Premiere 2.0 or Vegas 7
 

Hi there

I know a lot of you are fans of Vegas on this board.

I've been using Premiere Pro for a few years and am considering upgrading to either 2.0 or Vegas.
I shoot on a Z1, but as there is no distribution format for Hd yet, I've put off editing HDV and therefore upgrading software.

I've looked around the board and can see pros and cons for both NLE systems, but no real comparisions...

So question is using mostly a Sony Vaio laptop, which programme would you upgrade to?
Would the transition from PPro to Vegas be easy? and would there be any real advantage?

Thanks and regards
Gareth

There are probably no real advantages to switching. However, Vegas is quite different than Premiere Pro. You might like it better. Or not.

Try it out, but I think you would find that if you had the Production Studio, you would use After Effects and Premiere Pro together in a way no other NLE can.

You will want to upgrade to Connect HD if you buy Vegas, and you will want to upgrade to Aspect HD if you stick with Premiere Pro.

The overall cost is probably less if you stick with Adobe.

So, instead of worrying about which is best, figure out which one allows you to be creative in a way that suits you.

I have both, but have been Premiere oriented for years, so I find myself going back to Premiere. I think I have grown accustomed to the GUI style in Premiere, and it feels more comfortable. Titler is much better in Premiere. However, I did use Vegas to render some Windows Media and QT files for a contest, and Vegas seems to do a better job in the "default" settings. I find myself having to try to adjust the Premiere settings, and often screw things up more.

I converted
 

I used to use PPro, and then I made the move to Vegas 7 when I went HD. The learning curve, if you've used PPro for a while, is next to nothing. It was super easy to learn, and very easy to use.

SB

Yep, I converted to Vegas as well (from Premiere)-

I just like the way Vegas works, you have to try it - some people can't stand it, it's a bit different from premiere but it is very easy to use and learn.

In some ways it might come down to workflow. I used to composite in After Effects, edit in Premiere and do the audio in Cubase. Now I can edit and do the audio in Vegas and in a surprising number of cases I can do the compositing as well. It's no After Effects but there is a lot of compositing power under the hood for an NLE, not to mention the audio side of Vegas which is very well regarded.

This has really speeded up my workflow. Give it a download and check it out - I guess the only advice I can give is check out some tutorials (I think you can google some) and try it for a short project. See if you like it.

Don't ask others ---- download a demo and try it yourself.
(Only YOU can tell if something works well with YOUR workflow and habits.)

Personally, I used to work with Premier but switched over to Vegas Movie Studio when I saw how much easier and faster it was for ME to put together projects. But that's me. And I'd upgrade to the full Vegas in a heartbeat if only they had put the MIDI support from ACID into it so that I could compose/edit audio and video in one application....

I've found DVD export directly from Premiere Pro 2.0 to be rather poor. My footage went from shaky to jerky... it looked like I had shooting in a strobe light or something (it was somewhat poor quality footage to begin with).

Also I'm not real happy with the need to purchase another plugin to export a DVD with Dolby 2.0 (most of what I'm doing is home movie footage that doesn't require menus).

I haven't actually tried Vegas yet though.

As a long time Premiere user, I am almost embarrassed to say that Sony Vegas simply rocks!

I had tried previous versions but never really took the time to stick with it. But when version 7 came out, I decided to give Vegas another chance. I read the manual a couple of times during some lunch breaks and then I started playing with it. I must say that Vegas is a well organized, fast, powerful program. I'm sorry that I didn't give it more of a chance in the past and I'll probably be using Vegas for much of my editing from now on.

Hi John

Well I've downloaded Vegas 7 trial and must say it is confusing beyond belief...about as intuitive as a maze.

I've looked around Final Cut on Mac's (That everyone raves about as the nec plus ultra of editing) and find that totally understandable, easy to follow...Everything is where I'd expect to look... So I find Vegas to say the least, disorientating...

And then I realise that Final Cut and Premiere are like siamese twins... and I ask myself how come everyone dumps on Premiere???....

So to satisfy my curiosity I downloaded Avid free Trial.. well I guess that was not worth the download time...I guess the Pro version are better...

So after my short software odyssey I conclude that my mind set is in tune with Premiere (and I suppose, Final Cut) but that on a PC I can't have both so PPro 2.0 will probably be my best choice...

I see most professional usages don't use Premiere, prefering Avid (Industry standard..why?) or Final cut.. (nice if I had a Mac)

what is it that I'm missing? your thoughts guys !!



Cheers
Gareth

I think it's just tradition. Way back when, Premiere was it for Macs (and Macs were it for NLE). Then Apple released Final Cut and it was more advanced than Premiere. Adobe played catch up and the newer versions are much better. In use I find the 2 to be very similar (I've never tried Avid and found Vegas very confusing as well).

I think Premiere is going to see more use in the future, especially now that Macs are using Intel processors and render times should be fairly similar.

I read on Wikipedia (so take it with a grain of salt) that Premiere was used on "Dust to Glory" (a great docu) and "Superman Returns"... it doesn't mention what it was used for [maybe the editor used the Premiere Pro box as a footstand while he was editing on FCP or Avid? :)]

Also: http://www.cineform.com/press/rel-DustToGlory.htm

http://www.blackmagic-design.com/casestudies/superman/

I also found Vegas extremely confusing when I tried it in the past which is why this time I read the manual twice before delving into the program. I took brief notes on those things I wanted to be able to do or that I thought were cool features, tried them in the program and went back to the manual when I was confused. Now, I find it quite simple. I can switch between Premiere and Vegas with ease. I still use Premiere for some of the plugins I own (but I also have many of these installed in After Effects) but Vegas is just so fast and simple for editing that I will probably use it for most projects. If I could add all of my Premiere plugins to Vegas, I would probably dump Premiere completely. Initially, it can seem like a lot of work to learn a new piece of software but that is the only way for me to truly know if an application will work well or not --- I can't rely on other people's opinions. So, I have tried Premiere (which I still like), Edius (which has some really good and some really bad things), Avid (I don't have the system for it), and Vegas. (I have also looked briefly at many others like Ulead and MainConcept but they didn't do much for me).

Some things I like about Vegas:

• Vegas already uses Cineform codec
• Edit transport streams without a 3rd party plugin
• Loading media is much faster
• Secondary monitor output
• Better native deinterlace and frame rate conversion (good for many projects)
• Excellent slow motion
• Quicker editing (fast, precise edge trimming with keyboard and more intuitive --- once you’ve read the manual!) :-)
• Quick select of timeline events for selected media
• Takes
• Matching project properties to media with a click
• View sync problems at a glance and fix them
• closed captioning
• dynamic ram previews
• split screen previews
• network rendering
• frame numbers
• the ease of working with crossfades / transitions / event envelopes

…and a ton of little hidden features, scripts for automation, etc.

If Premiere works for you then you should stick with it but if you have the time, I think you should browse the Vegas manual and see some of the things it can do.

Ide stick with Premiere just because of the other Adobe integration it provides. Also Premiere Pro 2 is quite different from the other Premiere releases but I love it when I do PC work. You can't be dynamic link or anything like that.

- Kyle

Jacob Rosenberg did the work with Premiere Pro. No salt needed. Not a great surprise since he is the guy who does the Premiere Pro tutorials for Total Training.

Go with Windows Movie Maker 2!!! It blows them all away!!! No, just kidding. As someone said many times before in this and other threads -get the demo and play around with both. I prefer Premiere Pro 2.0, but I have also used Premiere since 1998. FCP is basically the same dang thing, just more hype around it.

Well I've downloadsed the demo of Vegas, but even after watching a few tutorials, reading up on it's features I find it very awkward...

I get back to Premiere and it's like coming home...

As I grew up on Mac's and Photoshop, perhaps there is a certain Mac/Adobe logic I feel comfortable with... I think I'll go with a new version of PPro.. I just didn't want to miss out on a thing that a lot of people on here tell us is the nuts....

cheers
Gareth