Should I Purchase Vegas?

Lanzaedit wrote on 9/24/2003, 9:56 PM
Okay, I'm sure to get grief for posting the following question on a Sony Vegas Forum:
"Should I Purchase Vegas?"

Brief history:
Six years Avid MC 1000 experience at an NBC affiliate.
New job launching a Government Access Channel. We'll produce quality programming in addition to the standard fare of Council Meetings. Acquisition more than likely will be DVCPro.
Programs under one hour will be encoded to MPEG, and then be broadcast from a video server.

Now I'm looking at equipment. For non-linear editing, since I have Avid experience, my first thought was Avid's Adrenaline, but I've heard a lot of great comments regarding Vegas. I'm looking for a desktop and laptop solution. While I'm trying to stay open-minded, I already know Avid (though I've never used the Adrenaline itself). But I want to make a good budget decision as well.

If I purchase Vegas instead, will the learning curve make me wish I had purchased Avid?
If it influences your thinking, we'll also be doing some DVD production as well.
I'm welcome to comments on or off list.

Thanks.

John Lanza
Lanzaedit@aol.com
Smyrna, Tennessee
615-355-5703

Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 9/24/2003, 10:32 PM
Download the demo and see if it meets your needs. You should be aware Vegas does some things differently. Most agree the logic behind why makes sense... once you untrain yourself from some other application that did it differently.

Vegas is one of those rare applications that's both easy to use yet powerful. Like Photoshop you can get by at the most basic level but the power of Photoshop and Vegas really shines through once you get into the nuts and bolds. A learning curve? Yes, fairly steep if you want to use the more advanced features, but right out of the box bing, bang zoom, its that intutive.

Vegas is "event" based. Just means you can carve up the source files into has many pieces as you want and apply effects/filters exclusively to the event besides applying to a whole track, a range or the whole project.

Very little Vegas can't do and it has the BEST audio support of any editor with many special FX filters just a couple clicks away plus a very good assortment of video FX filters.

There's also a very creative programmer called Satish that pops in every so often with another great freebie plug-in. Like a free frameserver, free 3D effects, etc.. He been working on a Photoshop plug, due soon.

The big "complaints" if you can call them that about Vegas follow:

1. somewhat slow in rendering, compared to some other editors.
2. no support of any hardware rending option.
3. no support of fancy edit lists
4. limited support for bins.

That's about the only things you see some complain about. Vegas is rock solid stable and rarely if ever crashes. Most crashes can be traced to Windows itself. The interface is a dream to work with... once you learn it. About 5 minutes if you're any good with software at all.

Vegas comes with one of the best MPEG encoders, a tuned version of Main Concept, the German company known for good encoders.

Let me close this way. If you don't at least try Vegas, you'll probably kick yourself six months or so from now.

TheHappyFriar wrote on 9/24/2003, 11:36 PM
I'll add on to what BB said (and said so darn well!).

I've happend to use a DVCPro with vegas, and rendered to MPEG-2 for play on a video server. :) Vegas is an excelent program. If you need to render multiple parts of a project onto mpeg files (or anything else), you can download a script and have it autorender everything for you. With the MPEG-2's I rendered, they looked identical to the DVCPro footage.

If you're used to Avid (which I understand FCP and Premiere base their interface off of) you'll find it different. I found it better myself.

Another plus is that Vegas, Acid, and Sound Forge have almost identical keyboard layouts and interfaces. So, unlike Premiere and Photoshop which have completely different interfaces, switching between products is a breeze.

Another thing you might find useful (I find it imensly useful) is that you can have as many copies of Vegas running at a time as you want. So while you're rendering for an hour,, instead of twiddling yout thumbs, you can open another copy of Vegas and edit!

Download the demo. The only restrictions are as folows:

1) Can't save your projects
2) Can't render/open any type of Mpeg file (Mpeg 1,2,mp3)
3) can't play back fro, the timeline for more then 2 minute.