Premiere or Vegas
 

We are looking to move from Avid Xpress DV to either Premiere or Vegas. We don't do a lot of editing. Some talking heads type interviews (20 min to 2 hrs) and short training informational videos (20 min. max). We need to import/export MPG 2 and would also like to network the 3+ systems we'll have. We shoot on P2 and DVCPRO. As of now we're leaning towards Premiere, because of native P2 ingesting and the integration of Photoshop, After Effects. Anything else we should be aware of?

Premiere is hit or miss depending on your hardware and setup. Here's my issues on two workstations (amd opteron powered BOXX, and dual xeon Dell 650). Please note, these may not apply to you, as others are not having these issues. Also I use cineform based projects, so your results may vary:

1) A playback head the freezes when using dual monitors.
2) A title tool that forgets it's settings and position each time it's opened.
3) Large jpeg and tiff images that refuse to preview or render, and require reboot and/or relinking.
4) Images that flip upside down on their own.
5) The horrible audio drift that occurs when dropping a video frame, requiring manual cut and sync.
6) The wonderful apology of were sorry, a serious error had occurred and the application has to be closed.
7) The constant error of system running low of memory, save your work...
8)Power point slides saved as tiffs, import as 1 frame video clips. I had to batch covert to high quality jpegs to be recognized as images.

Of all the issues, the audio drift is the most concerning. I did not discover that issue until I cut my first live presentation on it, (my previous jobs since CS2 were all voiced over).

Vegas has a fully functional demo, while Premiere is crippled, (you'll have to make a purchase to really know if it will work in your case).

I would test this on one of your machines and be mindful of the thirty-day return policy.

I'm going the Mac on FCP route. Vegas would an interim option just to get work done. Again, that just in my case, which may not apply to you.

Good luck.

Peter, are these problems listed on Premiere CS3 or CS2? It seems in most of the world's opinion, CS3 isn't ready for primetime yet. CS2 might be a better comparison for Vegas right now. Unless those are CS2 results, in which case, you have waaaay too much patience to put up with that for 2 years. ;)

Peter: It would be helpful to know which version of Premiere you're using. The problems you list are major.

Thanks.

Addendum to Original Post
 

I should have added that FCP is not an option. Our editing solution needs to be PC-based.

Amen! :)

There are too few of us it seems. ;)

It's not patience, it just being that busy. These are CS3 issues. CS2 just crashed at random when I scrubbed the timeline over large tiffs, or during a render. CS3 Beta actually worked, and I cut a few jobs on it and was convinced to go for the CS3 upgrade.

I actually used 1.5.1 far into the CS2 cycle, only switching when folks at cineform were a few versions into support.

At the very least, in the interim, my only recourse is to step back to 1.5.1 and/or resume cutting SD projects. (I have a local vendor whom is checking on someone in the area that can put me in front of a MacPro with FCP).

I've never considering switching until my job depended on it.

Have you tried doing a clean install of Windows? And how large are your Tiffs? Super high res images can cause problems moving around in memory. If they're large, maybe you could scale them down to output size?

Peter's list of shortcomings is making me think seriously about Vegas. The major downside of Vegas, at this point, is having to use Raylight to convert P2 files.

Edward,

Vegas is a pretty nice program. I just bought the Adobe Production Premium and I do plan on using it. But for many edits Vegas is still just so quick to do things in. Premiere feels clunky to me.

One of my major complaints about Vegas has been the incredibly lame titler. However they have just released a new titler in version 8. It's not perfect and I still like the Premiere titler better for basic font control etc. but it's big step in the right direction (including some pretty advanced text animation capabilities). Give the Vegas demo a try and watch a few tutorials to see how the program works. You might find it fits your editing style.

Good luck,

Marc

Have you looked at Edius?

Ron Evans

Marc: Coming from Avid Xpress, the Vegas title tool doesn't seem like much of an issue.

When I get some time I'm going to try the Vegas demo.

Ron: We haven't looked at Edius. What kind of audio editing capabilities does it have (That's why we've looked mainly at Premiere and Vegas)?

Been there, done that -twice (and not because I liked it :)

I have two completely different workstations, both in spec, and both exhibit the same issues. (So it must be the hardware :)

Big tiffs were a problem in CS2, and low rez jpegs helped. In the CS3, it don't matter. Only work around was rendering out a clip and replace. Tedious.

My recent audio slippage is due to dropped frames in video. The audio loses sync on a dropped frame and has to be manually adjusted. This is evident regardless of PPro capture tool, or stand alone HDlink capture and import.

Others have verified this. I'm not alone. Still others have zero issues.

High res jpegs should work just like high res tiffs. they both will use the same amount of ram when decompressed (width x height x bits), regardless of format. So lower resolution tiffs would work. I personally prefer 24 bit png, or 32 bit with alpha. If the image isn't very detailed, it'll compress nicely, but it's lossless. I guess compressed tifs would be the same, but i think png compression might be better.

Sounds like a huge mess there though. Yeah, 2 separate systems, must be the hardware. ;)

I didn't know anyone had CS2 problems, that stinks..

Newtek SpeedEDIT is pretty sweet and I don't know of any life altering problems with that one. ;)