We use Premiere 5.1 and 6.0 so I cannot comment on 6.5. Regarding Premiere 6.0:

Premiere is okay if used in conjunction with a hardware card such as the Pinnacle DC1000, DV500, matrox RT 2500 et al. However, when used with just 1394 it is slow as heck because every transition and title must be rendered before you can see the result. This is particualrly annoying when doing colour correction. Vegas's preview shows what's going on in real time.

Premiere's audio editing capability is truly pathetic. Vegas, on the other hand, is outstanding, likely because it began as Vegas Pro, a multitrack audio editor.

Both programs have limited titling but there are some great plug ins for Premiere, such as Boris Grafitti. Alas, Graffiti doesn't work with Vegas so I use Premiere to make the 3D titles and effects.

Vegas exports to MPEG1, MPEG2, wmv, Real video directly; Premiere does wmv slowly and uses EZ Cleaner 5 for MPEG (which you cannot adjust without buying expensive plug ins from Heuris).

Premiere crashes more often than Vegas but you don't have to render the whole project in order to print to tape.

Vegas can open any format (mpg, wmv etc.) right away so that you can edit it; Premiere equires you render it and editing anything other than avi or QT is difficult.

Both programs have their merits but Vegas is a better value, next step being AVID for about 4 times as much.

If you are going to do a lot of editing the Matrox RT 2500 combined with Vegas is a good combination: speed, analog I/O and great audio editing capability.

With Premiere you're constantly fighting with the clumsy interface. With Vegas you're free to think about your EDITING and not really thing about the software, once you understand how it works, which with Vegas, doesn't take long, which is as it should be.

What I'm trying to say is every so often someone comes up with software that is heads and shoulders about the competition. I'm for sure not the only one that thinks that SoFo has accomplished that with Vegas.

Oh you can get the job done with Premiere, but you'll need to get a bunch of plug-ins, suffer through a lot of crashes, and did I mention that clumsy interface?

Vegas is as close to intuitive as software gets. While Vegas has a interface that is somewhat different it is different in a good way... making common tasks easier to do, not different just to be different.

"If you are going to do a lot of editing the Matrox RT 2500 combined with Vegas is a good combination." - Does that mean that I could achieve Real Time editing using Matrox card from my present Vegas interface?

Sorry Grazie

No joy on a RT card + Vegas. Any of them. Vegas captures and exports most efficiently with your basic 1394 firewire card.

There has been much talk of this in the past (do a search). The general thinking is that RT cards will be moot at some point as computer speeds increase.

PB,

How does the Matrox RT2500 help you with Vegas?

I thought everything in VV was handled in software and import/export through a firewire card.

What does the Matrox card do for VV?

Kirk

RT 2500, DC1000, DV500 etc. work only with Premiere. If you have to cut super fast, say for the evening news as we do, a real time card is pretty good. Our DC1000 runs on a PII 500 with just 256 meg ram. There is virtually no rendering and it outputs to BetaSP via y/c, DVCAM via firewire and (shudder) VHS through the composite. It is true faster PCs are making this approach obsolete but it works great for us since we source from DVCAM and BetaSP. THe other posters are right in telling you you don't need a real time card for most apps. Thing with us is as soon as the piece is cut it is ready to dump to tape and then taken downtown to the MPEG2 high speed transmitter box.