Sure, there are significant differences between systems. And YES, you should do all the personal research you can in order to suss out which one is right for you.

What we're trying to say, Peter, is that YOU WILL NEVER GET OBJECTIVE ANSWERS TO WHAT'S RIGHT FOR YOU BY ASKING PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT YOU.

I could post 1000 messages that say (insert my NLE here) is THE BEST. And all that says is that one guy in Scottsdale, Arizona who does one type of video work and has a particular kind of brain and a unique history of experiences with operating computers and with software styles, and with workflow issues, and button layouts, and a bunch of other stuff and I've decided - based on that - that MY software is THE BEST.

It's all INSANELY subjective.

When I was in college I had a used 1970 Volvo. Coming off a small Datsun, I thought that was the MOST comfortable car I'd ever driven. It had genius design, with elbow supports that gave my arms and shoulders rest while driving, it's seat fit me like a glove.

I sat loaned it to my buddy expecting him to have a similar experience - he HATED it. He's smaller than me. NOTHING fit him like it fit me.

The other critical thing is that my EXPERIENCE base back then was woefully inadequate. I'd never driven a Mercedes, or a Jaguar, or a Cadillac. So my opinion on "THE BEST" was not only inadequate, it was insignificant.

Sure reading car magazines can give you some general guidelines about which models have what features. But NOBODY buys - or *should* ever buy their care based on a review and some pictures.

And sorry, but that's what considering an NLE based largely on newsgroup reports is mostly about for me.

Nothing wrong with listening to the general conversation about NLEs. Just so long as you keep in mind something that I've learned in newsgroup chatter. To wit...

The people who have the strongest internet opinions tend to be of a type who enjoys the process of reading and debating - NOT those who use and explore things experiencially. There's a good reason for this. Experiential knowledge takes A LOT MORE TIME to acquire than reading and debating. The read and debate guy will have opinions on 10 different NLES - The experiential guy will spend that same time learning to operate HIS NLE.

Guess who will end up billing more?

FWIW.

Oh yeah, I know. Playing with it has made me learn that. I mean, it has keying and such within it, but when I got to use After Effects, I had someone show me some ways to do things sooooo much easier. Pins on animation, auto-tracking for masks, auto-re-resterizing of vector images from Illustrator, and the list goes on and on. He even showed me a few clips from some training video and I'm just amazed by it. Vegas CAN do it... but I don't know if it has all of those time saving functions (if it does, enlighten me!). And then Premiere seemed to have more advanced looking keying and transition presets. Now if you take the time and all that, I might be able to get Vegas to do that, but the presets I found with Adobe products rock. Now I learned you can even download more off the internet! I know you shouldn't just use presets, but man, they are a great starting point and if you are running low on time... pop one in that looks like it took a lot of time to make and an interview can look great quickly! A lot of times I felt like I was just putting funky text over a picture in Vegas while the presets for Premiere look professional.


Now, I've only gotten to the surface of Adobe too, and that just astounds me. To get things straight, I was using Vegas Movie Studio Platinum Pro most of the time, though I demoed Vegas Pro 8.

Still, I'm going to have to play with the color correction in Vegas Pro more first. See if it would work for me. I just know Premiere's because it's pretty close to Photoshop's.

I'm feeling stoked for Adobe now, but I still want to here more about Vegas to see if this can be done on it. I've heard that Vegas is lighter on CPU too, anyone confirm this?

Hi Chris, I started on Premiere Pro 2 because I wanted to do video with impressive motion graphics. PP2 wasn't bad but I did notice it needed a lot of computer resources to work with HDV. Hopefully that has changed since then. I always thought of PP as a PC version of Final Cut, and the two are very similar, especially since the same group created both. Did you know that? The creators of Premiere for Adobe then went on to create FCP for Apple. Obviously the two programs have diverged quite a bit, but the essential workflow is similar.

I think it is wise to keep Vegas around. You will notice that the workflow in Vegas is less convoluted than in PP and for certain projects you can save a lot of time, especially if you don't have to do anything in After Effects.

I would also like to hear about your experiences with PP CS4!

This is a good discussion, but was mis-categorized, so I've moved it (from Open DV) to the forum where it really belongs, High Definition Video Editing Solutions (for Chris R.: please review the forum index and post to the most appropriate board -- thanks in advance). Thanks also to everyone who has responded here, especially you, Bill. As always, it was great to see you last month NAB (and to meet you better half, finally)!

Yes, I can confirm that - just a little while ago I installed the latest Vegas 8 on a (very) old computer - AMD processor @ 1.6 GHz - slower than optimal but it still runs, whereas other contemporary editing software cannot even be installed on it because of the lack of MMX and SSE support.

Thanks for the link, that was exactly what I was looking for a few days ago :)

While Vegas will run on anything, that does necessarily mean it's light on the CPU.

Vegas doesn't utilize the GPU on the videocard. I know Avid does, and I've read that Adobe does to some extent as well.

I have Avid and Vegas on my PC, and Avid is much faster; there is really no comparison.

Pardon me if I'm thicker than the offspring of the village idiot and a television weather girl but one question I have is that of quality.

Does Adobe Premier Elements 7 have smart rendering? I downloaded trails to vegas and Video Studio X2 and both claim to smart render (VS even has a cool little green bar letting you know what won't be touched in the render process)

With all the talk of bikes and volvos and volumptuos blonds, can we expect all the major NLEs to "smart render" (ie: just splice footage together that hasn't been altered). I reckon this would be a very important decision.


Is this where I wait for the "Kurosawa didn't use AVCHD"? :)

I guess what I want to say is that if I'm going to make a bad movie, I at least want the image quality to be not affected by my poor choice of cuts and star wipes.


Laurence

Laurence, a side note on smart rendering. You have to be careful that your project settings aren't in conflict with the MPEG that you don't want rerendered. For example, if your project setting calls for a bit rate of 6,000 but your MPEG stream has a bit rate of 8,000, your program will want to rerender it so that the bit rate matches your project setting.