Vegas or MS

Adontech wrote on 2/8/2005, 10:58 AM
I was getting ready to purchase Vegas and I thought I would stop and ask you guys a few questions first:
- Anyone here decide to purchase MS over Vegas and why?
- Is rendered output from MS equal to Vegas, especially with mpeg2?
- Anyone decide to move to Vegas from MS because of needed features that weren't in MS?
- I have read of at least one person using both products. In what situations would you need both?

Any other info comparing the 2 from a user perspective would be appreciated.

Comments

dtudela wrote on 2/8/2005, 11:51 AM
Hello, I used MS 3 for awhile and it was great. My reason for moving up to Vegas was the availability of unlimited video and audio tracks--comes in handy for me. Also, with Vegas I can preview the timeline from an external monitor--a TV in my case. I find this helful to determine how my video and any added effects will display on a TV and also for positioning text, etc. Another feature I like is the ability to un-dock windows and move them around in the workspace and hotkeys to hide windows from the workspace to facilitate editing and bring the windows back with a stroke of the same key--very handy when working with a lot of tracks. Working with keyframes to manipulate video for effects is a nice feature as well. I'm sure that more experienced users of Vegas will jump in here with more info. For me I'm glad I chose to upgrade. Good luck!
Darrell
trock wrote on 2/8/2005, 12:01 PM
I agree with dtudela, I upgraded from MS for the same reasons - I *love* the external video monitor option. I'm also enjoying learning 3D compositing, bezier masking and using the WAX and Vdub plug-ins.

The rendered mpeg output from Vegas is better - 2-pass vs 1-pass in MS. But I frameserve from Vegas to TMPGEnc and author in DVD-Lab so that aspect doesn't really affect me.

They are both very stable and fast and easy to use but Vegas is a whole new plateau of functionality.

trock

BigEgg wrote on 2/8/2005, 12:21 PM
Don't forget the price difference.

Vegas +DVD $800
VMS+DVDAS $100

I can't and I don't wanna pay $800 to make home videos...

gogiants wrote on 2/8/2005, 1:52 PM
I've used MS for about 2-3 years now and I've been very happy with it. I've recently been tempted to upgrade to Vegas for 2 reasons:

1) Unlimited tracks: You can definitely get by with 3 video tracks in MS, but I recently found that I wanted to have a number of independent text elements and I wanted to use various layered effects. I just make home movies so Vegas is overkill; but in my case it's not about the end result, it's about the fun I have along the way!

2) Keyframed effects: The pan/crop features in Movie Studio are very powerful, but at some point when you're doing more advanced stuff you'll start wishing you could use keyframes instead of constantly splitting events.

Don't forget that you could upgrade from MS to just Vegas (minus DVD Architect) for more like $400 or so instead of the $800 people have been talking about. You can make DVDs using DVD Architect Studio from movies created in Vegas, or a lot of folks use something like DVD Lab to make DVDs (about $99).
ScottW wrote on 2/8/2005, 6:54 PM
Keep in mind though that if you just go to Vegas without DVDA then you don't get AC3 encoding, so you're stuck with PCM for DVD authoring unless you get a seperate AC3 encoder (which may be much more expensive than DVDA).

The Vegas+DVD (+DVD just for AC3) along with DVD Lab Pro is a great combination (if you can afford it).
trock wrote on 2/8/2005, 8:31 PM
The TMPGEnc AC3 encoder costs $29 and works great with Vegas files. I upgraded to Vegas 5 for $199 since I used to use Vegas 2 for audio way back. I use Vegas professionally but I agree for home videos Movie Studio is great value and the best NLE in its price range.