Thanks, that's an excellent reply. I really know my way around Vegas so I don't need Premier. Photoshop is no doubt better than Paintshop Pro but I have some good photo plugins so I'm not sure I need Photoshop.

I suppose my confusion stems from not really knowing what AE does. I thought it was for adding FX to video a bit like CC7 does but it's more like Boris Red for creating 3D FX. I'll definitely check out Maya instead. If it's like AE and is free for students then that's ideal.

I really want to stick with Vegas because I find it so straight forward to use. So if I can compliment it with applications that cover most film and photo editing requirements then I won't need to learn Adobe products. I already use Reaper for audio which is excellent and has replaced ACID Pro 7 for my needs so I don't need any of Adobe's audio products.

I'm particularly interested in learning to create green screen effects. I've had a go in Vegas but CC7 is supposed to be much better. Is it better than the Adobe stuff?

"I suppose my confusion stems from not really knowing what AE does. I thought it was for adding FX to video a bit like CC7 does but it's more like Boris Red for creating 3D FX. I'll definitely check out Maya instead. If it's like AE and is free for students then that's ideal. "

Maya is a 3D CGI program, pretty much like Blender but on steroids. If you buy all the modules then it's a very expensive program. It's also very complex, some people may specialise in only one part of it e.g. the hair guy or the smoke guy etc.

Combustion as far as I know is now dead.

After Effect, Fusion and Nuke are compositing programs. Not true 3D applications like Maya, generally called 2.5D. AE is the cheapest and most widely used of those three. Yes of course you can add effects just like you can in Vegas but if that's all you want to do then you're possibly wasting your money and time to learn it. On the other hand you can do a whole world of things in any of those compositing programs that are difficult or impossible to do in Vegas. All of Boris's FXs that run in Vegas and more run in AE. Of course you also get a considerable range of other vendors offering FXs and animators for AE, some of them quite expensive.

If you want to get some insight into what can be done in AE I'd recommend watching a few of the tutorials from Video Copilot. As you'll soon see amazing things can be done and you can download and use all of those projects for free. Just keep in mind that he's been doing this for years, it is his life's work. Being a good compositor is a career not just something you do as a sideline to being an editor. I'd also suggest even if you don't decide to go down the AE path to still watch some of those tutorials. A lot of what's being done can be done in Vegas and it's a great way to learn about good compositing regardless of the tool you use to do the job.

Bob.

You said

1.Your work was mainly Video Editing and photography
2.You have a limited Budget
3. You are happy with what you have but want to up your skills or levels

I would go with BCC7 which is only 64 bit…. for now.

As Bob said the market place is very niche set, with people doing specific tasks in video editing and compositing. You have to decide what you want to specialize in ,its imposable to become a heavy weight in all the fields in one lifetime. Or 3.

In the general field of Video editing and compositing you can develop your skills to a middle weight level easily with Sony Vegas, filling the needs of 80% of the market requirements. In this level Sony Vegas is by far the quickest and the best.

In the middle weight level you will want to develop some 3d skills and Boris RED or BLUE will give you that, in that Level.
If we need some heavyweight 3d material we get the heavyweights in and we pay heavyweight.

Any skills you learn on aps like AE will be beneficial when working with Vegas.

AE is for motion graphics. You create them, by piling (or compositing) layer upon layer of graphics to build up an animation.

Something like this
http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/gallery/domanistudios/index.html

15 years ago, you didn't see things like this. Now it's everywhere

Thanks for all the great replies. This is really helpful information for me as I'm trying to get my head around the different ways of editing film.

One of the aims I have with film editing is to cut out a part of a film (e.g. people or backgrounds) and layer this with other videos/films. Is this creating a composite?

I want to select a part of a video, isolate it and then cut out what I don't need. I think I need to motion track the part I select and then delete the rest of the video. Once I've done this to the videos I want to combine then I can create a composite film. I can do this with photos very easily but I don't know how to do it with moving images. Combining animation and green screen scenes is one thing but is it possible to cut up film and video and combine them like it's possible to do with photos?

I hope that makes sense as I'm not entirely sure about the correct terminology. If I can do this in Vegas then that's great. If CC7 will make this whole process easier then I'll get it. If it's very difficult to do even with Vegas and CC7 then I hope to find an application (maybe AE?) that will make it possible.

I'm creating films on a Fine Art course rather than trying to create a composite that will look completely realistic.

Vegas can actually do a lot of what you're describing but you can do more sophisticated work with AfterEffects or the other compositors mentioned.

These are pretty big commitments to buy so if you can find someone near you who'd let you work with the software that'd be a heck of a lot cheaper.

One thing I find very helpful is a year-long subscription to Lynda.com. They cover a lot of software in their online training and for $250.00/year you can look at all of it, as much as you want. This way you can train if you need to and you can also get a very clear idea of what other software does. Total Training is another source for this so if you're interested look at their course lists to see if they have what you want.

For book recommendations get a copy of The DV Rebel's Guide. That should give you some good clues about what AfterEffects can do for you.

If AfterEffects is something you specifically want to pursue then get Photoshop along with it.

As it happens, today I'm touching up scans before they go into AfterEffects. I won't be the guy using AfterEffects, though.

Rob Mack

"One of the aims I have with film editing is to cut out a part of a film (e.g. people or backgrounds) and layer this with other videos/films. Is this creating a composite?"

Yes, this is compositing. Cutting out moving people falls under the title of rotoscoping because in the past using AE or Vegas the only way to do this is frame by frame unless of course they were shot agains a green / blue screen.

AE CS5 makes this task orders of magnitude easier. If you need to do this a lot probably worth the price of admission just for the Rotobrush tool:



I haven't used it myself as I'm yet to uprgade to CS5 and that is a canned demo. You'd probably find cases where you would also need to do a lot of manual tweaking. Still it has to be easier than doing all of it by hand.

Bob.

I'll check out the DV Rebels Guide. It looks very useful. I read a review of it and they use AE quite a bit. What I like about using Vegas is that I don't normally need to read a 400 page book just to use it. That's why I'm reluctant to use Adobe products and chose PSP X3 instead of Photoshop.

I've read more on masking and compositing in Vegas and what I want to do seems possible. I did try to mask a video in Vegas before but it took ages because I had to adjust the mask every couple of frames manually. I couldn't find a way to get the mask to snap to the area I wanted to mask at each point I inserted a key frame. The key frame points had to be quite close together otherwise Vegas wouldn't track the object I was masking correctly.

If I could find a way to mask an object and then have Vegas or a masking plugin track the object I'm masking so that I just have to fine tune certain key frames rather than all of them manually then this would be perfect for what I want to do.

Thanks farrs, rotoscoping is exactly what I'm trying to do even if I didn't realise it until you pointed it out! The AE tool appears just what I need. I think I'll probably buy the Adobe bundle now unless Boris have something similar for Vegas. I looked at a few demos of the new AE rotoscoping tool and although they said it wasn't perfect it looks a lot quicker than the time consuming way that Vegas does it. Are there any other rotoscoping tools out there that are better than the AE one?

" Are there any other rotoscoping tools out there that are better than the AE one? "

Not that I know of. Rotoscoping is as that video points out a task for those with the patience of a saint. There are plugins and tools for AE to ease the pain such as wire removal, degrain / regrain. I've also had a bit of fun with the "puppet tool" in AE and also found the Vanishing Point trick that works between PS and AE quite useful.

I use AE along with Vegas because whilst AE is not easy to learn, for compositing it is easier to use than Vegas. Having tools like a real 3D camera saves a lot of hard work in Vegas to get a result that looks optically correct. Using Expressions to connect things also helps and is easier and more flexible than Vegas's parent / child 3D compositing. Being able to create many composites in the one projects and feed the output of them into a parent composite is easier and faster than using nesting in Vegas.

None of this takes anything away from Vegas. Vegas started out life as an audio application that had video added on. After Effects started out as a compositing tool. It is designed to make the complexities of doing that well and fast, easy. Trust me, you really need to get familiar with the keyboard shortcuts in AE . On the other hand no way would I try to edit video in AE or mix audio.

BTW the Vegas manual is over 400 pages. You should read it all at least once. It too has many great features that you might miss unless you at least skim the manual once. At least once in the past 10 years we've had one Vegas user unaware that you could mix audio in Vegas despite quite a few award winning mixes being done with it.

Bob.

I did a bit of searching and came up with a few alternatives for rotoscoping. I've tried to sum up AE and its alternatives from a student perspective:

'Silhouette' - there are no examples or tutorials on their website so I couldn't see how it worked. It costs nearly $1000.

'Rotation' by Eyeon - not sure if it's as easy to use as AE and the lowest student price is nearly $500.

Autodesk's 'Combustion' - virtually no info about it on their website and no examples. I could download and use it for free with a student licence but I'm not sure if I'd end up having to adjust the mask with every frame just like in Vegas.
(While it's great that Autodesk offer free products to students, when I downloaded Maya and 3dfs Max each took nearly two hours to download and I had no control over the whole process which was a bit worrying. I still don't know where all that data was being downloaded to and once the program has installed there's a further reg process. Both 3dfs Max and Maya seem far beyond what I need. The student products leave a watermark on anything created and I'm not sure whether that's visible.)

Imagineer's 'Mocha 2' - looks promising but costs much more than I can afford. Again, I'm not sure if it's able to do what AE's new rotoscoping tool can do.

AE (as part of CS5 Production Premium) - Seems pretty versatile at rotoscoping and other things. A lot of info, examples and tutorials about it. Costs £299 with student discount which includes Photoshop and a bundle of other products.

Boris Red 4 - Integrates into Vegas. Lots of info about Red but could not find much about rotoscoping with Red. Not sure if its rotoscoping capabilities match the new AE tool. Student pricing is nearly $500.

The reason I'm asking about these tools is to find out the experience of others who have used them or use them regularly. I suppose I could try out all the demos but I'm a bit reluctant to install lots of different software unless it's better at rotoscoping than AE. Also, I'm not sure if I could figure out which one is better unless I had a lot of practice with each product. The learning curve that could entail might be be mind blowing.

Thanks Bob. You've sold me on AE. I think after checking out the alternatives I was moving in that direction. I mainly come from an audio background so Vegas is great for that and I love the easy with which I can edit and create video with it. I tend to use software for specific needs and I usually only learn new techniques when I need to so I'm hoping I can apply that to AE as well. That's what I like about Vegas, Reaper and PSP X3. After a bit of learning I could use them to do what I needed. I suppose others might say that about their favourites so maybe it's all relative.

After a lot of prevarication I just bought CS5 Production Premium. Thanks everyone for your advice. I started out not even knowing what compositing was and ended up learning about rotoscoping. This forum is incredibly helpful.

definition of prevaricate

I think you mean vacillate. (At first, I though you mean equivocate, but that wasn't it either.)