AE Pro (not the standard version) has an amazing amount of capability already, including plug-ins.

You have the $575 Synthetic Aperture Color Finesse 32-bit float color corrector included, the $399 Visual Infinity Grain Surgery advanced noise and grain removal & matching tool, the Cycore FX filters that include everything in the $799 Final Effects Complete package, the hefty GridIron X-Factor preview acceleration software for heavy compositing, using multiple computers on a network, and more.

The list of what anybody might want never ends though. There are lots of inexpensive plugs available, but you can absolutely do a lot with the "basic" package.

AE Pro is getting a little bit long in the tooth. The user interface especially is messy, but this has been much improved in the next version of AE which is due for release soon, possibly next month. I saw it briefly and thought it looked much better.

I wouldn't pay full price for AE Pro (~$1K) before the DV Expo at least, just on the off chance they would choose to launch there.

Still, if you can get a really good price on the current version, their upgrades usually cost only $150-$180 or so.

Don't forget to budget for some books, videos, or live training. This is not a trivial package to learn.

I absolutely love AE 6.5 and have really only added plugs from Boris and Trapcode. As was mentioned...this is a really deep app to tackle. I invested in Total Training's DVDs, and though that helped (and continues to help) heaps, it's still an app that is very challenging at times, but worth every hour invested!

AE pro is a great app right out of the box. Plus if you have Photoshop it opens up a whole lot of interesting things such as filmstrip. Tons of free plugs are also available, learning curve a little steep, and it is a use it or lose it kind a program,, go a couple a weeks without using it and gets tuff. Any 3d stuff we do is done faster and in my opinion ,better and simpler than in Vegas .

I second what winrock said, there are a lot of free plugins for AE out there (I'll post a small list in a bit, tho google could give you the same results).

The thing about AE Pro is that it can be used for so many different things, that what one user uses it for can now be done in Vegas (in Spot's case for instance), while for another user, their use for AE is very far from the overlapping capabilities of Vegas.

For this reason, it's a bit hard to say whether or not plugins are necessary.

But, there are numerous things that AE can do without the aid of add-on plugins:

- Better, more robust 3D capabilities compared to Vegas (Multiple cameras, 3D lights, etc.)
- Scriptable animation
- Awsome text animation capabilities
- A fairly robust 3D particle system
- Animation of vector imagery (no aliasing when zooming, etc.)
- And more! :)

The comparison is often made that AE is like photoshop, but for video/film. If you think about it that way, it might make the capabilities of AE a little more clear. Photoshop on it's own is very powerful, but if you want a quick way to get an effect or (sometimes) a better quality result, you get a plugin (Alien skin, etc.). It's much the same with AE-- there's so much you can do without purchasing any plugins, but if you want a quick effect or a better quality effect than AE can do on its own, you get a plugin.

Personally, the only plugins I have purchased for AE are the Trapcode plugins because they are so awsome. Surely, you can do a lot without them, but you can do so much more WITH them! :) Any other plugins I have are freely available.

Thanks everybody....

I am a little late on this, for some reason this thread did not come up before today. I use AE and an finding it to be a must have tool for many reason. yes plug-ins are a main reason that it becomes a "must have" but I will say in past years, even with no plug ins, for people who did/do things like build title sequences or do composites AE was a must have. Many of the plugs that have been developed have been deveoped around AE and enhancing what AE could already do, much like most of the plug-in thus far for Vegas. The differance is that in Vegas scripting makes existing worlflow easier, and in AE many of the plugs are actually building on, and adding to, AE. You look at Magic Bullet and how that seemed to have come about - it was built from the gound up, so to speak, and ported over to AE before the NLE market, and even now the suite is for AE and the "editors" version is for the NLE market. AE was either, still is, a finishing tool or a compositing tool. it is not an NLE or any sort of audio tool although it could do both in a very limited way.

As with everything it depends on what you want to do. Many people love to do it all with one program, Vegas is trying hard to be that one program. Vegas has many neat feautres but I have been saying for a while now that it is trying to become the swiss army knife of NLE's. it does many things very weel but it does not seem to do one thing perfectly well, and for many people that is ok. What I mean by that is, and I have said this soo many times, editors use to edit - period. Effects/CGI people do only that. Titles were done by someone else. Color timing was done by a colorist sitting in a higher end suite. Mixing was done in a nice studio with all the nice little audio goodies. Sound editing was done by another person. Encoding for CD-Rom or DVD was done at yet anothe rplace. And so on. All these pople used various tools - now so many people are going to DIY route they don't want all these various programs so a tool like Vegas can come in and nicely fit the bill. In other words the user isn't as specialized so the software doesn't have to be either.

So for me AE is a very specialized tool and on top of that, because of the lack of plug-ins available for Vegas and the lack of AE plug-in support in Vegas, I just do not see Vegas being an AE killer.

AE does come with a lot of goodie and you can do a lot "out of the box" but there are certian things that are very nice add ons, depending on what you want to do leads to the question of "do I need these add ons". So for me my work flow has been to frame serve out of AE into Vegas for finishing, if need be. I like Magic Bullet but as many have said - it is a render hog. So I use the 55mm and DFT stuff for AE, they are add ons that I really like that can not be used in Vegas unless you have something like RedGL, which will act as an AE plugin host. (But it does not work with all AE plugs) (plus it is really expnsive if all you are going to do is use it as an Vegas > AE plugin adaptor) I have also come to find the frame rate conversions to 24p are much much smoother and nicer via AE with Revisionfx's Twixtor Pro and FieldsKit plug-ins than they are in Vegas. For titles I like Trapcode Shine and it's 3d counterpart Lux, although I must say this plug-in has become waaaaaaaaay too trendy now and I am sort of backing off using it that much as far as titles go. I have heard good things about Depth Cue as well, but I have not played with it that much as I do not do much 3d stuff.

Anyhow - if you have th budget I say go for it if your needs would require any of the many things that AE can do/provide. Actually I would say if you plan on doing lots of artistic type stuff - music video for example - AE is a must have.