As an old Premiere user / hater I can only say this for starters:

Vegas Video beats the crap out of Premiere any time of the day.

Now for the more interesting part. Bottom line is this: Vegas is
written by / for musicians (basically), and Premiere by / for Adobe
graphicians. Hence, the Premiere graphic capabilities are, in my
humble music-opinion, slightly more intuitive than Vegas, although
also more limited. And as someone pointed out, less optimized for
today's computers, meaning slower and buggier.

However, if you look at audio management, there is really nothing to
say. Premiere is slow, un-inutitive, non-professional, ugly, buggy,
limited, requires extensive work-arounds and simply cannot measure
itself to Vegas. If you're into audio, you simply cannot even
consider Premiere as a serious alternative. Vegas has real-time
effects, buses, direct-x compability, good performance, flexibility,
editability and every -ility you can think of. Premiere has nothing,
except for a few cheap plugins and some envelope editing.

The choice is clear everyday.

Sorry for not being too exact, but you can figure out the rest from
the ads. Just wanted to state exactly how I feel about Premiere
contra Vegas =)

I used Premiere before, and Vegas is tops in my opinion.

Vegas Baby!

There are scores upon scores of people who have gone from Premiere to Vegas, including me, whereas it is rare to find any who have gone the other way.
Why would that be?

actually, I'm one of those who has gone back to PPro - I use Vegas occasionally, but I find the workflow counter-intuitive - and this coming from soneone who works in Acid Pro and Sound Forge alot! For whatever reason, I find myself frustrated in how Vegas does things with Video. Maybe I have just gotten used to the workflow of PPro, but for quick little edits, Vegas works much better. Plugins are another BIG reason I use PPro over Vegas for my longer projects...

...Maybe I have just gotten used to the workflow of PPro, but for quick little edits, Vegas works much better. Plugins are another BIG reason I use PPro over Vegas for my longer projects...

That's a fair assessment. 3rd party plug-ins are sorely lacking in Vegas.

Well, I'm a member of an amateur filmmakers club, and most of the 'old hands', those who produce the more interesting films, all use Premiere.

There appears to be this ludicrous idea that to produce great movies, you have to use what the pros use... and the pros use Premiere, right? Actually, the amateur magazines all say Premiere is the tool to use, so everybody rushes to buy it.

And you know what... I can spot a Premier produced film a mile off... every one, without exception, uses the Adobe Academy Leader! And the films, though interesting, are still pretty poor!

I am the only one to use Sony Vegas. Why? Because it's intuitive, the interface slick, and it helps produce superb quality video AND AUDIO with little effort.

What really matters, of course, is that the tool you use gets the job done quickly, with a minimum of hassle, and in a way you understand. In my mind, Premiere (as will many Adobe products) is a bloated, ill-programmed monster.

Premiere is a body builder, Vegas an Olympic Gymnast. Both have muscle, but only one has grace.

Worley

(so why did a 6 year old post just rise from its grave?)

Vegas has much better waveform than Premiere.

/Ulf

Vegas is by far more stable and the audio tools are better integrated, but Adobe is catching up.

Premier supports the latest DirectX 9 interface and OpenGL 2(Vegas supports the older Directx 7) for Graphics GPU accelerated rendering (will be even more important when DX10 cards and Vista roll out)
Premier supports 32bit fpp per channel rendering, even if you are going to output at 8bit.
Premier easily supports 10bit color via several plug_ins/codecs. If you work flow involves using 10bit color, Vegas is out.

No one in their right mind uses the default codecs in Premier, go straight to MainConcept and get the good ones. If not Mainconcept, search around.

Premier usually crashes at least once a day, and most Premier users seem to think that constitutes stable.
Premier when properly configured with desired plug_ins and codecs is a lot more expensive than Vegas, and thats not included the cost of Audition to bring Premier up to the audio tools present in Vegas.
Adobes DVD authoring program is considered better than DVDA from Sony. But not by much since DVDA 4.

IMHO, Vegas in increasingly oriented toward the wedding/event and eng crowd and less and less toward the indie movie crowd. But there is a lot more money in Wedding/Eng customers. Not that you can't use it for independent movie making.

While Adobe Bridge is a nice app for collecting and importing media, the media manager in Vegas is actually more useful in day to day work.

I could go on, but you have to decide what you goals are and then search for the tools.

If Vegas supported 10bit color and floating point rendering, I wouldn't use anything else. So I am sort of being forced into using Premier unles Sony surprises us at NAB (I won't hold my breath).

Then again since I'm now leaning against the SI2K, I'll probably stick with Vegas and my HD100 for the short term. That and connect HD work fine, not outstanding, but fine.

Wait a minute--what year is this?

De-ja Vu

The SI2K is one I might have to switch to PPro.
It will not fly with Vegas, sadly.

I have to agree with you on if Vegas supported 10 bit color - I would probably make myself use it more.

Like I said previously - if Vegas had better plugin support, I would use it more, but the amount of third party plugins for PPro and AE blows Vegas away in that regards - not that I'm too happy about that - Vegas is a screamer on XP64 and burning DVD's doesn't require jumping through hoops with DVDA4 like it does with Encore on my desktop machine.

Vegas is so EZ to use a Caveman could do it.

Heck, even a bass player could use it! (We drummers don't have many to pick on).

@oceanvisions

"if Vegas had better plugin support, I would use it more, but the amount of third party plugins for PPro and AE blows Vegas away in that regards"

exactly, just see my topic about boris red 4 & vegas 7.

vegas is the only one that got a horrible integration, and boris say:
"due to limitation in vegas plugin architecture"

it will change someday?

Heck, even a bass player could use it! (We drummers don't have many to pick on).

Hey! I'M a bass player!!

My favorite drummer joke:

Q - What do you say to a drummer wearing a three-piece suit?
A - "Will the defendant please rise?"

Let's don't just single out drummers and bass players...

Q - What do you call a musician without a girlfriend?
A - Homeless

Drummer joke:

Q: How many drummers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: Ten. One to screw in the lightbulb, and nine more to explain how Neil Peart could have done it so much better.

Tim L

. . Interesting and indicative of the User base that we HAVE wandered OFF the main point . .. and that, dear hearts, is exactly why Vegas is superb! Free thinkers and creators!

Vegas is realizing that there IS another way of "doing" the biz of NLE. Worley got soooo close to it, you could smell it!

"I am the only one to use Sony Vegas. Why? Because it's intuitive, the interface slick, and it helps produce superb quality video AND AUDIO with little effort. What really matters, of course, is that the tool you use gets the job done quickly, with a minimum of hassle, and in a way you understand."

. .What ever gets me closer to the narrative of what I'm doing, is what I want. Narrative is ALL! Vegas just keeps outta my face when I want to experiment.

"Stories are like Arrows in Flight. You have to grab at 'em - otherwise they are lost forever"

And any tool that delivers this for me is crucial. Getting closer to the narrative - Vegas does this, every time.

I have not owned and never produced any work on Prem. BUT, I have done trade shows demoing (well showing-off, actually!) to Premmies just what Vegas can do. You should try Loop Colour Correction and correct in realtime. Try looking over your shoulder and watch their jaws drop? Maybe this has changed, I dunno, but I still can raise a little frisson of excitement when I do it. ( . and THEN showing off Media Manager?!? )

I'm anew wegas 6.0 /7.0 user and I'm very upset inside of this softare
there is an option to us it with Black magic extreme HD decklink card
with their driver 5,6 on SDI or YUV mode during captiuring there is a black frame every 45-60 seconds plus on playback there is a huge stutering which was minimized to 80 % by stripping my 4 drives raid to 0 and changing my processor from Dual Core to Core Duo Extreme E6700 intel which improved the situation but still there is some vibration on HD mode during playback!!! I did complaint to the Sony team how can we correct the problem I was told
Soon Only Not Yet!
Meantime I did swich to Premiere pro 2.0 on the same system and there I'm very satisfied!