Adobe Premiere to Vegas 8 transition. Please Help.
 

I am interested in purchasing Sony Vegas 8 and I previously worked on Adobe Premiere 1.5 pro. There are two reasons for considering Sony Vegas and they are:

1)Price
2)I had a lot of system crashes and hanging problems with Adobe Premiere (was using a dual core amd system at the time)

I would like to hear from other users here on DVinfo who made the transition from Adobe Premiere to Sony Vegas and what their experiences were changing from one package to the other (what should I be aware of, what are the pitfalls when going for Vegas?) Please take note that I am still a novice, so please go easy on the tech talk.

I'll be downloading a Vegas 8 demo very soon just to check it out before departing with my cash.

Any help regarding this matter will be greatly appreciated. Looking forward to hearing from you.

I started my non linear editing with PP and it felt like I'd landed on Mars with my eyes shut when I started with Vegas. But, rather than give you a list of how it differs and betters, have a play.

It took me only a few hours in the deep end cutting a project to get the hang of it. Once you get used to the interface, location of stuff etc and layout you'll LOVE IT!!! I find it MILES better than PP.

For the price it's an absolute steal.

The only downside for me is it's hold in the industry. When I speak with other post houses, productions teams, clients etc etc you get...

You'll be cutting this on PP or FCP right?............errr........No, Vegas.......silence.............Vegas? errr........what the fu}~s that?

It's a real struggle, but I have to say this NLE is better. End of story.

Have a play and let me know what you think. I guarantee you'll prefer it after one week.

Stuart

Premiere Pro CS3 is vastly more stable than PPro 1.5. Price is like in Premiere's favor as you can update your old license. I'm not saying there aren't reasons shift to another NLE, I just don't think the reasons listed are a justification.

I love Vegas, and have only played with PP CS3. But I gotta tell you that with the tight integration with other Adobe products, I would seriously consider upgrading to CS3 if you are already familiar with the interface...reviews on it are pretty good.

Encore is also a great program with the ability to import layered Photoshop images, etc., I am trying to learn it for making DVDs. Additionally both PP and Encore export to .flv format which may not be important to you, but that cannot be done with Vegas yet.

Vegas is extremely easy to use, is simply fantastic in so many ways but as David said you might be abandoning PP a bit prematurely with CS3 available.

That all being said, I was appalled at some of the instability and system crashes I have read about in the PP forum here on DVi.

Have you considered trying the trial of CS3 before making your move to Vegas?

Long time Premiere User, since version 4 (1999), decided to see what Vegas was all about, didn't care for a number of things, especially the lack of a preview monitor but the 1 thing that blew me away and kept me coming back was the playback performance, it just blows Premiere out of the water. I'm talking 7-8 color correction filters and Vegas still plays back relatively smoothly. Same clip with the same filters in premiere, 2 filters deep and it is choking. This is all SD, going HD and Vegas still performs like a champ. Just got my work to upgrade to Production Studio CS3 from CS2 and it runs worse than CS2, slow, unstable (more so than CS2), it just can't keep up with me. Giving Vegas a fair shake this past month and it is really growing on me, I've caught myself saying "Wow" out loud a number of times. Vegas is stable so far. I opened up Premiere CS3 just to create a title to use in Vegas (nothing else in the CS3 project) and immediately I get a dialogue "Premiere is running low on system memory...", I definitely don't miss that. I've used Adobe Production Suite to author 2 retail DVDs fully utilizing the integration and it rocks, but Adobe needs to fully optimize Premiere, it is a dog, and very unstable, and is not very responsive. I feel more productive with Vegas, and I'm still going through severe growing pains, can't wait to see where I'm at in 3 months.

Thanks guys for your great feedback.

One other reason for leaning heavily towards Vegas is the fact that I locally have the support from guys who are very experienced in Vegas and who are always too willing to help out (and I can say the same about the members of DVinfo).
At this stage my gut feel is to go with Vegas so I quess it is back to school for me learning a new package. I've played around with Vegas pro 6 a while ago but will be downloading a demo of Vegas 8 soon because I need to make my mind up before the end of April.

Kevin, what are your pc specs for running Vegas?

Thanks again for your response.

I've been using Vegas since V3 and am now on V8. Although I love the program I would not recommend that you switch to Vegas right now if you are into HD editing because there are some serious issues with it. Vegas was always very stable through the years, but the change to high definition is not going very well at the moment in my opinion. If you can wait 6 months before deciding I would recommend that you do.

Richard

Antonie, I'm using an HP DV9000t Laptop, Core2Duo 2.00, 2GB Ram, 512MB Vid Card.

Richard, what issues are there with HD? Still mostly doing SD with an eye towards HD with a fresh XHA1. The way Vegas handles HDV playback is one of the reasons why I'm learning the app as PrPro CS3 has trouble with SD. Thanks.

Kevin

Thanks Richard and Kevin.

Unfortunately I don't have Premiere anymore and I need to start from scratch as far as software goes. Unfortunately cost is a big issue seeing that we are working on a very tight budget but if it is absolutely necessary we can stretch it a bit.

Richard, like Kevin, I would also like to know what issues there are in Vegas when it comes to editing HD/HDV. Most of my work will be in SD but the days of clients wanting hdv is coming closer and closer.

Thanks