Premiere 1.5 or Vegas
 

I currently have premiere 1.5 since it came with the matrox rx 100, whats everyones thoughts on it verses Vegas? I intend to use it with the XL2 for short films/docs ect.

The Matrox RTX100 does not provide hardware acceleration for Vegas, only Premiere Pro.

If you already own the combination then you'd have to shell out even MORE money for Vegas.

Generally speaking, the two programs can achieve the same result.

Differences:
If you know one, the other will make no sense to you.

Vegas has excellent audio tools built in and you do not have to leave the program. Premiere Pro needs to export to Audition or other audio program for serious audio work.

Vegas has excellent color correction built-in. Premiere Pro lacks a secondary color corrector. It still does the job fairly well. You can get Color Finesse (it's expensive) for PPro which solves the lack of secondary color correction. Magic Bullet Editor's is another good plug-in (available for both) but that does something else. It gives you a library of film looks and it's fairly easy to use and is intuitive. If you get more advanced into this stuff you realize you can do what MBullet does with a lot less rendering (and with more button pushing), with the exception of black and white diffusion.

Vegas may be more stable- it definitely is more stable than PPro1.0, although 1.5 is supposedly stable. I have never tried 1.5.

Premiere Pro may be faster at rendering/real-time for the work you do. You have the hardware acceleration card after all. (It may only however work with specific effects- Magic Bullet, Color Finesse, and other plug-ins may still be slow).

For documentaries, you may like Premiere's better management. You may like Vegas' audio tools for cleaning up bad audio.

For short films, you may like Vegas for creating soundscapes, adding foley, adding in music, etc. You may also like Vegas' color correction capabilities.
You may like Premiere at it can be less button pushing for cuts and dissolves editing. You may like its speed.

I'm a big fan of Vegas, but you should be able to accomplish most/all of what you want in Premiere Pro, and possibly/probably faster too.

The Matrox RT 100 card is great but the bad news is, it doesn't support 24p advanced editing. If you shoot 2:3:3:2, then the Matrox in 4:3 and 16:9 work great! I have never used Vegas but PP 1.5 is a solid program combined with the RT. Hope that helps!