Re: Thinking about moving to Vegas (from Premiere of course) by Gary Kleiner on Jan 26, 2006 at 4:30:55 am
Many folks have come to Vegas from Premiere.
In once sense, you'd be better off if you had no experience with another NLE, because to have to unlearn some of the ways of thinking you use with Premiere/FCP/Liquid/etc.
On the other hand, once it starts to click for you, you can see how many things are just so much quicker and easier in Vegas.
I am curious about your own story about deciding to make the switch.
Re: Thinking about moving to Vegas (from Premiere of course) by Peter Wright on Jan 26, 2006 at 6:01:49 am
To add to Gary's wise words, as a former Premiere user ...
Firstly, I don't think it's worthwhile simply comparing WHAT each program can do, because whilst there may be a desired feature one has over another, a far more important issue is HOW each program allows users to use its various functions.
In my opinion, the ease and fluidity of Vegas is simply fantastic. As an example, you can drag the mouse to set up a playback loop on the timeline, and Vegas will continuously play back this loop uninterrupted whilst you apply almost any changes or effects, video or audio, track motion, pan/crop, colour correction, add new track and superimpose title, etc, etc, and you can see or hear the results of everything you do the moment you change any settings.
In many other respects, the design of the Vegas workspace puts so many tools just there where you need them, rather than hiding them through a series of menus.
There are many other great things, including:
Takes (a wonderful feature for both video and audio),
Velocity Envelopes
Dragging Tracks up/down to change precedence and Unlimited Resizing of tracks
Supersampling
3D Track Motion
multiple instances
and ... Scripting (another incredibly powerful feature)
.. and lastly but not leastly, the various Vegas Forums - Vegas has an extremely responsive and helpful fraternity/sorority of users on this and several other forums.
Peter Wright
Perth, Western Oz
www.allroundvision.com.au
Re: Thinking about moving to Vegas (from Premiere of course) by Charlie King on Jan 26, 2006 at 7:36:21 pm
Just to put my 2 cents worth in. I have Avid, Vegas, and Premiere Pro. I use Avid and Vegas for almost everything. I have hardly used my Premiere at all, to this point.
Charlie
ProductionKing Video Services
Unmarked Door Productions
Flamingo Las Vegas Hotel
Las Vegas, Nevada
Re: Thinking about moving to Vegas (from Premiere of course) by Charlie King on Jan 26, 2006 at 7:38:53 pm
[Peter Wright]"As an example, you can drag the mouse to set up a playback loop on the timeline,"
This is a nice feature, but I still have problems with it, for instance I do a split, then mark the tracks to delete the area ahead of the split, and invariably it sets a loop of one frame instead of deleting the tracks. That loop marking being so prevelant is always getting in my way.
Charlie
ProductionKing Video Services
Unmarked Door Productions
Flamingo Las Vegas Hotel
Las Vegas, Nevada
Re: Thinking about moving to Vegas (from Premiere of course) by Charlie King on Jan 26, 2006 at 10:11:37 pm
[Charlie King]"but I still have problems with it, for instance I do a split, then mark the tracks to delete the area ahead of the split, and invariably it sets a loop of one frame instead of deleting the tracks."
Never mind, operator error.
Charlie
ProductionKing Video Services
Unmarked Door Productions
Flamingo Las Vegas Hotel
Las Vegas, Nevada
Re: Thinking about moving to Vegas (from Premiere of course) by perry cheng on Jan 26, 2006 at 11:55:30 pm
Thank you all... one more question, is the rendering really slow compare to Premiere Pro? Say render out to DVD MPEG2 format of 1hr video, how long will it take, say not many effect applied.
Re: Thinking about moving to Vegas (from Premiere of course) by Steve Mann on Jan 27, 2006 at 3:15:42 am
I have two comments- First, I started with Premiere because "that's what everyone uses", but I got fed up with the workflow that went something like this: edit, crash, edit, crash.
Vegas has never crashed my PC's. In fact, I sometimes work for hours without remembering to back up the veg file. (Vegas is a non-destructive editor, meaning that the original media is never altered during editing, the veg file, which would fit on a floppy disc, contains all the editing instructions).
Next, do you want your renders fast or good? I really hope that Sony doesn't listen to the whiners complaining about the slow renders, because the quality of Vegas renders is unbeatable. Slow, but better than anything else in the price range.
Did I mention that Vegas never crashes?
And number 2.5: Vegas is software only - you aren't stuck with any particular hardware or potential conflicts. If the PC can run Windows XT, it will run Vegas.
Last, Sony Vegas has, without any doubt, the most common-sense, realistic and workable licensing terms of any other NLE softeware in the world. (This they inherited from Sonic Foundry, and I hope they never change it).
Re: Thinking about moving to Vegas (from Premiere of course) by Ted Snow on Jan 27, 2006 at 5:26:50 am
Ditto Steve...using Vegas for almost 3 years and not a single crash. Rock solid stable. I just rendered out a 1hr 9min video of old 8mm film which I had to do some color correction etc. and it took about 2 hours on a p4 2.8 ghz machine. Vegas was my first (and last) NLE. I wouldn't think of switching to anything else. It does everything and more than I will ever need.
Re: Thinking about moving to Vegas (from Premiere of course) by mrbb on Jan 27, 2006 at 1:29:14 pm
I too was facing the decision whether to upgrade to Premiere Pro or switch to Vegas. I am a hobbyist, albeit it a rather serious one, so a lot of the advanced features of both programs are not of that great an interest to me.
So I downloaded the trial versions of both programs. For me, I had to balance the time to learn a new program (Vegas) versus its features and benefits. The choice turned out to be quite simple.
Premiere Pro (1.5 anyway, I can't speak for 2.0)is the same kludgy program as the earlier versions of Premiere, just dressed up a bit. Vegas on the other hand is very intuitive, and displays most of the everyday stuff in real time without any special hardware. To get Premiere to work reasonably well you need a special board like the Matrox RTX100.
One important point is the term "render", which is actually used in 2 contexts. In Premiere, you need to render preview files, even a simple dissolve. Dissolves render very quickly, but each time you make a change you have to re-render. (Right click, select 'Render Work Area') This is one command that you will quickly memorize in Premiere. If you import anything other than a file that matches your project specs, you will need to render. For example, if you have a background that is a .mov file and you import it into an .avi project, you need to render just to see your previews. Very time consuming even for a hobbyist guy.
In Vegas, "render" means outputting your project in its finished form, such as MPEG2. This type of rendering time is of no concern to me either in Premiere or Vegas becasue that's the last step before I go to bed. That's what we have comnputers for - to work while we sleep. But Vegas' ability to apply filters, transitions, effects, etc. on the fly and view the changes in real time, even on a modest processor, is outstanding. I used the trial version on an AMD 1.3 chip and the results were phenomenal. I'm upgrading to an AMD dual core 4800 chip so I expect I will have even better response. For complex effects, you may need to do RAM previews or selective pre-renders, but for what I do, so far I haven't seen the need.
The only drawback to Vegas was that it does not have the support for Smartsound (Quicktracks)like Premiere does, probably because it competes with its own Acid product. I really like Smartsound and have purchased a lot of the music. But there are several workarounds. For me, I still have Premiere so I can output my Vegas Project to .avi and then add the music in Premiere. I also have Sonicfire Pro 3 which can be used to create the music tracks. I am also experimenting with getting SFP3 to open as my default sound editor in Vegas. So far I haven't been able to get that to work but I think I will be able to. If anyone has done that successfully please let me know.
So bottom line: Learning Vegas is well worth the effort, and if I was starting today, Vegas would be an even easier choice. Good luck.
Re: Thinking about moving to Vegas (from Premiere of course) by Perry Cheng on Jan 27, 2006 at 7:27:18 pm
Well, thank you folks for all the input. I have been using Prem for years, to make a switch is really a difficult decision. But, aside from Adobe sometimes driving me crazy on their policies, I like Prem Pro. Contrary to what 'mrbb' stated in his post, Prem does display things (e.g. filter applied) in Realtime for most effects without me having to render them for preview. (He might have his setting mixed up to render every time?)
Anyway, the main reason for consider upgrade are:
1. PPro's ability to import flash files (ironically after acquiring Macromedia, PPro 2 does not state it can or not to import swi or swf.)
2. PPro rendered quality is not very clean and vivid! It takes a long time compared to other Rendering Codecs
3. Vegas include: Boris Grafitti Ltd, Boris FX Ltd for Vegas, and Magic Bullet Movie Looks HD50, 5.1-channel AC-3 encoding, Copy-protection tools, Multilangual DVD, Elementary stream import... (Filters...)
4. NOW, the competitive upgrade is only $299 for Vegas6 + DVD Architech (After $100 rebate) while PPro 2.0 upgrade is $199!!!!!
