

Premiere Pro has NESTED TIME LINES.... Oh i wish they were in vegas... (HINT?)

Conclusion:

Premiere Pro is a better Avid Express Pro in that it edits quicker with similar workflows, intelligent media management like avid without the anoying segment/trim modes and difficult to select trim points. I'm drawn greately between Vegas and Premiere Pro. (I cant wait to see 1.5 of Premiere Pro) Premiere Pro lacks the ability to save teh settings of a filter tha tis applied to a clip. This is in 1.5 now, so that is definatly worth checking out.

Vegas 4 and 5:

Oh how i love Vegas, infact the more i love it, the more i hate it because its so good and just needs a few things to make it killer

I played around with the v5 demo and i wasnt impressed much. The new features are great but the lack of nested time lines, and intelligent data management has left me wondering if i should buy Premiere Pro 1.5 rather than v5 (i'll have to wait to see the demo)

I'm glad they added roto masking tools. I'm rather impressed that they did infact. The 3D TRS (translation rotation scale) features are odd at best. I mentioned i was a 3d artist, and i simply find the 3d ui in vegas rather odd but atleast usefull.

I'm more or less finding vegas clumsy. It is so powerful, yet it seems like features are being piled on rather than being thoughtfully implemented.

NESTED timelines should have been priority. Even over rotomasking which i'm ashamed to say is a feature i was hoping for. But Nested time lines come first! As do basic editing improvements, such as intelligent clip rendering and management of them.

Vegas has so many incredible tools when it comes to fx. Its such an fx oriented editing workflow but it fails to realize that FX work is COMPLEX while editing workflows are supposed to be simple. I can apply all kinds of incredible color correction tools in a very effecient manner. I can choose color curves if i want, and then add color correction, and then secondary corrections if i want. Thats POWER... and all of the other NLE's fail to match VEGAS in color correction tools. The fact that i can choose curves, or a color correction, or both is incredible. Premiere pro lumps it all under a single bloated color correction node that fails to perform as well as vegas's tools. With that said.... If i can apply all of these great fx filters... VEGAS should be smart enough to NOT DUMP my rendered clip data.

Rendering out a clip (not to new track) should create non destructive history info. In that i should beable to move a clip, trim it etc after it has been rendered without it LOSING its rendered data. AVid and Premiere do this flawlessly.

Vegas makes this a chore and its these basic things that make Vegas flawwed. Such a powerfull application needs better data management and that should have been the focus of v5.

Editing tools in Vegas are fast and fluid. EASY to work with but still too simple in terms of interaction. I think vegas could steal a few things from Premiere Pro and Vegas would then be the killer cutter :)

I have to say that i do not like Vega's single monitor window workflow. Avid's color correction 3 window workflow is incredible and Vegas needs this greatly. When editing i would like to see my edit as well as the new clip that i'm opening from the bins... That way i can make better artistic design decisions in how i edit. ALSO i wouldnt have to drag a clip into the trimmer to be able to scrub through it. It would already be in its own monitor window with its own timeline. I could scrub it in there, mark I/O points and splice in from there. Its much easier then draging to trimmer, marking and draging into the edit which i cant even see the current frame because the trimmer is displaying the clip that i'm about to bring in, rather than the edit's current frame. Seeing both in two monitors is the only way to really solve this issue. Single monitor in vegas sucks. Dump it.

And while you're add it. Adjust the color levels properly and deinterlace interlaced footage so we can edit with a nice clean image like in avid express.

Vega's clips are great and easy to work with however their display is confusing and cluttered. Its nice that they show video frames but it becomes too busy to look at. A simple single frame option and clip name display would be nice.

Navigating and moving around iin vegas is superior to the other two NLEs. Its great that you can now store layouts in V5.

The things that keep me in vegas are... color correction tools, velocity curves, great real time performance and incredible audio tools.

Vegas has a great set of fx filters and transitions... far better than Premiere Pro. Some of Premiere Pro's transitions look straight out of early video editing days. They're corny, they lack style and any video editor that uses some of those silly wipes in Premiere Pro should be shot :)

Vegas seems to come to a crawl when i have hundreds of clips in the bins while editing on a dual amd workstation with 2gigs ram. Undo an edit and wait a minute while Vegas figures out what the hell changed. Its anoying and scares me away from editing anything longer than a music video.

Well i have written a lot, and its in rough broken thought form as i sit here trying to remember everything i want to say.

Vegas is by far the best NLE feature wise however it lacks refinement and i was hopeing V5 would be that refinement. I'm curious how some of you folks deal with the lack of good rendered clip mangement? Ram previews are usefull but you cant ram preview an hour long edit. :)

Nested edits seem possible, and i think Vegas will have them in time. OBVIOUSLY the thing thats keeping them out of vegas is the very thing that makes vegas great. The amount of tracks and compositing features. Wrapping that all into a single clip... wow... lots of data. It would all work if they simply figured out how to get vegas to handle rendered clips better... and i think thats probably whats holding them up. Lets face it. Rendered clips are hard to manage when you have tracks of video that layer liek photoshop layers. Its a tricky thing and i think the Nested FX feature in v5 is a STEP towards NESTED EDITS because it is exactly the very thing needed before nested edits and better clip management is implemented.

I have a feeling Sony gets it and are trying very hard to implemenet the features we all want. I'm just heartbroken that v5 lacks them. The rotomasking is nice, and like i said... Nested fx are a step towards nested edits. From a software developement standpoint... (and i have worked in that field as a artist consultant) .... Its very difficult to implement BIG features like Nested time lines when you have a complex multi track layering system that was never meant to do it in the first place. Nested FX are/were a nessecary alteration to the vegas workflow because that is a step to finally figuring out how to manage data better and do full nested edits with intelligent clip rendering/management.

Of course sony could be reading this and saying "wow he is way off" ... but i'm only guessing :) I know you guys are working hard.. the product is excellent and above the rest in many ways... powerfull ways.

To you though i suggest implementing a multi monitor work flow option and some of the nice cutting features of premiere.

We need better plugin support!

Also i had mentioned Avid's layering ability... and how they keep applied FX nested under the root/source clip This makes it so much easier for editing. Simply move the clip around and it moves all of its layered fx with it. It makes it so much easier to edit rather than deal with all of the tracks inside vegas when moving clips.

I've said way too much.... :) Kirk Out.