I had to read that out loud to my homies here. We all had a good laugh.

We have three PPro stations and we all agree that you've summed up the situation nicely.

Rob Mack

In our case it's not due to our familiarity with Vegas. No one else at my shop has used Vegas to cut anything but we all agree that PPro is unproductive. You can't edit if you're rebooting your computer.

We do finish a few hundred short movies of 3-10 minutes in PPro over the course of a year, but we'd never try to do anything long form. If I could convince people to look at Vegas I feel like they could do the same work with it. I wouldn't recommend Vegas to them for long form work either, but I think they'd have more free time if they used it for the short projects.

PPro has pushed my employer back onto a Mac/FCP platform for long form work. Eventually he'll retire the PC/PPro systems in favor of more Macs, which is kind of a shame. In the end we don't want two types of edit systems and they're relatively happy with FCP for the two long form projects we have going.

As far as other Adobe apps...we just upgraded three PCs to a Web premium suite. I have no truck with Photoshop or Flash (okay, Flash could have a better interface), I'm not familiar enough with Illustrator or Fireworks, and DreamWeaver is constantly taking turns for the worse (they've tightened up some standards-based things at the great expense of people with older sites that weren't standards-based. It actually makes it hard to work on legacy pages -- of which I probably have about 10,000+).

Overall, they've enhanced the interface in CS4 apps in a way that really messes with a lot of my habits.

Rob Mack

i loaded avid xpress pro on my laptop having found the disk / dongle i bought from a student years ago, just to refresh myself.

couldn't even remember how to split a clip on the t/l, and the help was useless - doesn't even mention split / cut.....

thank heavens for vegas, warts and all.

Still using CS3 here and it's a breath of fresh air compared to Vegas of late and that is saying something. Sure PPro is still stuck in the old linear world but that's still the way the industry works, timecode is still king and Vegas is out to lunch when it comes to TC and EDLs. The thing I like about PPro is it is just an editor, it doesn't even attempt to be a compositor or a DAW. Vegas tries to be everything and gets itself bogged down to the point where it doesn't excel at anything apart from where it started in audio land. Even there it has fallen way, way behind the competition. I guess maybe I should have a serious look at Acid but products such as Protools and Nuendo have the gravitas in the industry.

At the moment though Avid is looking mighty tempting. For one current project Script Sync would be a godsend. It always seemed like a bit of dross to me...until I had to work with a certain kind of client :(

Bob.

Sometimes the issue is just that there's a learning curve when you try new software, and this seems more like what Clipman is describing.

In our case PPro has just never been stable, but this is also because we bought into Axio hardware when we installed our original CS2 suites. PPro has always been very unstable for us in this hardware combination.

We just recently tried to dump the Axio cards and go to CS4 with Xena cards. This turned out to be a total disaster. Although AJA support is very good, the state of their drivers is/was bad at the time we installed the cards. They may have fixed the driver problems in the last few weeks but they lost the sale based on what we were seeing at the moment.

Backing out was where the nightmare really began because CS4 required SP3 but the Axio drivers would not install if SP3 was applied. A total rebuild was required to get Axio drivers installed, then SP3, then CS4.

Putting aside Vegas' handling of time code and EDLs, I think the ease with which Vegas lets you do "everything" eventually becomes a problem. Vegas gives you enough rope to hang yourself. It'd be better design if it actually compartmentalized things enough to enforce a better workflow, although how that could be accomplished is up for interpretation.

The interoperability thing (EDL, AAF, OMF, XML) ought to be a major project for SCS. It'd be totally worthwhile to get it right, get it robust, manage customer expectations, and make it possible to bring other people's work in and out of Vegas. It'd be just fine to make it a stand-alone product.

Rob

Hi, Bob

Following your posts over the years, it appears you are into the high end of video production and your needs differ from mine considerably. I am sure you are correct when you match high end features of both programs but I am talking about the simple day-to-day stuff like setting up a project, importing media and making simple cuts and edits. There is no doubt that after using PPro for a few weeks, I could get the workflow down pat. But the point is I would have to take those few weeks whereas with Vegas it took only a few days. It seems to me that Vegas gets you through the learning curve much faster. Sure, Vegas has some dorky methods to accomplish a particular task but you can understand it quickly enough. In PPro, many simple tasks remain a mystery to me even after using them repeatedly. Anyway, thanks for all your input over the years. I learned a lot from you and others here.

Brian

My own personal run-ins with PPro are limited but, like a lot of NLEs, it has a lot more buttons, levers, and dials to push, pull, and twist than Vegas does.

One of the reasons I don't recommend Vegas here at work is that it lacks that level of complexity. It doesn't give a sense of control to someone who's used to having to control things. In other words, it doesn't inspire confidence that you've got a real professional tool in your hands.

Does that matter? Somewhat. Different strokes for different folks, but Vegas is definitely something you can outgrow as your skills and knowledge move beyond what Vegas can offer. I've often thought that SCS could use a third tier product beyond Vegas and didn't think slapping the Pro moniker on Vegas was really all that great an idea.

Rob

Since I use both, I have to say that the previous post sums it up. For SCS to do what you say, it would also have to pry the compositing stuff out of Vegas, create an After Effects type program and also write something to compete with Photoshop. But Vegas IS more intuitive and Adobe could learn a lot from looking at the Vegas interface.

I've been doing video editing since the days of the linear CMX editor with Type C 1" decks and that's what PP seems like. The Adobe aps are so counter-intuitive they make my head hurt. I bought After Effects CS4 over a year ago and after reading all the "Help" files I can find and the on-line tutorials, I have almost figured out how to make a title over video in AE4. Been using PhotoShop since v.5 about 10 years ago but if I want to get someting done, I use Paint Shop Pro.

Sometimes it's hard to tell in this forum what someone's responding to, and that's probably because you can have threaded and non threaded views of the forum. So, J., from my view it looks like you're responding to my post but I can't quite tell which is the "previous post" and who is "you".

I agree that Vegas is very intuitive and there's a lot to like about Vegas' way of letting you work quickly, without getting in your way. Obviously, Vegas also needs to reliably and safely get you to the end of a job.

Honestly, if we never heard another complaint about Vegas hanging on a render that'd be a huge step forward. There's probably a number of ways for SCS to approach that. Maybe some sort of incremental render strategy that renders a little, writes a little, and allows you to resume a render even if Vegas hangs. (that also ought to let you pause a render if you wanted)

I don't know whether Vegas should really completely pry out things like compositing, but it might benefit from "encysting" things like that into their own folder tracks or sub-veg events that prerender on their own.

Rob Mack

Jabloom,

I would have to disagree on your recommendation to rip out the compositor. After Effects is a nightmare to use for the quick and dirty project. I am currently experimenting with animation technologies where I am focusing on compositing the end results to minimize render times. The idea of trying to do what I am doing in Vegas with After Effects makes my stomach more then a little quizzy. Per the Photoshop competitor, Corel has Paint Shop Pro Photo, formerly from Jasc, and PhotoPaint, which are both direct competitors to Adobe, Elements and PhotoShop respectively, and they, Corel, have been in an uphill battle for many years.

As far as Sony uping the ante? I would love if they made Sound Forge functionality work "in place" within Vegas. I would love to see improvements in their API so third party plug-ins could operate as seemlessly as they do in After Effects or Premiere. I still have to say that the support for outputting almost any media format trumps anything, save Super. I have had Mac only guys watch me convert their work from FCP into needed formats in minutes that left them awestruck. I love the batch converter tool that is included in the FCP Suite, but there are certainly political limitations in the formats supported there.

Joe