I assume you mean Studio 7 by S7.

I started out using studio and very quickly found it to be quite limiting. Don't get me wrong it was fine to start with and a good intro but when I wanted to do far more than it would allow I looked at Premiere and Vegas. Premiere is bundled with a lot of cards but as I had a OHCI compliant firewire card and was only input/ouputting DV bundling wasn't a consideration for me. Vegas had rave reviews & it's feature set was impressive. Although there is a lot of plug-ins available for Premiere (due to it's huge following) a lot of people said they found it a bit clumpy to use.
Vegas is very intuitive, read the manual, try the tutorials & you will be on your way very quickly. Also you generally get help fairly quickly from not only talented people on these forums but Sonic staff.
It's a great product & I'm sure it is gonna make big in roads on Premiere with the right marketing & the plug-ins that are available to Premiere will follow.

I started with Pinnacle products (DC10plus, Studio 7) and found it to be easy and quite powerful for the price. However, the unstability, especially when making tape was totally frustrating. Now I use VV3...And Love It!! About the only thing that I miss from Studio is the ease of insert editing, moving etc., but I feel that SF is working this issue. I have had zero stability problems with Vegas. Haven't used any other NLEs, and don't think I want to. Vegas has enough for me.

First let me say I really like VV3 for a lot of reasons, but there are benefits to having an Avid over any other NLE that perhaps SF could incorporate. Such things as having a built in vectorscope/oscilliscope and awesome color correction capabilities. These are must have tools for any professional video editor. And no other NLE comes close to the Avids trim capabilities, which is the essence of editing. With Avids, you have to learn the keyboard commands because otherwise you will be making lots of mouse clicks, but the keyboards are mapable (any chance for that SF?). Avids aside, VV3 kills priemiere, DPS, and media 100. If SF added a professional vectorscope/oscilliscope and beefed up trim capabilities, Xpress DV will have a contender for the independent producer.

With Avids, you have to learn the keyboard commands because otherwise you will be making lots of mouse clicks, but the keyboards are mapable (any chance for that SF?).
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The same goes for Vegas. Keyboard commands are a must use. Everyone should have the keyboard commands chart handy when learning Vegas. If you didn't get one, make your own from the manual. Vegas is so deep, that chart could be next to your computer for months or years.
Just what editing/cutting/trimming tools do you need (that avid has) that Vegas doesn't have ? And what color correction tools?
I'm not trying to do the perfect cheer. Just think lots of what people are looking for is in there.

Craig H.

I agree VV# is loaded with top notch features and If VV3 has a competitor at all in its class, it's Avid, and that's nothing to sneeze at! As far as editing features, Avid makes use of a keyboard-driven "JKL" jog/shuttle control which is awesome for locating and marking in- and out points, 3 point and synch editing, frame accurate slip and slide mode with but the main difference is that Avid has a mappable keyboard and its GUI is "modal" where each mode is optimized for a phase in the workflow of a project. In other words, If you are editing a production with dozens of tracks and hundreds of clips, the Avid interface forces an editor to choose what type of operation they intend to perform. While there are some drag and drop type functions, you can not simply click-select a clip in a timeline – and then delete, cut, copy, move, or edge-trim it. This is intentional because a modal interface means editing accidents are far less likely to happen. At first, this may seem tedious, but if anyone has spent hours or days recreating a timeline (as I have) because of some inadvertent mouse click in the timeline that has offset everything around it, you begin to appreciate the “modal philosophy”. This is important because the even experienced editors can make mistakes. I'd love to see more control in that way and it keeps you thinking. As for color correction, there are lots of controls in VV3 , but what are we referencing it against? The Avid features include advanced vectorscope & waveform monitors, previous, current and next frame windows, reference frames, before and after split-screens, “patent-pending NaturalMatch color matching”, and safe color warnings. Believe me, I think VV3 is awesome software and I think they have potential to take it to the top! I think these are areas for consideration and improvement is all.

Thanks for the Avid insight there Barry. A couple of points:
Vegas 3 has JKL jog/shuttle control. I - O works with the trimmer.
Locking events helps with stray mouse clicks. Adjusting your mouse acceleration and speed helps a ton in Vegas. You don't want click drags happening unless you want them. To easy to do by accident with hyper mouse settings.
I don't think I could work in such a "structured" layout like avid, but you never know. I do hope to see SF put some front ends to help with using the powerful filters. I see acid just got a new style of filter that allows automation of settings over time without use of busses. Also picked up 5.1 mixing, but doesn't encode. Sound Forge just got background rendering. Good signs for what we might see in Version 4.
And a big ol yes to the Wave/Vector idea. Color levels can be checked with Histogram now.

Craig H.

Good to know about the JKL in VV!!! As for the interface differences and being more structured, ultimately it comes down to what you are used to, I still prefer more structure for a lot of reasons, and certainly locking tracks or slowing down yer mouse are all workable options. I have also worked in software such as DPS Velocity where you have to lock tracks for the same reason. You know, Clicking in the timeline winds up moving video a frame or 2, sometimes unnoticeably. Or when you drag an effect onto a clip or simply trying to relocate the curser in the timeline moves something. What I didn't like was constantly locking and unlocking tracks because sometimes you have a whole bunch of video and audio tracks and you wind up making 6,7,10 clicks to unlock them in some cases and then relocking them all which becomes tedious as well and I think that's why I like the modal thing which is like one keystroke and your timeline editor is engaged. Anyway....enough of that 'cause we could split hairs all day on that kind of stuff :). As for color correcting, having the ability to compare previous and upcoming frames silmutaneously, in real time, is a great feature to have and I'm not so sure you can do that with a histogram (can you?), but no doubt, it's a helpful reference. Do you know, Can you use keystrokes or use somekind of keypad entry to VV3 to trim clip edges, or can that only be done with a mouse?

Barry, you really need to adjust your mouse settings and re-evaluate. It makes a world of difference. ;-)
I don't know of a one step keyboard command for trimming events. I just place the cursor where I want, then drag an event edge to it. Accurate and quick. Alt-arrow steps at one frame intervals at any horz. zoom setting.
Using the histogram as a vectorscope doesn't allow for previous and upcoming frames. That sounds like a cool feature.
Craig H.

Yes, its a must have for any kind of serious color correcting, trying to match skin tones, or to correct for proper white balance etc. Putting our interface preferences aside, and to sum up my thoughts on the original question, I think the waveform monitors and color correction are the most significant differences between XpressDV and VV3. Proper waveform monitoring and color correction capabilities are essential tools to a proffessional NLE and that will be the deciding factor for a lot of people. If your work has to live up to broadcast quality and maintain legal NTSC standards, without those color corection and waveform tools, its a shot in the dark (no pun intended). If Vegas Video finds a way to incorporate those tools.....goldmine. I hope they can make that happen.