Goodbye Premiere, Hello Vegas (I think)

S

sinapps

Well-known member
I have a workstation that's a few years old, but is still well configured for 99.9% of my tasks. I'm running an intel Quad Core 2.6mhz with 8GB ram, SLI dual video cards w/640mb each and Raid drives. Win7 64 bit. While some tasks could be faster, I can't justify a major upgrade at this time.

In CS4, AVCHD is completely unusable. It plays find in Windows media player, but when it gets to premiere it chokes.

CS5 does not seem to be a viable option financially. $300 for upgrade + at least $300 for new video card + new MB, memory and processor since my MB does not support PCIe 2.0 which is required for hardware accelerated CS5 video.

Downloaded the trial for Vegas and was great! RT playback of AVCHD stream + 1 effect.

I wanted to try out CS5, but Adobe does not include AVCHD support in the trial version, so I have no way to see if I get any performance improvements on my existing system.

So my options at this point are $525 for Vegas or $2500 (software + new hardware) for Premiere upgrade.

Any other options in a reasonable price range?
 
Edius 6? I've been burned so many times by Vegas, I am really not even tempted to spend the $139 to upgrade this time.

Best of luck with your choice.
 
Agreed with Perrone. I haven't upgraded Vegas beyond version 8. EDIUS 6 looks fantastic, and Premiere CS5 is pretty darn good. At one point I was working among four NLEs, being Premiere CS4, Vegas 8, EDIUS 4.5, and SpeedEdit. Each did things the others didn't. On the new laptop the only one I've installed so far is Premiere CS5; it does everything. But it's still Premiere, and that's clunky as hell compared to Vegas, but Vegas doesn't support what I need it to support.

But I'm chompin' at the bit for EDIUS 6 too.
 
What type of problems have you guys had with Vegas? I tried it a few years ago and went the Adobe route due to stability issues. With that said, I was very impressed with the latest version.

A huge deciding factor for me is getting software that will let me edit AVCHD on my current hardware. That takes CS5 out of the running.
 
How long of a list do you want?

Stability has been a huge one.
Lack of professional features
Lack of a plug-in structure and poor plug-in support
Lack of captioning ability
Poor scaling forcing use of third party tools
Poor professional codec support
Lack of support for GPU.
Poor multi-camera features
Poor timeline performance
Poor preview performance
Ineffective media management
Poor compatibility with industry standard software (FCP, Avid, ProTools, etc.)

The new version allows you to put AVCHD on the timeline. Great. This is not something I'd do except in an emergency, so it has no bearing on my use. The new version does levearge the GPU for encoding in Sony's AVC encoder. Only. And the MainConcept codec is generally regarded as superior. So again, little use to me.
 
What Vegas has going for it is a slick interface that is leagues beyond Premiere's, which lets you just work so much faster. And its integrated audio tools are fantastic.

Premiere (and Apple's NLE) go the "suite" route, where you have all these different applications for every possible task. I installed CS5 "Production Premium" on my system, and when I go to start->programs->CS5, there are literally 17 different applications to choose from.

With Vegas, it's two. The NLE, which does everything -- effects, keying, sound editing, output, everything. And then there's DVD Architect. So you pretty much have a complete suite, in two apps. That's its appeal (to me, at least). You learn one program, you do everything in that one program, and the interface is actually intuitive and (dare I say it) fun.

But, it's gone straight downhill since Sony bought it. Version 4 was the last "great" version. Ever since then it's become more proprietary, and more unstable. And now, with AVC being all the rage, it's falling behind in performance terms because it simply cannot compete against graphics-card-enhanced products like CS5.

So, yeah... Vegas. Great while it lasted. And hello CS5 and EDIUS 6.
 
Barry_Green said:
And now, with AVC being all the rage, it's falling behind in performance terms because it simply cannot compete against graphics-card-enhanced products like CS5.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your thoughts. This is the sum of my problem. I'm not ready to custom build a new machine to take advantage of all the new goodness in CS5. I'm leaning towards Vegas right now because on my existing machine it significantly outperforms CS4.

How's Edius 6 performance on older hardware?
 
Vegas is totally fine for pure editing and hasn't been more unstable than CS3-5 on my computer. I can edit superfast and intuitive with it and prefer it over other NLE if I work alone on a project. It does lack other things though as mentioned above.

I wish I could tell you to not buy anything and instead get Lightworks for free, but they still haven't released the open source version and unfortunately don't give a date when to expect it.
 
Barry_Green said:
What Vegas has going for it is a slick interface that is leagues beyond Premiere's, which lets you just work so much faster. And its integrated audio tools are fantastic.
Click to expand...

I've always found Premiere CS5 to be fast if you use keyboard shortcuts... its bin system needs an overhaul big-time though. I'd kill for a Google-like search functionality.
 
PerroneFord said:
I've been burned so many times by Vegas, I am really not even tempted to spend the $139 to upgrade this time.
Click to expand...

Same here.
I really like Vegas and know it pretty well but I'm in the process of switching to Premiere CS5. Vegas is just too unreliable and v10 just doesn't have new features I'm looking for (mainly Cuda integration).

FYI I have a system worse than yours - 920 i7, 12gb ram, Win 7, Gt8800 - and so far my gh1 MOV files certainly are working better with CS5 than with Vegas. I havent tried AVHCD yet.
 
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