Fair question.

Color Correction, Chroma Keying. SloMo with progressive footage. Encoding and Device Central ofr mobile devices.
Editing 10bit YUV. Vegas has some horrid problems with this that had me tearing my hair out. All worked just fine in Ppro. Thankfully there was minimal editing to be done, phew.

I can't believe how tragic many of the transitions are in Ppro compared to Vegas. Not that I'm into transitions but once recently the client wanted them so I tried Ppro, that was a timewaster.

Bob.

I can't speak to CS4, but I have CS3 and I really see very little advantage or disadvantage of Premiere Pro when compared to Vegas. It's just different. You do have the ability to create active links between After Effects and Premiere, but the memory management in CS3 is shaky enough, so why you'd ever want to try that, I don't know. CS4 supposedly does a better job of memory usage, especially under Vista x64.

The only other issue that I see as major, is that there are a lot of tutorials online for Adobe products and there also a lot more plug-ins, etc.. But the gap with Vegas in these areas has been narrowing.

Even if you don't use PPro there are surely other useful things in the suite. PhotoShop is always good and AEFX is very worth learning if you've got the time.

Familiarity with another NLE can give you some insight into why Vegas does what it does, and vice versa. Familiarity can also breed contempt.

Rob Mack

One of the biggest disadvantages of Vegas compared o almost any other professional NLE is that you only can hold one timeline per project. PP, FCP, … all offer multiple timelines. It depends on the job you have to do, but I miss this function the most when I work with Vegas. And the “import .veg into another .veg” can not give the same flexibility.
Thomas

Also included with CS4 Premiere Pro is OnLocation. This is the replacement for DV Rack that I used all the time when capturing footage with my laptop. I installed this application and I like the look of the new interface but I have not tried using it yet.

Grasshopper

Rob, that is why I bought the suite - for AE, PS and Illustrator. I would have preferred a discount in lieu of Premiere Pro but that isn't a choice ;-).

Jerry

Even if you don't use PPro there are surely other useful things in the suite. PhotoShop is always good and AEFX is very worth learning if you've got the time.

Bob, that is very helpful. One other thing occurred to me - maybe you have experience with this. I see that PP can encode to FLV. Have you tried AAF out from Vegas to PP? I assume it would probably have to be a single track project but this could might be a useful way for rendering to FLV, which I occasionally need.

Jerry

EDIT: I see now you DID mention encoding to mobile devices. Do you use AAF?

Color Correction, Chroma Keying. SloMo with progressive footage. Encoding and Device Central ofr mobile devices.

I would say that On location can be very usefull if it works well on your setup. I love the interface, but like the previous DV Rack, it seems prone to be buggy sometimes. That's why i just gave it up with DV Rack some years ago and opted for the rock solid Scenalyser.

If you have Fireworks in the suite, it's a truly great graphic soft with flexibility Photoshop dosen't have IMHO.

Somebody once gave me their pre-rendered video to include in my Vegas project. I didn't like the output quality. Luckily they also included the original premier project and files. I was able to open the project in premier pro, save it as an aaf and bring it into Vegas so I could further tweak and edit it. If I didn't have Premier, I would have been stuck with what was originally provided.

You can never have two many tools in the shed.

Premiere CS4 does have some value to me as an intermediate solution. It can deal with DVCPro 100 natively, doesn't require Raylight. It can also deal with the RED camera's native footage, quite nicely, too. If needed, it could be a great conversion tool to recode some footage into something that Vegas can deal with, as I still much prefer to edit in Vegas.

"Do you use AAF?"

No, simple took a rendered file from Vegas and opened it in Ppro.

I've only tried AAF from Vegas into After Effects.

Bob.

I'm seriously considering a switch to PP. Vegas has been giving me fits for months now and the support team has offered very little in terms of solutions. Vegas crashes, generating runtime errors or exception errors, often preventing me from loading projects. I'm blowing deadlines on a regular basis because of this and it looks like I'm going to have to restart 3 of my projects from scratch. Simply infuriating.
How does PP compare in terms of stability?

How does PP's audio capabilities compare to Vegas? Does it require a separate audio app?

How many AV tracks will PP tolerate before it gets unstable?

Do they offer competent support?

>>...How does PP's audio capabilities compare to Vegas?..

I know this one.

Vegas is hands-down the best audio-wise. It's not even close. May have to do with Vegas originally being an audio app. I don't think anyone will disagree on this one aspect of things.

I have the whole CS3 suite, but never use it, except for Photoshop and Ultra.

"How does PP's audio capabilities compare to Vegas?"

Perhaps not as bad as I'd thought. Ppro has had a mixer panel for a long time. Never used it though.

"Does it require a separate audio app?"

Yes, just like Vegas does depending on what you need to do.

"How many AV tracks will PP tolerate before it gets unstable?"

Never tried to break it. Certain aspects of Ppro mean you might need less tracks. I find having lots of tracks confusing to work with and try to adjust my workflow to avoid it in Vegas. I want to stay focuessed on the story and having to go looking for the track I need too distracting.

"Do they offer competent support?"

You can buy turnkey systems so I guess there's better support available through vendors. Ppro does seem to crash more elegantly than Vegas.

You can download a time limited evaluation version of Ppro just like you can Vegas. Both have feature that mean you need to invest considerable time to fully get up to speed with them, same goes for any advanced application. So far I only use Ppro when Vegas lets me down. Vegas is certainly quicker for me to get things done with. I don't see myself jumping ship, rather I've added an outrigger to my Vegas ship.

Before looking elsewhere I'd try to workout why you're having so much grief with Vegas. Years ago I jumped from Ppro to Vegas, yes Vegas was more stable back then but as it turned out that was because I was running on dodgy hardware.

Bob.

You should download a trial of PPro, export an AAF from Vegas, and import it into PPro. That's the best way to figure this stuff out, along with reading forums and looking at people's questions about PPro.

Our experience with PPro CS2 wasn't too good but we were using it with Axio cards. Memory management was awful and the Axio cards seemed to make it exponentially worse.

There's been a lot of effort since CS2 to improve PPro's memory management, I hear it's much better but not nearly perfect.

Stability is an interesting issue. While I have not been editing in PPro, I was sitting within earshot of my employer as he struggled with it. This man has years of editing experience, meaning years of practices that he wanted to keep using in PPro because they were the absolute right way to work (in the previous NLEs). The result, I think, was that he had a habit of trying to force workflows onto PPro that would quickly crash it.

That tells me a couple of things. The first is that PPro was designed with very limited workflows in mind. They didn't try to break it. They had an idea of how to use it and their QA folks tested things that were supposed to work in ways that ensured they would work.

The second thing it tells me is that stubborn editors will repeatedly build projects that crash, without ever adapting to the software they're using. That says to me that if you are crashing constantly in Vegas you might have the same problems in Premiere. Now, that might not be true if the problem is that you insist on using a codec that is problematic for Vegas but perfectly fine for Premiere, but the tendency probably remains.

Rob Mack

Tim, I see from one of your previous posts you are working with 150 or more HD clips in a project. Are those all in one veg, or are they spread across several nested vegs? My guess is 150 HD clips in a single project file might be a challenge for any 32 bit NLE. I know from my own experience that Vegas 64 bit is NOT yet stable enough for large or complex projects, but the hope is 64 bit architectures will give us some breathing room as they work thorugh the bugs.

Jerry

I'm seriously considering a switch to PP. Vegas has been giving me fits for months now and the support team has offered very little in terms of solutions. Vegas crashes, generating runtime errors or exception errors, often preventing me from loading projects.

Thanks for your responses -- all were helpful.

TeeTime, I've been experiencing these problems in a variety of environments.
I work primarily on a Sun 64-bit system which is pretty beefy. I have 8.0(32bit) and 8.1 (64bit) installed and I seem to experience instability with both. It seems that sometimes the problem will temporarily clear up if I open a crashed project in 8.1, save it and then re-open it in 8.0.
I frequently work at home at night, so I also run Vegas 8.0 on my laptop. Same problems there. On both systems, I've tried storing the media on an external WD Studio II drive as well as on the local drives on each system. That doesn't seem to make a difference.
I'm capturing HD footage directly from my JVC GY-HD200 camera and SD footage from a JVC BR-DV3000 deck, both via firewire. The deck opens the Advanced Capture option (logging clips and batch-capturing) while the camera does not. Normally, I just capture the entire tape on the camera with Scene Detect enabled and then get rid of unwanted or unusable clips as I go through the editing process. That's how I end up with 150+ clips in the gallery. That's not to say that I actually have 150 clips on the timeline. The HD clips are m2t files, while the SD clips are avi.
I did notice both systems were noticeably more stable (only one crash, from which we immediately recovered) at an event last December, where we were producing 2-3 highlight videos per day, using SD footage from the 3000 deck and SD (avi) files recorded to an HDD unit mounted on the JVC GYHD200.
I've done numerous uninstalls and reinstalls to no avail. I've had a thread going with Sony tech support and nothing they've suggested has worked.
Initially, I liked Vegas. It was the closest thing to DPS Velocity, one of the best, most intuitive NLE's I'd ever worked on. These recent problems, however, have put me behind schedule by several months I've lost hours and hours of work, and people are starting to get angry.
If anything raises a flag for you, I'll be listening anxiously. I'm pretty desperate and I'd like to remain gainfully employed.

Scene detecion and HDV always seems problematic to me and that is from thinking about the very way HDV is encoded.
I have remarkably few problems, I never use scene detection. Might be a clue there. If scene detection is vital to you using an intermediate codec could well solve your issues.

Bob.

Tim, I agree that sounds very frustrating. I just finished a project where I had about 300+ SD AVI clips and 800 photos from which to choose from. I used media manager and was pleased with it in this role. One possible thing that could be different between mine and yours - does all of your media get into the project media pool? Using MM can mitigate that - only the timeline clips make it to the media pool.

I've also done a couple of large projects with AVCHD HD - but the largest had about 80 clips. Again, I used MM for that one as well.

One other possibility I can think of if you are into experimenting. Perhaps try doing a batch transcode of all your media before starting the project. This could perhaps tell you that it is something with the media itself. Admittedly, I'm kinda grasping for straws here.

Good luck.

Jerry

Bob,

I suppose I could try re-capturing w/ Scene Detect toggled off. I cut my teeth on linear editing, so I got used to shuttling through tapes and being able to pick my shots rather quickly. With digital, it's a bit harder to see, and with Sony's capture, there's almost a 5-second lag from play to display, so capturing on the fly isn't quite so easy. Do you know if there's any way to get the Advanced Cap option with the camera?
Also, what intermediate codec would you suggest, and how do I implement that?

Jerry,
I saw the MM option, but I don't have it installed and it and never took time to read what it was for. I was just capturing directly to my project folder (I like to keep all my media, etc. in a folder specifically for that one project). What exactly would MM do?

Thanks guys.

Tim, I also put all my media in a project-specific folder, but on a separate drive from my real project folder. I then create a MM library that contains everything in the media folder. MM lets you quickly browse and tag all your media working from thumbnails/previews and a pretty good tagging system.

You can apply from zero to many tags to each piece of media. For example, on a recent project of a 5k race I had tags like: b-roll, susan, george, interview, race, etc. After I have tagged everything I start building my timeline. Suppose I now want my shots of the race, I query on the race tag. Or, I want to insert that interview with susan, I query for tags "interview and susan". It just gives me a way to organize my media when I have way more than I will be using.

I also have a MM library for all my stock stuff - media and vegs that can be reused across projects.

Jerry

"Also, what intermediate codec would you suggest, and how do I implement that?"

The Cineform codecs seem pretty rock solid with Vegas apart from some people having some installation problems. Certainly those who say they've never had issues seem to be those using them.


As for workflow, I just capture entire tapes and then slice and dice from that.
Log and Capture should work just fine with DV in all it's variations. It's the long GOP formats where you stike issues. HDV is not the first, there's also the old IMX that old hands tell me was a beach to edit when it first came out. The problem is that the frame that you want the clip to start from is very likely to need data from a preceeding frame to be able to be decoded. If that data is not in the file a problem can arise, it would seem to get worse if there's a minor glitch on the tape that requires error correction as again all the data needed may not be on the file created for the clip. I'm no mpeg-2 guru of course but certainly the issues people keep having make sense from my understanding of how things work.

By capturing the whole tape of course Vegas can find all the data it needs for any portion of the tape. I suspects that's one reason I don't suffer the issues others do.

Bob.