Great answer, Kim!

> "Suggest you get in touch with JR for the particulars."

I resemble that remark! :-D

I have a Windows 7 64-bit virtual machine with Vegas Pro 12.0 on it that I run in VMware Fusion 5.0. You have two options. You can create a virtual machine with Fusion and install Windows and Vegas Pro on it, or you can use Bootcamp to create a Windows partition and then run that partition in Fusion when you don't feel like rebooting to run Vegas Pro. It all runs quite smoothly and it even works in "unity" mode which hides the Windows desktop and just shows Vegas Pro. This is what Vegas Pro 10.0 looked like on my MacBook Pro desktop with unity mode enabled:



VMware just came out with a new version of Fusion 6.0 that supports OpenGL. I haven't gotten it yet but I do plan on upgrading to see if I can then run Boris Continuum Complete under VMware.

~jr

I was recently faced with the dilemma of Vegas being unable to handle a large project with many EX1 files. So I bit the bullet and upgraded to CS6. Overall the experience has been good and Premiere CS6 has been able to handle effortlessly the number of files that Vegas was continually crashing with.

It took me a while to get over the feeling of Premiere being clunky and for many things it still does feel that way. However I also see the wisdom in the way Adobe does certain things and keep discovering nice features. Other things like the Titler are far superior than the half baked multiple Titler releases in Vegas. Render quality, motion and slo-mo is also excellent and plugin support is better than Vegas. The included filters are nice and it interfaces with other Adobe programs very well (After Effects, Photoshop, Audition).

I'm also maturing as an editor and getting away from the crossfade crutch so Adobe's way of doing things is not so difficult for me now. But I still can't understand why no one copied Vegas's brilliant auto crossfades and Vegas' audio is also easier to work with.

That said I don't plan on moving to the CC model because I feel like it's creative extortion. CS6 and Vegas should serve me well for a while and I'm hoping that Sony will finally fix some of their stability issues and become a real player again.

Every several months or so I will decide to attempt a project in Premiere since I'm paying for the Adobe CC apps and use most of the rest of them on a regular basis. I was die-hard Premiere editor before I came Vegas, so I'm certainly not unfamiliar with the program. I'll get a little way into a project and just throw my hands up in disgust, it is so darned slow to edit in Premiere because of the way the interface is designed! Click on most any parameter to change it and the timeline stops dead in its tracks, arggggh! Want to see the scopes and the preview window at the same time? Nope, not gonna happen. Want to zoom in on the audio waveform for a little surgery or basically anything audio related? Good luck with that. Want to mix different resolutions and frame rates? Not easily. Change the project's properties after the fact? Yeah, right. If I'm getting paid by the hour and I don't have a deadline then it makes all kinds of sense to use Premiere, otherwise, I'm sticking with Vegas.

John,

As far as seeing scopes and preview monitor at the same time it works fine when I preview output to my secondary monitor. Very similar to Vegas.

True, but I do a lot of editing on my Dell M4700 laptop and a secondary monitor is not always an option. Not a problem with Vegas. Regardless, it still doesn't solve my other issues with Premiere, the ease of editing in Vegas has me spoiled.

Vegas Mouse Wheel timeline zooming......nuff said

Paul B

Oh yes I do miss the fluidity of the mouse zoom in Vegas. Premiere does mouse wheel zoom in with the alt key pressed but not as good as in Vegas. It's side to side with no modifier pressed.

Wow. Good stuff here guys. Thank you so very much. I was out of service for a while and couldn't stay up to date.

So it's good to know Premiere is an option. I've had it forever but never used it. I am too adicted to Vegas. It's gonna be a hard transition.. I hope don't have to make and can stick with Windows. But If I do.. I will be certainly looking into Fusion.

Again, super good info. Thanks so very much.

J

> I was recently faced with the dilemma of Vegas being unable to handle a large project with many EX1 files. So I bit the bullet and upgraded to CS6. Overall the experience has been good and Premiere CS6 has been able to handle effortlessly the number of files that Vegas was continually crashing with.

How many long GOP files will Vegas handle these days? I have been doing lots of shorter projects lately so this hasn't bothered me, but when I was working on a documentary with lots of HDV footage, this drove me bonkers! How many EX1 files did it take to start giving Vegas problems? Does anyone know if there is a way around this? What I used to do was to smart-render the clips into larger chunks so that I would have a lower clip count as large numbers of individual clips was the problem, not the play time of the footage.

> "So it's good to know Premiere is an option. I've had it forever but never used it. I am too adicted to Vegas. It's gonna be a hard transition."

I would seriously look at FCP X if you are on a Mac and want a more "Vegas" like experience. FCP X is a lot like Vegas. In fact, you will be saying "oh, no they stole that from Vegas" a LOT as you learn it! I picked up FCP X very quickly. The magnetic timeline is brilliant. I bought a training course from Ripple Training and it made it very easy to learn. I feel that FCP X is a lot more natural for a Vegas Pro editor to learn than Premiere will be. I can switch between Vegas Pro and FCP X quite easily depending on what system I'm editing on.

And for those of you who might be thinking that I've "switched". The answer is no way! I still love Vegas Pro the best. I had to collaborate on a project with another FCP X editor and I wasn't even going to try and bridge between the two worlds. It was a lot easier to just jump on the same platform than fight it and it as fun to learn a new way of doing things. I bought Apple Motion too and I like it a lot more than After Effects. I'm done with Adobe and their Creative Rental business. lol (didn't sign up and don't plan to)

BTW, most of you know I'm also a software developer. In the software engineering world, if you can only program in one language you're basically unemployable. It is unthinkable to say I only program in Java, or C++, or Ruby. I find it quite silly that video editors think that you should only use one NLE. Regardless of what industry you are in, you need to be well versed in all of the tools if you want to stay employed. It's OK to have favorites, but it's not OK to be ignorant. Just my words of wisdom for the day. ;-)

~jr

[i]It's OK to have favorites, but it's not OK to be ignorant.[/]

very, very well put indeed!!!

I was recently faced with the dilemma of Vegas being unable to handle a large project with many EX1 files
How many EX1 files did it take to start giving Vegas problems? Does anyone know if there is a way around this?

I never really add any problems using many EX1 files with Vegas. I have several times used 10 to 23 hours of footage on the timeline (I never use the trimmer and trim on the timeline) and building 8 half-hour episodes on the same timeline. I did have Vegas Choke near the end of a project, adding fx and transitions..... but I only had 6GB of Ram on a Quad Core 6600. So I did reach it's limit and that was on a 32 bit system. Lately I had to pull off some footage from that editing session and it opens fine under Vegas 12, even faster than Vegas 9 on which the project was created.

Here is a screen grab with more than 10 hours of EX1 footage (+ additional GoPro footage) with my trimming session on the timeline, 8 half-hour episodes with fx, transitions, animated lower third built in this Vegas session and not pre-rendered. BTW, I never pre-render or use proxies. The .veg filesize is 54mb on an i7 2600 with 16GB Ram and editing was fluid.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/24553216/Vegas%20timeline.JPG

I would seriously look at FCP X if you are on a Mac and want a more "Vegas" like experience
The magnetic timeline is brilliant.

This is what I did and like FCPX very much. You do need to get used to it and think differently than what you are used to but indeed the magnetic timeline is brilliant. I like the skimming feature and many free or low priced plugins available. Only I haven't used FCPX on any commercial projects, Vegas is still my preferred editor, but felt I needed to learn another editing software just like JR pointed out. I never liked Premiere, it did get better under CS6 but still prefer FCPX over Premiere and don't want to rent my software. Also Motion 5 at $50 is a no brainer.

Rob

"How many EX1 files did it take to start giving Vegas problems?"

My project had 349 MXF files from an EX1r ranging from a few seconds in length to interviews up to 20 minutes. Just loading them into Vegas 12 made it choke but trying to review clips in the trimmer and create markers was impossible without constant crashing. This was with and without acceleration on on my GTX 570.

Ended up using Adobe prelude to log clips with markers which is a great program that solves the problem of not having a trimmer like in Vegas. Then I edited the entire project in Premiere. I had very few crashes and Premiere for the most part handled it like a champ. Output quality was superb as well and being able to use plugins like Colorista was a treat.

Mark, you are converting the original EX1 file (.MP4) to mxf.

When I first got my EX1 upon release, you needed to convert your files to .mxf in order to import them in Vegas. If I had to many shots, Vegas didn't handle them very well and also had several issues with .mxf converted files.

Then Vegas got an upgrade, I forget which version, but you could use the EX1 original files straight on the timeline. Also I have never used Vegas device explorer and would just search my BPAV folder and copy it's files into a folder and from that folder slide them to the timeline. I don't know if your problem was related to using .mxf converted files.

Yes I did convert the files to MXF using the XDcam content browser. Part of the reason for this workflow was that I had some clips that spanned two cards and needed them to connect which require the XD cam explorer.

Perhaps that is the problem but Premiere still handles the MXF with no issues and Vegas cannot. Seems like a Sony editor should be able to handle clips exported from a Sony camera using a Sony conversion program. But hey.. maybe I'm expecting too much :).

I had one question for those that have used both Vegas and Premiere, is there any equivalent on Premiere to the scripting available on Vegas? I make heavy use of scripts to automate things I always do and its a great time saver, I'm curious if Premiere has something similar available. For example I have a script that will add fade in/out on all video and audio tracks, add a watermark, add a legal notice, add a color correcter with a preset, etc, all automatically with one click.

> "I had one question for those that have used both Vegas and Premiere, is there any equivalent on Premiere to the scripting available on Vegas?"

No there isn't and IMHO this is one of the most powerful features of Vegas Pro that no other NLE has. Unfortunately, it's also one of Vegas' best kept secrets because it never comes up in comparisons between NLE's.

When we (VASST) were demoing the first version of Production Assistant at NAB 2009, broadcasters who had never heard of Vegas Pro were willing to purchase a copy just to use Production Assistant. It was as if Vegas was the "dongle" you had to buy to use the tool so they could automate their workflows. Here is what Jan Ozer said in his blog post about it (Something new under the sun – Vegas Pro Production Assistant):

"...and if your current job description includes lots of repetitive work, it could be enough to think about picking up Vegas, even if just to automate these recurring tasks."

Never underestimate the power of automation scripts because other NLE's don't have this so they don't know what they're missing but we Vegas editors do.

~jr