I can say that the reasons I bought Vegas was because of what it could do for the money I spent. I am one guy doing everything.

I didn't want to have to start buying a lot of other applications to support it. I knew that I needed a lot of sound tracks but I didn't have any idea how many until I started working on my biggest project with as many as 22 tracks most of which are audio. I needed green screen and compositing and it had it. That was in 2003. The titler has gotten better but for what I do it seldom is a big deal. Most of the time simple titles are all you really need.

So it is a jack of all trades, easy to learn, quick to use and very stable. I pretty much never have a problem on any work that I do. I am not using HD right now but look forward to it in the future.

I downloaded the trial a short time ago just to see where it stood. I do mostly HDV work so I was a little irritated to see that the trial disallows ANY mpeg work.

I played with it in DV format and I could take it or leave it. (I crashed it 3 times trying to use the color corrections)

It does go into a bit more detail with the effects, but I didn't take my play much further than a few days worth. With no ability to test the Hi Def the whole thing became a giant no-no. I have no plans on spending that kind of money on something I can't take out for a FULL test drive.

I've got both Vegas Pro 8 and Premier Pro CS3 (along with the rest of the CS3 Master Collection) and for video work, I almost always find myself favouring Vegas. It's so much easier to work with, and much more intuitive. PPro also won't do 5.1 AC3 encoding natively (only Stereo; and only through Encore); that requires an additional $300 purchase from Minnetonka. Vegas is also definately a much more capable program for editing the audio portion of a video.

Plus, Vegas is cheaper. And if you're a student, you can also get a really good deal on it from a place like Academicsuperstore.com

That said, I do often find myself using other components of the CS3 collection, like After Effects, Photoshop, Flash for things that Vegas isn't really capable of doing. And although I haven't done a full comparison, I do prefer Encore CS3 as a DVD authoring program, and I usually use that once I've got a final render from Vegas.

To really answer that question would take one heck of a lot of typing!
Both are very good at what they were designed for so you really have to consider what the task at hand is. Both will get you there in the end pretty much but depending on where you want to get to the road might be a lot easier with one or the other. Expect to invest more time learning with PPro and to have to throw more hardware at it too. There's many things in PPro I like as there is many things I love about Vegas and I understand that it'd be impossible to build one uber NLE that does both well, it's that simple.

But here's the good news.
They both use the same kinds of media files, so swapping from one to the other is usually pretty trivial. Don't like either of them, well there's also several other NLEs to choose from, or heaven forbid, use as well and again it's pretty easy to open the exact same media files in them too. Project shifting isn't so simple but I'm happy enough just being able to share use the same media.

If I could only have one, yes, it'd still be Vegas but then again I've got several text editors and I use all of them regularly.

Bob.

I downloaded the trial a short time ago just to see where it stood. I do mostly HDV work so I was a little irritated to see that the trial disallows ANY mpeg work.

vegas won't eigther. can't fault adobe on that one.

Why I switched to Vegas: As in I worked at a TV job & used premiere all the time. I hated it so much that I read *ONE* review in DV magazine about Vegas 3, tried the demo for *ONE* day & bought the book+Vegas 3 LE.

Premiere made me want to pull my hair out. Seriously. It was like your 3 year old who pours the syrup all over the floor when you go to the can. I had THAT bad of an experience with it I went out, bought V3LE, upgraded to 4 & used that for most of my production work. My bosses didn't want it. Yes, I spend ~$350 of my own money to use vegas of free Premiere 6 because I couldn't stand it that much. I was making sports highlights videos on a P3-667 with 256mb RAM & using huffy compressed video with two 80gb HD's and I could barely pull together a 30s TV spot with premier & state-of-the-art, adobe unrecommended equipment.

Ever go to the store & get told they don't have something when it's right there on the shelf, and the make excuses and don't admit they're wrong & still harass you when you try to purchase it? That's premiere. Don't know of the newer versions are better but I don't plan on shopping at THAT store again.

**Don't know of the newer versions are better but I don't plan on shopping at THAT store again. **

The newer versions ARE better, much better.

Premiere and Premiere Pro are two different beasts, they completely rewrote the code for Premiere Pro. If you're a long-time Vegas user, you probably don't think about switching, but Adobe has come a long, long way.

I think people who are newer to editing adapt to Vegas much easier than to Premier Pro. Some people who like a source preview and a timeline preview find it hard to adjust to Vegas.

Adobe=685.86 Vegas=113.0 Do your math!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

"Both are very good at what they were designed for"

Edit Video?
Or Crash your machine?

I've found Vegas 7 to be very stable, looses sync all the time but it's OK rendered out. Vegas 8, hm, well give them time, it'll get there.
Vegas 6, rock solid as were the previous versions.

Bob.

Decent PC with RAID array, Digibetacam decks, Sony broadcast monitor. Total cost >$100K.
Vegas's output all screwed up, do your maths.

1,000s of DVDs on store shelves with menus messed up by DVDA, do your maths.

Nothing in this business is perfect, it's all a crap shoot. Buy dodgy hardware and anything will crash. Put blind faith in what any software vendor says and you're likely to get burned.

Bob.

>>>To really answer that question would take one heck of a lot of typing!<<<

not really :-) I can do a very short and accurate version

Vegas = the best ( audio capabilities alone are enough to put it above any other nle, and on top of that it still does better at video editing than those other aps ).

PPro = it edits video, so what

FCP = it edits video too ( if you have the right, overpriced hardware ), so what, it's basically Vegas lite.

avid xpress = It will not exist a year from now. It does edit video on 5% of machines out there ( just the right combination of components determined against any logic, by geniuses at avid's el cheapo devision ). if you do your research and still buy that, you may be suffering from some kind of mental illness.

I tried Premier 6.0 and then PP 1.5 with 2 different hardware accelerator solutions (Matrox and Pinnacle). I built 2 virgin, dedicated machines paying excruciating detail to the components, loading order, driver versions, etc as discussed in countless forum threads and system compatability charts. The result was constant crashes and stability problems on every project.

Recently I loaded PP 1.5 on a faster, dedicated machine without H/W acceleration and got through a 20 minute DV project with only one freeze up and no lost data which was a better experience. It was the first project where I still wanted to keep doing video after it was done.

After doing some research I decided to try Vegas. All of your postings of 8.0 problems sounded so much like my old Premier experiences that I went to eBay, bought 7 and only upgraded to 7d. My Vegas 8 upgrade sits on the shelf waiting until it is time, maybe that's 8a. In another thread I am asking if I can go through the 8 upgrade process and not disturb 7d. I have only just started a new project in Vegas with no problems so far but I can say at this point that Vegas has a better manual that explains things more clearly and I already like the one button audio level normalization. This program would definitely have a faster learning curve for a newbie and is cheaper.

Are there any good 3d effect plug ins for vegas like transition cubes?

Can Vegas do PIP?

Thanks,

George

George, NewBlue has just released 7 transition and effect plug-ins to Vegas. See

http://www.newbluefx.com/

You get all video plug-ins for $449.

Jøran Toresen

"Both are very good at what they were designed for"

Premiere has a nice time-lapse capture option. something people wanted vegas to have for years. But with the cost of Vegas you can get other software to do that.

Can Vegas do PIP?

Yes. Just use pan/crop.

My experience is not unlike yours.
I cut my first video on Premiere back in 2001, managed to get a 90 minute video out of 9 hours of footage with only the odd lockup. Since then I've realise that PC has dodgy hardware, games die, CGI apps die as well.
I bought V4 to do the audio for that Premier project. Tried to go back and redo some of the titles and graphics I'd done in Premiere and Vegas just couldn't handle it at all for me but then I realised that apart from that one project I didn't really need fancy titles anyway.
Since then I've mostly made my money doing audio work in Vegas.

Hopefully in the new year I'll be cutting one or two short films to be printed to 35mm in CS3, Vegas just cannot do what needs to be done but I'll still be doing the audio in Vegas. I expect all manner of issues with PPro and AE to say nothing of a heck of a lot of other issues but I know it's already been done by others, so it can be done, I've just got to find out how to make it work.

Bob.

Vegas is like Christmas. I thought I knew about 25% of what it could do. Then every day I find out something new it can do. It boggles my mind that one human being can have a thorough knowledge of this application and then keep improving and adding to it trying not to let all of the equipment/software variations get in the way. It seems to me like a puzzle trying to place all of the atoms of our Milky Way galazy in their proper place and hoping the aftermath is not a supernova of human criticism.
JJK

"supernova of human criticism."

Man, I hear that. It gets to be a mud slinging fest for a while after every release, and sometimes the criticism is valid. Other times it's operator error that might have been handled by a little better design in the product.

Anyway, PPro anecdotes. We've got three systems with Axio hardware in them. on SD projects they run out of memory, constantly rebuild previews, and crash constantly. Oddly, they're a bit better with HD projects and can do many things on the fly. I keep hearing comments like "Premiere is a total trainwreck" followed by "That worked really well"

The end decision has been that we probably can't do projects of any length or complexity in Premiere/Axio, and we're trying out FCP for the long form documentary we have coming up. We've had an FCP demo system for about 5 days and I've not heard much complaining yet. Hopes are high.

Our second editor had some interesting things to say about PPro and FCP. When we first migrated from Media100 to PPro, she remembers it as a fairly easy transition. PPro wasn't hard to learn. In contrast, she's saying that the initial forays from PPro into FCP aren't too satisfying. FCP feels a bit awkward and ungainly to her. I have a feeling she'd find Vegas very easy, but there's a bit of an interoperability problem because Vegas and PPro don't seem to be seeing the time code in each other's DV media. So I'm not encouraging anyone to try Vegas.

There's no real consideration of Vegas at our shop for a variety of reasons, although the boss keeps hearing positive things from third parties. It would run very well on the systems we use for PPro and Axio, but there's a strong desire for hardware acceleration so that's the primary obstacle to considering Vegas. (FCP doesn't have hardware acceleration either but it's got a track record in long form projects)

I'd compare Vegas to a ShopSmith (it's an all-in-one woodworking tool). Personally, I think Vegas could do just about anything you'd want to do, but because it's so popular with people of relatively limited means, you don't see many examples of higher end edit stations. You could definitely run Vegas on a very high end computer, could definitely use high throughput storage, could definitely use high end I/O cards, and could generate files to output to a high end HD deck.

While I think Vegas could do a lot of jobs, I don't see Sony pushing any case studies or roadmaps to get from start to finish. It'd be worthwhile if they contracted this out and put 8-12 presentations up on their site.

Rob Mack

I have had Vegas 4,5,6,7&8 and they always work perfect. Not out of sync problems, no render problems, period. I agree 100% on crap equipment. Buy quality. I don't over clock because that can lead to problems. Stability rules the day.
I have 4 published DVDs using Vegas 7 & DVDA4 with zero complaints from my client (Magic Castle performer Ed Ellis) and zero complaints from his customers.

This is a link to 4 DVDs created using Vegas.
http://www.murphysmagic.com/Multi-Language-Magic?search=ed+ellis

DVD number 5 using Vegas 8 starts in January and I expect everything to go perfect using Vegas 8 + DVDA 4.5.

And looking at your profile, the system you list is pretty modest these days. I'm not sure I'd try to run PPro on that. Vegas runs a bit leaner than PPro.

Rob Mack

PPro and Axio, but there's a strong desire for hardware acceleration so that's the primary obstacle to considering Vegas
I'm curious... how much faster is PPro/Axio than Vegas?

What about Vegas with network rendering? (If you've tried that and gotten it to work.)

Is it worth all the headaches that came with Axio?

Worth it? That's the key question. When things don't work PPro with axio is infinitely slower than Vegas. When they do, it's real time. So, for instance, you can do a real time key in HD. Throw titles and photoshop files onto it and it might all fall apart.

Part of the problem is that PPro, unlike Vegas, really likes you to render stuff and keep it in a rendered state. Axio can complicate this by increasing PPro's memory requirements as well as project and media checking to see if things need rendering. You can end up with very loooooong project loads, and loooong updates.

I'm kind of a fly on the wall with this stuff. I have work to get done, and I don't use the house edit software (PPro) to do it, because it'd be awkward. I just hear the complaining. What I'm hearing this week is that PPro with Axio is actually much better in HD than SD.

One of the big deals of Axio is it's ability to control and capture via 1394 from a DVCProHD deck. PPro can't do it on it's own.

Rob

Network rendering didn't deliver much from what I recall. The issue was the amount of time to move the data around. I've always wondered how well it might work on a blade server kind of rig.

Trying to work with long projects seems to be a challenge, not just for PPro and AE, Colour has issues too. Vegas has problems as well, it mightn't crash but try running in 32 bit with lots of composited tracks and it's hard to tell if it's locked up or just thinking very hard about the next frame. One solution on all these platforms is to split the project into Reels. The other solution is nesting and here Vegas starts using prerendered proxies, I haven't tried doing that in 32bit, would be interesting.

One thing that caught my ear listening to the guys from eFilm recently is the explosion in the amount of data we're trying to deal with. 8 bit SD video is a doodle to work with. Then someone came up with the bright idea of HDV and now we've got a flood of people shooting with it and although the source data files are the same size as DV in reality the pipeline is handling 4 times the amount of data.
Now it's being used for projects destined for a filmout, so you work in 10bit. That adds another 4x into the equation and of course it's all going to be 4:4:4 uncompressed. So the final file size to deliver to the printer is around 3.5TB of data. That's manageable, just.
But recently the new thing is 4K, either from neg or Red. That just added another 4x into that equation so now the amount of data hits 13TBs to deliver. Don't forget this gets stored on striped drives so in reality you need 20TBs of disks. If that wasn't enough of a challenge now the talk is to go beyond 10bit to 12bit and again another 4x the amount of data.
The wavelet codecs can certainly crunch that amount of data down dramatically but still, it has to be decoded to be dealt with. So although the data storage drops the internal pipelines stay just as fat and the CPU load goes through the roof. To do this on a desktop PC is one hell of a challenge but it's coming with no doubt many speed bumps along the way.

Now of course not many are at that bleeding edge but as we ramp up the pixel count and the bit depth it's still worth remembering how we're also raising the bar. When things go wrong no matter what software we're using it's not hard to understand that we're asking a heck of a lot of both the software and the hardware.

Bob.