Sony Vegas 8 vs Premire + After Effects
 

Hey guys,

I'm getting ready to work on a new project and am now trying to decide if I'm going to need to move away from Vegas (currently 7, can goto 8) to Premire + After Effects.

What I've been told is that your NLE should be used for just editing, and that all color correction and effects work should be done in a compositor. One of the main concerns was the 8bit color depth of 7, which is now 32 in 8 so this may no longer be an issue. Now of the top of my head there were other reasons not to CC and do effects in your NLE but they escape me ATM ;-)

Can anyone comment on this?

Glenn,

You might want to do a search on 32 bit at the Sony Forums. There's quite a bit of confusion as to what it really does. To be honest I'm not sure if it gives you the same advantage as doing 32bit CC in After Effects. Also some of us (myself included) are having crashes when trying to render in Vegas 32 bit. I would try the demo and see how it works on your machine. Overall version 8 is a nice upgrade and Vegas is still just so fast when working on certain types of editing that I myself have had trouble switching over to the Premiere workflow.

Regards,

Marc

Also, bear in mind that when you save your Vegas project, you have the option to save as a .AAF file, which can be read by After Effects.

So you can do your long-form edits in Vegas, and then do color correction in AE. YMMV.

I use Vegas 8 and After Effects CS3 but have had limited success in exporting AAF from Vegas, even with the simplest of projects. AE crashes four out of five times when trying to load an AAF file.

I tend to do a coarse edit in Vegas, saving timeline events as subclips which I then bring into AE as required for further work. Then it's back to Vegas for the final assembly and fine editing. Personally I am not too sophisticated when it comes to CCing so that's done in Vegas as well.

The only thing I always do in AE and never (if I can help it) in Vegas is Magic Bullet work, primarily because of the de-interlacing functionality in MB Suite (which is AE only) as opposed to MB Editors (which is available for Vegas). I use a Canon XL2 and even though I have the facility to shoot progressive I like the flexibility of the choice in post (or is this a sign of lack of confidence?!).

BTW, the reason I say 'never if I can help it in Vegas' is because I don't have access to the MB Suite at home - that's courtesy of one of my regular clients. When I'm there I use it, when I'm not I can't!

I was very pleasantly surprised at just how sophisticated Vegas is at compositing. It's no After Effects but it really does let you build lovely complex, layered sequences. Not having to go back and forth between Vegas and AE saved me a good few hours on a low paid project I recently worked on for a charity.

Best bet, regardless of NLE is to CC the actual clip itself in AE, then replace that clip in your NLE bin and forget worrying about round tripping.

But doesn't that mean you have to cc the entire clip rather than the portion you want to use?

For my corporate work I guess I have a shoot:use ratio of at least 20:1 - probably higher. So for every 1 minute of finished product I have at least 20 minutes of footage. Of course I can discard a proportion of that on capture, and more as I log the footage, but that still leaves me with having to CC many times as much footage as I need to.

I'm not saying your suggestion wouldn't work, but for me personally I would prefer to select, trim and loosely arrange clips in the NLE first and then treat just those trimmed clips outside the NLE - not the whole clip.

Or is my workflow/thinking flawed? I'm more than happy to take pointers for improvement.

In fact, I do follow your suggestion, Peter, in that I save the rough edit Vegas project with 'copies of trimmed media' selected, work on those clips in AE then replace them in the bin. I think I mentioned using sub-clips earlier - this, in fact, was what I meant.

It depends on the job, the volume of correction and your patience.

If vegas is having issues with 32bit and round trip or AFF, then you're left with doing it in AE or other.

Going ahead with your edits will reveal which clips need correction. Note them and CC only the qualified ones.

If you have just a few, you could trim and render. CC and relink. In PPro's project manager (Vegas may have a similiar tool), you can create a trimmed project that will reduce the clips actually used (obviously a last step once the final edits are done and all that left is CC). That way, if you have five hours of stuff logged, and only use ten minutes in the final edit, you'll have to work with tens minutes of material or less.

Usually I'll do a test correction on a clip to even consider it's worth to include in the edit. (That's why I like cineform and 10bit conversion).

Moreover, I've gotten into the habit of shooting for the look I want, or use two of the same camera and matching with a monitor before rolling. Of course, I still get media from outside sources, or archive. This getting OT.

You get the idea, there's no single way about it. Just think it through before you begin.

AAF seems to work for me (to get a Vegas project into AE).

But if you for some reason that doesn't work (it should though), try this method:
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=88535

Or, try Sony technical support because it should work.

AAF has never worked for me, but exporting an EDL works in AE ever time.

Peter, thanks for that. What you're suggesting is pretty much what I do, and of course in Vegas I can save the project with trimmed media (plus any amount either side) which means I'm not rendering multiple times.

Glenn, I guess I gave up on AAF quite quickly as it fell over so many times but maybe I'll revisit it and see if I can't get it working. To be honest, there are few occasions when I would need to get the entire project structure out of Vegas and into AE and I have got into the habit of working in the manner already discussed.

But as you say, it should work. I just need to spend some time analysing what it is that's causing it to fail.

Bennis, does the return journey work as well?

Thanks for the replies guys ..

I guess what I need to do is just grab the Vegas 8 demo and see if 32bit mode will work for me. I guess the consensus is, if I can edit in 32bit mode, and render in 32bit mode w/o it crashing I should be good to go?

After reading the Sony forums it seems like bugs are the only major issue people have had ..