Vegas convert needs help
 

Hi guys,

I normally post in the Vegas section and well I have now ventured into the world of Premiere and After Effects CS4. I have downloaded the trial and really like the layout of these programs. So I got 4 weeks to decided if they will replace Vegas Pro 8 for my home videos. For Vgeas I have bookmarked tons of great sites for tutorials that we advised by the guys here. I would like to ask what are the best places for Premiere tutorials and After Effects?. I googled this and literally found thousands of sites. I only want the best.

Is Premiere a big step up from Vegas Pro?. It seems like a large learning curve in comparison to Vegas and After effects seems so complicated. I need help.

Thanks

Hi Matthew,

I was you about a month and a half ago. Have been a Vegas user for years and completely comfortable with the software, I was a little leary of changing to Adobe products, but the lure of Production Suite and it's myriad of benefits called to me to make the jump. I played with the After Effects CS3 demos for 4 weeks and during that time made the decision to purchase the CS4 Production suite. Now having worked with After Effects, Illustrator (a totally new program to me), Encore, Premier OnLocation and Flash I can offer some insights.

CS4 products have been incredibly stable for me...very few crashes and all of them seem to be only due to my current limited system memory. I have 2gig and will soon be moving to at least 8 if not 16 gig if i can find a adequate 4X4gig set. I'm on a quad core AMD with XP and all the software runs very well. I have to be doing some pretty complicated stuff before the ram issues present themselves. Having said that I want more ram for better performance AND running the applications simultaneously, utilizing the workflow benefits that the suite can offer in this regard.

Premier is far different than Vegas. It's certainly as capable of software but is not as quick and simple in it's interface. As I do more work in it I may find that it can be quick as well but right now for straightforward editing Vegas is a great editor. Honestly I have done very little with Premier so far as my needs are currently for more motion graphics and effects, which the CS4 suite has the great workflow for complete media creation. Photoshop and Illustrator are top end applications for graphics and photo editing and tie together with After Effects and Premier nicely.

For effects After Effects is incredible. Wether it's compositing, keying, effects, 2.5D, titles or just about any other video manipulation needed After Effects is a great tool, well supported and actually pretty easy to use. Aahron Rabinowitz's tutorials are informative, broad range of information and he has a good teaching persona. From there I have also found many good links in the software PDF manuals that go to other resources and tutorials from people like Maltaannon, and Video Co-pilot.

On that note....the manuals (which are pdf's) are well written, and deep. They are large though, with manuals for After Effects being 700+ pages just on it's own. The entire suite probably has closer to 5000 pages of information contained in their respective pdf's.

Finally Adobe TV is a great resource for learning the software and features for all the software. Something that you will get with the Production suite is Adobe Media Player and Adobe Bridge. These can link to many resources for information, scripts and effect presets as well as hundreds of hours of interesting content.

With Vegas I was always happy that it was a excellent editing system and had great audio capabilities. With CS4 production suite I feel like the world opened up a great deal as while Vegas is great, Adobe just seems to have so much more.

I have found a few great AE tutorials at video copilot were I purchased a few of their products before. I am switching to new computers for my new house very soon, I work in programming as a developer so I am a nerd lol and Will be moving to the Mac platform and plan to use AE and Premiere on my Macs. I am buying the Mac Pro as I require a serious workstation for college and work. I have most Adobe products for web programming, mainly I use Fireworks and photoshop and love Adobes products. Premiere seems amazing and I agree, the effects that can be produced on AE is beyond amazing. I am still fairly new to video editing and have found Vegas to be a great starting point, but like yourself, I want to take it further.
I was looking at Final Cut studio for my macs and thinking that I will maybe stick with the Adobe suite now.

I too have been a Vegas 6/7/8 user and am now making more use of CS3 and recently CS4. I have not done any complicated stuff within PPro so can't really comment on it. I still prefer to edit, score and sound sweeten in Vegas. One handy feature in PPro for my documentary work is speech transcription of the raw clips. While not really accurate, it's good enough to be able to search interview material using key words.

I have used Photoshop extensively (which I really like), AE quite a bit (which is both awesome and daunting at times) and Encore for a few authoring projects (which is more complicated and frustrating than DVD Architect). I love and use Bridge a lot. Media Encoder is also handy--but needs 4.0.1 to use Cineform files properly.

For training/tutorials, I have subscribed to Lynda.com ever since I got the suite and find it invaluable. They offered a 25% for the annual subscription on the floor at NAB last year which I jumped at and have never regretted.

By the way, I'm not abandoning Vegas, just broadening my tool set.

Good luck with the transition.

After Effects Help and Support Center
 

In my biased opinion, the best place to start for After Effects is here:
After Effects Help on the Web

From that page, you can go to this one, which has lots of links to tutorials and such:
After Effects Community Help and Support

I describe all of the documentation and training resources that Adobe provides in a post on my blog:
After Effects region of interest: a little more explanation about Community Help

I entirely agree about the value of Aharon and Andrew's video tutorials, which is why I link to dozens of them in context from After Effects Help and include them in the Community Help search database.

If you find something that you like using the Community Help search, be sure to use the "Give us feedback" link to let us know!