I'm ready to upgrade. vegas or adobe premier?

JoeS wrote on 8/3/2003, 6:10 PM

hi folks. been using vf for over a year now and i love it.

i do want to be able to edit mpg2, and rather than buy the plug in, was thinking of going with vegas.

i downloaded the trials of both vegas and adobe premier. i see that vegas' interface is quite like vf. for the few minutes i spent with adobe, i was totally lost and could not even bring a small clip to the timeline to play with.

vegas vs adobe.. any advice would be appreciated. i have read some comments on the vegas forum. just want a few more opinions?

thanks in advance.

joe s

Comments

JohnnyRoy wrote on 8/3/2003, 7:30 PM

You pretty much answered your own question. All of the skills you learned in VideoFactory can be transferred to Vegas 4 and you’ll be up and running in an afternoon. Premiere makes things more difficult than they need to be because they ported an Apple interface to the PC. Perhaps Apple users know what every triangle and squiggly line inherently means to the interface, PC users, however, are lost. I have no respect for companies that think they can get away with this. I used Premiere for one project and would never touch it again. Everything took many more steps to do that it does in Vegas. It’s like they actually went out of their way to make it harder to use.

As for which is better. Premiere is still trying to play catch-up to the function found in Vegas. It is nowhere near as stable. Nowhere near as streamlined to use as Vegas. Reviews have stated that while they have tried to add real-time rendering in software, it only does about 15 fps and bogs down to 2 or 4 fps for anything with a few tracks. In short, it’s still playing catch up.

Your about to do what I did a year ago. I fell in love with VideoFactory and instead of buying the $99 Pro MPEG2 encoder, I upgraded to Vegas 3 for $199. I’ve never looked back.

Consider this: The Vegas forums here, and on CreativeCow, and on DMN Forums, are filled with ex-Premiere users who have switch and will never go back. I have never heard of one person that went the other way. That pretty much tells you what direction to head in.

See ya' over on the Vegas forums. ;-)

~jr

JoeS wrote on 8/3/2003, 8:18 PM

hi jr, and thanks for the info.

by the way, thanks for also turning me on to ulead dvd moviefactory. its exactly what i needed for svcd. works great. though i still favor TMPGEnc for any mpg encoding.

anyway, will experiment some more with the vegas tryout i have, and feel better knowing that others found premier hard to use. but i do love adobe elements.

i wonder if i purchase vegas, will i be able to use the mpg2 plug in in vf (if i want to?)

ciao'
joe s

JohnnyRoy wrote on 8/4/2003, 5:00 AM

> thanks for also turning me on to ulead dvd moviefactory

You’re welcome. It’s a great little tool for the price and even does things that DVD Architect cannot like determine what action to take at the end of a clip (i.e., continue to the next or return to the menu).

> i wonder if i purchase vegas, will i be able to use the mpg2 plug in in vf (if i want to?)

YES, Once you install Vegas 4, VideoFactory will be able to use the advanced MPEG2 plugin as well.

Just to caution you on one thing. The upgrade price to Vegas for VideoFactory users use to be a great deal back in the Vegas 3 days. Unfortunately, you can buy Vegas 4 and Vegas 4+DVD for less at a retail store than the upgrade price. So while SoFo will upgrade you to Vegas 4 for $399 and Vegas 4+DVD for $599, you can find them at SafeHarbor for $339 and $499 or an even better deal at VideoGuys.com with a free copy of Douglas Spotted Eagle’s 4 DVD training video for $349 and $549.

The point is, shop around before you buy. I have SPOT’s 4 DVD training video and its outstanding. Getting it free with Vegas 4 is even better. ;-) Good luck,

~jr

JoeS wrote on 8/5/2003, 6:55 AM

thanks again jr.. will look around for best deal.
this forum really is the best place to go for any and all advice.

ciao,
joe s