Adobe almost cost me my job, Vegas needs to get into the mainstreem

scharky

scharky

Veteran
So recently I started working for a production company as a cinemetographer. I work with a small group that consists of a director, me (cinemetographer) a gaffer and an editor.
Long story short, we have been doing lots of shoots, and have been getting lots of business. Our editor decides to take on a larger job that we shot, which really should not have been that big a deal. Anyways, he starts editing with Premiere pro 1.5, and is doing massive 3D work and compositing in After effects pro 6.5. I come over to his place to do the color correcting, first scolding him for using Premiere, as I can't figure my way around the thing. We come to the conclusiong to have me color correct the footage, rendered uncompress from teh Ppro timeline. Low and behold, highlights are strobbing, and things are looking like ****. I am like, oh yeah, I remember reading about this. We find out that the only solution is to upgrade to Ppro 2.0 ($200) :(. now we have Ppro 2.0, and after effects 6.5 when we come to find out, these two don't play nice together when importing projects :(. We have to upgrade to After effects 7:kali::badputer:

Finally we get everything ready to render, now the day before the project is due. We render the timeline from After effects with all the massive amounts of compositing, and WTF, all the dialog is out of sync. You have to be kidding me :(.

Finally, after about 20 hrs of pure aggrivation, including the after effects file becoming corrupted and refusing to open hence forth, I along with the other editor recompile everything from rendered fragments, and new 3D compostions done completely in Vegas, in get this 1 DAY. Get it rendered out and out to the clients with a bit of an extension given us :(.

So this Edit not only cost us about $400 in worthless upgrades with buggy as hell and unreliable software, but almost lost us a very important client, which would more than likely mean that we would be dropped from the production company.

Long story short, yes I know, again. Forget the industry standard, Keep it simple stupid, people need to know the reliability and powerfull properties of vegas, so that I may no longer have to go through this living hell :).

Just a vent, please feel free to dispute this all you want, I'm just saying what happend, and what saved our asses. Adobe needs to get off it's high horse and start making software that is reliable, and does not require its customers to pay for bug fixes.
 
I've had it with Premiere Pro and its instability. I've been using Premiere for years, and its never been able to operate for very long without severly crashing my entire system. I now have Premiere running on an isolated machine with nothing on it except Premiere--not very practical. The last time Premiere Pro 1.5 crashed, it completely corrupted Windows XP, requiring a total fdisk of my entire drive (Windows XP wouldn't reinstall).

I'm switching to Sony Vegas.
 
I agree, i keep hearing how alot of places are going to FCP because its so much cheaper than avid. I learned FCP after Vegas and i'd still choose to do a project on vegas in a heartbeat over anything else.
 
scharky said:
Our editor decides to take on a larger job that we shot, which really should not have been that big a deal. Anyways, he starts editing with Premiere pro 1.5
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Has your editor worked again with PP1.5? He would know that Premiere is sh*t as you say. However I'm not with you for AE. Ae is one ove the most reliable software that hardly crashes, if nto the only one for me.

But Premiere...stay away, I've worked with Premiere 6.0 on a Matrox DigiSuite for 3 years and I can assure you it is a nightmare :furious3: . I will never work with Premiere or the Matrox company, they are both buggy as hell. So it is obvious that Premiere will never stop to crash or hang in each newer version.

But before blaming the company you should always look into the specs and others opinions.
 
Well, that's the thing, he has worked with premiere for years, and I guess he just felt the bugs were part of Premiere life. And while you may say that after effets is reliable, let me just say that our experience after this weekend has us questioning that, especially when Adobe forces us to upgrade for it to work, not cool. And here is the thing, everthing that was done in AE, was re created in Vegas and now exists in a much more stable environment. Now I'm not saying that we wont be using AE again, there are still many things that it can do that simply cannot be done in any other program, but seriously, having a project file become suddenly currupt and refusing to work alltogther? Anyone ever have that problem with vegas?

Adobe is trying to market themselves as a pro company, obviously with their new line of marketing, but they really are just digging a deeper hole for themselves. Both Premiere and Aftereffects are becoming so bloated, no wonder they aren't stable. DId you know that each of those programs is about 1GB to download off their server? WTF? Premiere would take almost 5-7min just to open a project, the same project that Vegas would open in about 15sec.

I've bashed adobe in the past, and I'll continue doing so until they get their heads out of their asses and realize that people don't want to pay for buggy software that has it's bug fixes as paid updates and is still buggy after that.

Luckily, we have heard back from the producers and they are very happy with the work, so our relationship is saved, but adobe will not be a part of our future endevors.

I personally have been working with vegas for about 2 years, and never once missed a deadline because of bad renders, incompatable file formats, missing plugins, corrupted project files, pulldown being removed incorrectly, etc.

Sony needs to start marketing Vegas as the professional software that it is. Mainly, sony needs to take a step back from it, remove their "Name" branding that screams consumer market, even rename vegas, something to make people turn heads and open their eyes to just how good a program this is.

I will now step down off my soap box, and continue with my normal day to day routine :)
 
Ive worked with Premiere for years, and while I still prefer Vegas (out of the two, I actually bought Vegas), but I have never had the types of problems you had. Premiere pro 1.5 has been a breeze, interprets 24p without even having to specify it as such, exports 24p, 30p and 60i perfectly. I have no idea why you were getting such strange effects. Actually, the only problem I have ever had with any of them was with Vegas exporting 24p from a 60i timeline shot with the DVXa, creating artifacts that look like interlaced abberations, but aren't. This usually only happened at the start or end of a file, and is only for a frame, but sometimes (and very infrequently) happens when simply scrubbing through the timeline. Very strange. Premiere has always been fine for what it is, but I never cared for its audio un-friendliness, and started using Vegas primarily for that reason.

But, when I taught video production, we had the Adobe Video suite, and often did the kinds of work you describe, never with a problem. And our workflow involved heavy use of After effects, Audition, and Encore, as well as Premiere. We never ran tinto bugs, crashes, or anything of that nature, and I have yet to have a problem with any verison of after effects being buggy or giving me fits, starting from 4 up to 6.5. Never any kind of issue at all.

I prefer vegas, for it's price to capability ratio, nothing else is even in the same bag. Nothing. Especially if you throw in 5.1 mixing.

Interesting you were getting so many problems. I have run them all, and even many times on the same project (a friend edits in Premiere, so I had to convert to vegas for my part) and never had one stich of a problem.

I know plenty of people who use Premiere exclusively, and have produced awesome work. They never had the problems you described.

At least you got to upgrade to AE 7, and for that, I envy you.

Glad to hear it worked out though.
 
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the 24P export from premiere 1.5 is a well documented problem, with flickering highlights. And guess what the adobe website says to do to fix the problem, UPGRADE TO PPRO 2.0 :( That's BS.
The other problem we had was becasue we don't have the Production sweet, therefore linkage between the two programs is very limited, meaning we can't bring the project files back into Premiere to render them, we had to do a huge render from AE, and that is just not setup for the type of render we had to do, for pete sake you can't even scrub the audio :(.

Basically I agree with what you wer saying, some poeple will have great success with Premiere, but for what we were doing, it was buggy and Adobe has some of the worst support out there, no one can deny this. Paying to fix software bugs is not my idea of customer support.
 
Scharky I agree I have pre pro and I get the stupid flickering after rendering a project. I probably will go to vegas as well, I used it before for about 1yr. To fix the flickering across the entire timeline I just save as and rename the project and it gets rid of the flickering. Bascially when you re-save it, it gets rid of unwanted bugs and plug-ins. I can't say it works everytime but so far so good.

I like pre pro cause I'm use to it, but when it comes to working with a client I'll work overtime and try to get the project done like a few days before it's do.

Especially big projects like 30 to 60 mins rendering is the worst.

But I have some good quality projects . Also there was a website where adobe has a free download of a program that would get rid of the bugs without upgrading. But as I stated before when you save as another project it's tricking the new project and dropping the unwanted bugs,plug-ins.

Try it if you have some down time.
 
scharky said:
the 24P export from premiere 1.5 is a well documented problem, with flickering highlights. And guess what the adobe website says to do to fix the problem, UPGRADE TO PPRO 2.0 :( That's BS.
The other problem we had was becasue we don't have the Production sweet, therefore linkage between the two programs is very limited, meaning we can't bring the project files back into Premiere to render them, we had to do a huge render from AE, and that is just not setup for the type of render we had to do, for pete sake you can't even scrub the audio :(.

Basically I agree with what you wer saying, some poeple will have great success with Premiere, but for what we were doing, it was buggy and Adobe has some of the worst support out there, no one can deny this. Paying to fix software bugs is not my idea of customer support.
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I don't know what I was doing to get clean results, maybe I was thinking about the times with 60i only. hmmm . . .

As far as paying to fix software, that's bullsh*t, and one of the reasons so many people have jumped not only from Premere, but from software like Lightwave as well.

I haven't tried opening up projects in Premiere to render, and hell, I didn't know you could do that. I know in Cimema 4D, you can output as an AE file, and have everything work right, but I didn't know you could use Premiere (to any extent) to open AE prjects. I was thinking about upgrading to the newest video suite primarily for Photoshop CS2, Encore, and After Effects only. I may have to rethink that.

Thatnks for the heads up though.
 
... from the other side:

I started working on Quantel Paintbox and eQ in december and what a surprise it has more bugs than I ever think of. Mostly in menu and sometimes it deliver bad frame during work in 3D space. I get like 10 Fatal erros during a day. Sometimes it makes more mysterious things like inserting one field from another project from another machine in your composition or entangle audio from other project.... :furious3:
But when everything work well it delivers nice strong 4:4:4 quality output. :)

I really dont understand widespread popularity of Premiere and AE all over that years?? Especialy for your business??? Why you rather dont use system based on strong and proven original video codecs like Avid or Canopus, (and for composing Combustion) all from companies which produce real pro solutions? Maybe cause their GUI doestn look so familiar to most....

But what is most critical is non conflict hardware configuration with proper driver and proper sotware instalation without ANY, yes ANY other junk software! It is worth of it.

Then you can sleep well. (mostly)

IF YOU WANT TO BE A PRO, STOP BELIEVING AND START TO PROVING (like with that hype around RED thing)
otherwise pay
 
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hawaj said:
I really dont understand widespread popularity of Premiere and AE all over that years?? Especialy for your business??? Why you rather dont use system based on strong and proven original video codecs like Avid or Canopus, (and for composing Combustion) all from companies which produce real pro solutions? Maybe cause their GUI doestn look so familiar to most....

IF YOU WANT TO BE A PRO, STOP BELIEVING AND START TO PROVING (like with that hype around RED thing)
otherwise pay
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No offense intended, but that's crap. Adobe markets itself as a professional video solution. If it's going to say it is at that level it better perform like it. Vegas delivers rock solid stability and professional results at an even LOWER cost than Adobe. Price is not everything. And could the popularity of Adobe products have anything to do with Photoshop? Hmmm.....maybe! Photoshop is the industry standard when it comes to image manipulation and everyone thinks that the idea spills over to all of their products. I think AE is a great program and is very useful. Premiere is decent too, but as others have mentioned in this post they really need to fix the bugs and offer better support. While you can do good things with it, the problems outweigh the benefits.
 
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