What Do They have (FCP X and CS 5.5 or Avid) That Vegas Doesn't And Can You Get It.

[Chris Barcellos]

This latest round of events with FCP X, and Adobes counter with half price for FCP defectors, leaves me scratching my head once again. In fact, this weekend, I actually downloaded the CS 5.5 trial, just to refressh myself on the Adobe side, and just to see if my memory of Premiere was any different from its present reality. I also took a basic tutorial in After Effects because I knew I had no idea what it was really capable of. I got through a first level really basic tutorials from YouTube, and noted that at the levels it was covering to that point, I was able to do similar things in Vegas without leaving it. No doubt that basic level is to be followed by some real cool stuff. The point of this is that in Vegas, we seem to have a lot of stuff on board the basic NLE, that Final Cut and Premiere relegate to additional programs.

I also experienced that same "handcuffed" feeling in the basic Premiere program, that I had felt before, and that had eventually driven me to Vegas. It feels to like Premiere requires some precise one way only steps to accomplish certain tasks that in Vegas I can attack from many different directions. So I am curious what others more familiar with these other NLEs have to say about what we are missing in Vegas.

[Mike Dulay]

Not really about NLE but more on VFX. I had to get After Effects for tracking and rotoscoping. In Vegas you need to use track motion by hand which was tedious. Worse for animating masks with multiple points, feathering was especially hard if you had hard edges you needed to keep. With CS5 the automatic rotoscoping works quite well and is cleaner.

I also have Premier but don't use it. Would also be interested in hearing from someone who does.

[Leslie Wand]

COLLABORATION - yes, in big letters - otherwise nothing much else.

[Sean Seah]

The 50% discount to Premiere is really enticing.. I use Photoshop a lot and have messed with After Effects. The current price of Production Premium is what i bought AE CS3.0 alone back then! However I'm concerned about PP being one of the more costly NLEs i have seen. I do weddings mainly, dun rake in big $$.

The only thing i dig is the smooth DSLR editing. In all honestly i have tried working it out with Vegas 10 but it jams a little on my alien laptop. Ends up with me doing the cineform conversion till now which is a pain.

Sometimes i do 3D space stuff within Vegas from photoshop jpegs and it has never been a problem so the collaboration thingy doesnt impact me that much.

With the introduction of ofx it is comforting to see more plugins for Vegas. Like Twixtor which has been for the rest except for Vegas shows that we r getting noticed!

What a hard decision..

[Chris Barcellos]

Mike, I have to agree that the rotoscoping and other specialized effects of After Effects aren't there, and that is something I am interested in exploring in After Effects.

Leslie: Can you explain what you mean by collaberation. Is it because that many people are not using Vegas ?, or lack of conversion capabilities to other editors ?

Sean: Would be cool if Adobe had that 50% offer open to any NLE user. I might consider that type of offer, as FCP users are.

[Leslie Wand]

vegas truly lacks ANY tools for collaboration - starting with the most basic - edl i/o.

without edl it's completely useless for working with anyone else on another platform.

otherwise it rocks!!!

[Brian Luce]

Vegas really can't match the power of After Effects. Even if you load up Vegas with Boris and Newblue plug ins, it's still not in the same league. But Vegas gets quite powerful as you add plugins, and it's nice for me at least to stay in one software. Vegas handles my AVCHD files fluidly while AE won't even recognize them unless I transcode them.

[Leslie Wand]

i would never compare ANY nle with ae - they're two different beasts.

[Chris Barcellos]

One of the things I am spoiled with about Vegas is timeline renders, etc. In the trial version of Premiere, I decided I wanted to render what I had on the time line so far, so I looked for render options, and of course it is called export in the file menu. So I tried to invoke that, but it wasn't available to open. Then I recalled from my old days of Premiere, I probably had to render the timeline first. I looked at my time line, and of course it was showing red above the imported clip files. (This was footage direct from a DSLR) So I had to prerender the timeline out, to fit the current project, and then stumble through setting and re-render an output file for what I needed.

This is the type of thing that seems so antiquated to me about Premiere. From the sound of FCP X, that is something that Apple was trying to change, making me think that FCP was trying to be more "Vegss like". And it seems that this type of approach may be what "old pro" users are rebelling against.

[Chris Barcellos]

Originally Posted by Leslie Wand

i would never compare ANY nle with ae - they're two different beasts.

I agree, to some extent. But Vegas does do a good job on many of the lower end type editing techniques in its unified time line that Adobe seems to push off to After Effects for "advance" treatment. And with Adobe packaging everything as a single cohesive unit known as CS 5.5, the comparison will be made by many.

[Pete Bauer]

Chris, if you had a red bar above the sequence timeline and did a pre-render (which isn't required to export in AME), then you didn't have CUDA working for you. Any i7 machine with decent RAM and even a cheap CUDA-capable nVidia graphics card will give you a buttery smooth editing experience unless your project gets exceptionally complex and/or you have specific need to load on a bunch of the less commonly used, non-accelerated effects. In that regard, I think your brief assessment probably isn't giving it a fair shake.

As a longtime PPro user, I guess I just can't relate to the handcuffed feeling. PPro to me is so straightforward yet robust. Who knows, I might feel as you do if I were to try editing in Vegas since I know PPro well but not Vegas. We all use what works and is comfortable for us.

I'm not the one to research the question, but am kind of curious about the converse to your original question...what specific NLE features Vegas has that PPro doesn't? PPro CS5.5 is really broad and deep; I go to AE for compositing, not editing, so the comment about pushing off to AE doesn't really ring true for me. Again, I'm unable to compare with Vegas but I don't find a need to go to AE for editing tasks. Might be interesting to see a listing of what one NLE does that the other doesn't, and vice versa.

[Mike Calla]

Yep, collaboration!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! can't even export/import audio to/from its own ACID program...silly.

As far as FX go, AE absolutely rocks, even for rudimentary FX its simple and effective.

Lack of third party support, not really vegas's fault, but they do have a broadcast hard ware giant behind them... take a look at edius, they have grass valley behind them and they get tons of great toys to play with!

Shameful.

[Marc Salvatore]

I agree on lack of collaboration. I love editing in Vegas but would really like to export my timeline out to Premiere and AE for grading. It's unfortunate because I think Vegas would have many more users if they played nicer in the sandbox.

[Chris Barcellos]

Have you ever attempted grading in Vegas, and how does AE and Premiere differ from Vegas grading capabilities ?

With Cineform and Firstlight, I am finding myself grading my clips before editing, and then touching up in Vegas.

[Chris Barcellos]

In answer to Pete:

1. General editing in Vegas is breeze. You can pull most file formats into a time line right out of Windows explorer, and mix any format on the same time line. From windows explorer you can drag and drop files directly in the media bins, or directly on the time line.

2. From your media bins, you can drag directly to the time line, or open in trimmer to close trim before dropping on the time line. Again mouse works in all these function, eliminating command keys. Fine frame by frame final trimming is probably best done on time line by enlarging time line so each frame become visibly represent on the time line. From there his S where you want to cut, highlight the extra piece and cut it.

3. I actually started editing when you didn't have to learn commands. I don't know if it is slower, but Vegas work flow with mouse is super clean in my opinion. Drag and drop is the name of the game in most situations.

4. I m not having any issues with the color correction capabilities. It also has great tools for mattes and compositing. Simple to use.

5. Basic titler is great. The ProTitler is kind of neat looking, but I just haven't tried to master it. Having some of AE's titling capabilities and presets, its seems this one is a bit week.

6. Key Framing effects and titles and such is simple and easy.

7. When I first started in Vegas, it seemed it rendered final versions quicker than Premiere.

I will post other impressions as we go along with this discussion.