Vegas vs. Premiere/AE
 

I've been working in Premiere 6.5 and After Effects 5.5 on PCs and am pretty used to them, though never used them for DV. On this and other DV forums I see numerous references to Vegas, a program I'd never even heard of until now.

Checking the Sonic Foundry web site, Vegas seems to have at first glance a more user-friendly interface than either Adobe application.

What is the great advantage of Vegas over the Adobe apps? Is it a better program for DV editing - for professional projects, that is?

I'm new to DV. As long as I'm emptying my bank account on camera and equipment, would I be off to a better start by getting Vegas also?

masking, compositing, true 5.1 surround with metadata extensions, soundforge integration, Keyframable Audio and visual EQs and effects, easy track motions, still image import as video, pre-render facility, scripts, avanced colour correction. Bump mapping, chroma keying yadda yadda yadda
.........all in a matter of seconds ....

put it this way, vegas is a FAST moving application, all in one (apart from s/forge) kit which doesnt require multiple apps to get the results you need.

Premiere is good, no doubt, but it depends on what YOU want tp do and how fast you want to do it

If Vegas is easier to use for you then I would probably go with it. It's very powerful. Maybe one weak area of it is titling, but you can probably still do decent titles when you know the program better. There are also lots of 3rd party titlers that are good programs.

I´ve worked with Premier and After Effects for a few years now...

Today I just donwloaded a demo of Vegas.. and I think it´s awesome. A little complicated at first... but I just used it for an hour and allready can tell It fits my needs and habits better than the Adobe Combo...

Why not download the demo and give it a shot?

i TOTALLY agree with the Titling being weak, however threa re afew good cheap downlaodable apps like Xara which offer some alternatives..

Boris is also coming out which will apparently have an OpenGl title renderer, so you can basically do full 3d animated titles jsut like a computer game intro...
itll also do a load of other stuff, but the price.. well thats another story...

Thanks for the excellent feedback.

I use Flash for titles anyway, if I want cool animated effects. Vegas sounds great. Until now I've been using a combination of Premiere, After Effects and Cool Edit Pro (now Adobe Audition), as well as Flash, and it can get very wearying constantly switching between applications.

Last question, though: how does Vegas handle importing square pixel graphics (such as Flash output) and stretching it for TV pixels? AE is great for this.

i have never tried, but download the demo and let us Know!

<<<-- Originally posted by Larry Feign : how does Vegas handle importing square pixel graphics (such as Flash output) and stretching it for TV pixels? AE is great for this. -->>>

Vegas isn't picky about importing media, you just have to worry about how you want it to be previewed/output.

Changing the pixel aspect ratio is very easy.
You can change it anytime at the project and individual clip level. The preview will immediately reflect your changes. The choices are Square, NTSC, or PAL with options for widescreen DV and Video CD.

It's also possible to change it on export.