then you probably wont have a wow factor with anything else you find.. what are you wanting to do?

Actually, I just got MEGA-wowed finding Red Giant Software.

But as my luck always is, their tools are for Adobe Premiere / After Effects. :(

Some amazing tools like TrapCode's 3D Stroke, Shine, Starglow, Particular, Planescape and Text Anarchy,

I don't know if I'm saying this right, but many things I've seen for Vegas offer very "Photoshop-Filter-esque" effects, which I don't really consider worthwhile.

Of all the great programs they have, the only one that support Vegas is the Magic Bullet Looks, which as aforementioned, provides very Photoshoppy results.

AfterEffects is pretty old stuff (Adobe bought got it when they bought Aldus, who got it from CoSa) I remember doing a job in '93 with some folks who were raving about it and how it would revolutionize things. It's still a great program.

People make livings just off of compositing tools like AfterEffects. If you really want to get some "Wow" plugins then you should probably get the right application to use them. AfterEffects is probably the most common choice but there are other things like Boris Red.

Even though I just said that you should get a compositing program like AEFX for really cool effects, it'd be nice to see more written for Vegas.

Rob Mack

not sure what you want. Vegas can do a lot with the built in tools & existing media. You just need to know how to use the tools.

here's some stuff:
http://www.jetdv.com/vegas/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3049&highlight=
http://vasst.com/sony/default.aspx
http://www.mikecrash.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=6
[linik=http://www.johnrofrano.com/tutorials/3dparentmotion.htm]


all these were done in vegas, no 3rd party apps:



3rd party apps would be great if you wanted something specific that vegas can't/has a hard time handling. IE a 3d maze is a pain in vegas (can be done), a 3d app or AE/Boris would be better. I've been using blender for the limited 3d stuff I'm doing & it works great.

With the apps I mentioned above off of Red Giant Software, I can't see Vegas being able to do many of those things on it's own. Take 3D stroke for example. There really is no tool there at all.

I'm looking for a cheap (legal, of course) way to get AE CS4. I can use Vegas for my video but I may be able to use AECS4 for "post-production" So that I can get tools for it. But it doesn't look like I'll be spending any less than $500USD at that.

Hmm, I might put my DVD training videos (Gary Kleiner) up for sale since I've gotten my training done through him. Might help me offset the costs.

HappyFriar, in your fourth clip you had text: "This would of been a heck of a lot easier .....". Should be "This would have been a heck ....."

This usage may not be a huge deal in forums etc, but as a title caption, incorrect language screams out ..... and brings out the English teacher I used to be ;)

"Take 3D stroke for example. There really is no tool there at all."

True indeed and AE really sucks at mixing audio.
You might pickup a copy of the previous version of AE from eBay and then upgrade that.

Bob.

Yeah, that's what I thought I'd try. If I can get AE6 for less money, the upgrade to CS4 is only $300. I got PS:CS and AI:CS that way. Bought PS6 and AI 8 and then upgraded. Biggest thing was making sure the product could be fully registered/transferred to you.

I just got an email back from Red Giant who says they will be adding support for many of their products for Vegas in 2009, but that really doesn't give me a timeframe I can work with.

This usage may not be a huge deal in forums etc, but as a title caption, incorrect language screams out ..... and brings out the English teacher I used to be ;)

as i said in the video, it's because I only had 1 monitor. You thought duel monitors would help with the layout? No, it's the SPELLING! :D

A big thing to watch out for with these programs is making sure you get something you will actually use, and you know how to use it. IE if you get AE/Boris, a) make sure you'll have a use for it & it won't just be something cool to say you have & b) read the manuals, find tutorials, etc.

Everything anyone has asked me to do I've been able to do in vegas + gimp. You might be in the same boat & could put $500 elseware.

....and if you add Blender 3D to the Vegas + GIMP combo, your toolbox is very full. Outside of specific high-end tools (3D trackers, optical flow, etc.) this combination of tools is up to most tasks. Blender even handles OpenEXR & node-based compositing.

> If I can get AE6 for less money, the upgrade to CS4 is only $300.

Yea, that's exactly what I did. I found an older Adobe suite on eBay and upgraded to CS4. I got really tired of seeing all these great plug-ins come out and they all required AE. I finally just broke down and bought it. Best purchase I ever made. Now I have to wait for all of those plug-ins that I passed up because I didn't have AE to go back on sale so I can afford to buy them. :(

~jr

I appreciate you guys keeping my wallet in mind here, thank you.

I'm in the same boat, it would seem. I want to get AE CS4, but if I do, it'll break the bank for these other tools. Heck, I still don't have the greatest grasp on what AE even does. Premiere is Adobe's Video Editor. I guess AE is just special effects and such.

I should be able to composite in Vegas and export an AVI for use in AE, to throw back in forth in a dovetail, only thing is I don't think AE supports .veg files understandably.

That Blender 3D looks pretty amazing for a Free 3D Editor, but I think that's an entirely new cup o' noodles to open. Right now I have Adobe Web Premium (PS, AI, DW, FL, FW all CS3) Won't upgrade those til CS5.

And once I get AE, then I gotta do some training for it. Lynda.com has a ~10hour training course that I should be able to get through in a 1 month period ($25/mo)

That Blender 3D looks pretty amazing for a Free 3D Editor, but I think that's an entirely new cup o' noodles to open

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro that's a nice blender tutorial. I just found out that Blender has a sculpting tool too. So you can make things like what you see in Mudbox or Z-Brush (if you wanted. I make funny looking faces). I've learned enough to do things that I need to do:

http://img135.imageshack.us/my.php?image=faceut7.jpg[/link]

Those are things that AE can do very easily (once you learn it) but I decided to see what I could do with spending nothing. Photo slide show can be done in vegas too, I just did it in blender. Found it easier.

EDIT: sorry if the youtube screens are taking up so much space, no way to have them be a link only or put them side-by-side.

That's some good work there, TheHappyFriar.

No worries about the size. I browse at 1920x1200, so pretty much nothing takes up "too much space" :)

No worries about the size. I browse at 1920x1200, so pretty much nothing takes up "too much space" :)

I'm at 1440x900 but it looks like the forum is a fixed width. Is it that for you?

One big plus on 3rd party apps: when you're doing keyframes, most non-Sony apps display curves. Very VERY helpful. Vegas used to show a curve in pan/crop but they removed that in vegas 5. no clue why. :/

I'm a web developer, and the forum seems to be designed at a set fixed width that is JUST enough to cover the lowest common screen resolution of 800x600. This was probably done to accommodate the majority of viewers without forcing them the horizontally scroll the site.

I'm not sure what you mean on CURVES for Vegas/3rd Party Apps. Are you talking about the envelopes and their bezier-style keyframes?

I can't find any screenshots of Vegas 4's pan/crop window, but here's some curves in blender:
http://img81.imageshack.us/my.php?image=blendercurvesmi9.jpg[/link]

you have curves for the X, Y Z locations, rotations, scales, etc. Vegas 4 didn't let you edit the curve directly but it showed one in the pan/crop.

The image you posted is only 150 pixels x 52 pixels. Impossible to make out any detail.

I think I understand what you mean. Independent control of the X/Y/Z locations.

I spent 6 years doing everything in Vegas and a bit using Daz Studio and Bryce. No complaints for the money I spent. I was forced to buy PPro and AE because of the things Vegas couldn't handle such as DPX but for nearly 2 years apart from processing image sequences I never really dove into AE because, well I could do it in Vegas.

Thing is though I was never happy with the results I could get out of Vegas. Here I'm talking projects with quite complex 3D composites, it wasn't that I couldn't make Vegas do what I wanted it was just that more and more I realised the results simply looked bad. I looked at all the work from other Vegas users and mostly it too looked just the same.

So a few months ago I jumped intp the deep ocean of AE and it's been a real eye opener. Simple things like animated text simply look better out of AE than the do out of Vegas. The explaination of why they do relates to how AE does things I think. In Vegas the text is rasterised and then moved. In AE the text vectors are manipulated and then rasterised. That reduces the amount of aliasing and looks much better.
The other tool thats have really got me hooked with AE are vanishing point. Now a flat image can be made to come alive. Used carefully a simple pan around a flat image look optically correct. The difference is subtle, the impact on the viewer is dramatic. It's one of the few tricks I've done that got an immediate response from my wife.

The other FX in AE that is very impressive is turbulent wind.
In Vegas you can use a Bezier mask and an FX and you get two choices. FX before or after the mask. That gives quite some creative control once you workout to use that yellow triangle. However in AE some of the FXs themselves are controlled by the mask and that gives a very powerful range of options. In other words the 'force' that the FX applies to the pixels is constrained by the mask itself, pixels appear to flow along the mask rather than simply being cut off by the mask. Now you could probably achieve much the same outcome in Vegas with lots of work and using displacements maps. The problem I have with doing that is it takes so darn long and the project becomes so complex it becomes an exercise in engineering and not a creative process compared to a few clicks and a couple of dial twiddles.
For me at least the crucial thing that a good compositing app like AE or Fusion brings to the table isn't the wizz bang stuff that has people saying "Wow Bob, that was really cool". It's being able to create things that people don't notice because they're optically correct. After all the aim of this game is to get the viewer to watch the story, not the technology. AE and some of the 3rd party plugs like Knoll Light Factory help keep the illusion alive so the audience isn't taken out of the story.

Bob.

If I understand it correctly though, AE does not provide Video Editing like Premiere would (or it's Sony equivalent, Vegas) It's a more than capable compositing app, but does not provide the video/audio editing tools that it's bigger brother does (understandably)

My thing is, I'll have to deal with a broken "Round Robin" system.

If I had Premiere, I could round-robin a project in there and "send it to AE" to get it's effects and then send it back to Premiere with those effects, all while maintaining the source files rather than having to render anything.

With Vegas/AE, I'll have to build it in Vegas, render it, send the render to AE, composite it, render it in AE and then use that in Vegas as a rendered file rather than project, so if I wanted to make changes to the pre-AE composite, I'd have to re-open the older .VEG file, change it, send it to AE, make the composite changes again, render it again, and send it back to Vegas.

Ugh.

Certainly it's easier to round robbin between those two apps however AE will open a Vegas project saved as AAF.

That said I think you need to look at your workflow.
One current project of mine I've built the opening titles in AE and simply rendered them out with an alpha channel and bought them back into my Vegas project. At another point in the project I needed to do some work on a 5 second shot. I rendered out only those 5 seconds from Vegas and worked on it in AE, rendered it out and bought that back into Vegas.

All this depends on what your projects are but the workflow that the big end of town uses makes a lot of sense.
Edit, cuts only. Lock vision. Send low res copy to sound guys. Maybe send reference files to CGI guys as well. Bring all the full res images together into compositing app. Grading is done after editing. It all depends on the nature of the production of course but jumping all over the place can cause you to loose the plot literally, depending on what you're working on.
For boring hack work on events footage I do sound and vision at the same time, there's no 'story' other than what was in front of the camera. Narrative drama is a completely different ball game entirely. Of course we don't have huge 'departments' working on our movies, we most likely do it all ourselves however staying focussed on the one thing and getting that out of the way before moving onto the next can make the task more fluid.

Bob.

Aegis,

Perhaps you can provide a specific example or two of what you want to do. That would make it easier for people to provide suggestions. Many people have successfully used other apps that were not integrated with Vegas so I'm sure you can too.