Nicely put. I am a scenic carpenter. It couldn't have been said better.

K

I totally agree. The AE interface and how it's automation works is not very friendly at all. I use Commotion Pro, and it's similar. The automation in Vegas is brilliant. It's keyer works well, there's colour correction and all the rest. For simple compositing tasks, layering 3d elements or whatever else, Vegas will always be my first choice.

If it's some rotoscope work, or maybe motion tracking, then I've got no choise but to use Commotion Pro for such tasks.

I think when you compare Vegas to Premiere it is much more interesting. There are only a few things I would do in Premiere that I have found I can't do in Vegas. Very few things, and most of these don't effect the final product, just the method of doing them. Such as Automate to Timeline, where I can place all my files into the time with a default transition betwean each. Maybe I'll figure out how to do this in Vegas. And .flm files to output to photoshop for rotoscoping. I did a light saber fight for my brothers college campaign video, and .flm worked well for this though it will draw a system to it's knees. Very inneffecient way to rotoscope, but at least a way.

However, I have found lots and lots of options in Vegas that I have no idea how to accomplish in Premiere, and these do effect the final output.

My most pleasant experience has been with the zoom/pan. Premiere has a "motion" option but it is terrible. Any still imported will be resized to the project settings before applying the motion. So a zoom higher than about double looks terrible. There are ways around this using filters instead of the motion tool, but they are cludgy compared to the motion tool or the zoom/pan of Vegas.

I have thoroughly enjoyed working with Vegas.

That's a great question. I'm just now learning After Effects and have edited a couple of small projects with Vegas 3.0 so I tried creating a :30 spot in both AE and Vegas.

The project was basically flying some masked stills over another still that had some moving video composited over it. Vegas was much quicker in actually creating my project file (but that could be due to me having more familiarity with it) but AE was a much quicker render and had a flexability to it that hinted at the extreme depths of the program.

Basically, if I was editing longer projects (5-10 minutes + up) I'd use Vegas. But for short, heavily stylized projects, AE is just amazing.

Use the right tool for your job (or a little of both, that's what I plan to do).

Jesse

It really boils down to substance over fluff. While the effects you can do in After Effects similar products are nice to have, over use tends to distract from the content of your video or points to a lack of content or sloppy editing which after all should be what you're focusing on and hopeful what people are watching your video for.