so...is it easy to switch from Vegas to Premier?

J

joker454

Well-known member
I've been a Vegas user for ages, but the limited gpu support in the Vegas 10 promo info has made me want to switch to premier. Is is relatively easy for a long time Vegas user to adapt to Premier? I don't actually use many features while I edit really. I basically drag clips to the timeline, snip out the crap, add some fades and a watermark, and render, all in hd. Should be fairly easy to make the transition to Premiere correct? Also, is there any tool to convert Vegas projects to Premier? That way I would not have to keep Vegas installed, and dealing with just one editing software would be much easier. Finally...what's the cheapest place to buy Premier CS5? I think the cheapest I've seen is around $610 so far. Ill probably go buy an Nvidia cuda card and then try the Premiere trial, but I figured I'd ask here before taking the plunge. Oh one more thing that I just remembered, how many installs does Premier allow? I believe Vegas allows for 3 installs which is great because I can keep one install on my work machine and another on my laptop. Does Premier allow the same flexibility?
 
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Your reason for switching is the GPU support? Is that it?
Seems for what you're doing, your current version of Vegas is working fine...yes?
If it ann't broke, don't fix it.

I was just the opposite, went from Premier Pro 1.5 & FCP to Vegas and haven't looked back yet.
I can edit in Vegas (again, for me and my editing style) 10x faster then FCP or Premier.
Maybe it's because I came from an audio background as did Vegas.
 
Yeah, gpu support is basically the only reason I want to switch. I like Vegas but I'm doing more and more editing lately, and it would be nice to be able to edit footage at full speed. Right now my core i7 can't playback my video files at full speed in Vegas so they stutter and/or drop in quality in the preview windows as I edit. I've heard mixed things about Premiere's ease of use hence why I figured I'd ask here first, as I find Vegas to be easy to use but I have no experience with Premiere.
 
Hummm... I don't know what you're shooting on, but I have a i7 box too and I edit multiple AVCHD tracks natively with EFX, etc... no problem.

I've also converted the footage in neoscene and edited with the AVI's...again, no problem.

What version of Vegas are you using? Your computer specs?
 
I have found the transition from Vegas to Premiere Pro painful. I just love the way Vegas' interface works. It's so fast and intuitive and everything you want to do, is just a click away.

I rue the day it got Sonyfied.

I'm getting more used to Premiere, and it's solid and robust and well rounded, but ... the Vegas way of doing things was great.
 
Yeah I'm about to be in the same boat. I tried Premiere and then Vegas and picked Vegas up so much faster... it's very intuitive.

I'm going to be making the switch myself... I got some CBT to help me along. I figure it's like Photoshop... I used to use Paint for most things because Photoshop wasn't intuitive... but once I sat down with some training things got a lot easier.
 
ZazaCast said:
Hummm... I don't know what you're shooting on, but I have a i7 box too and I edit multiple AVCHD tracks natively with EFX, etc... no problem.

I've also converted the footage in neoscene and edited with the AVI's...again, no problem.

What version of Vegas are you using? Your computer specs?
Click to expand...

I use Vegas Pro 9.0e 64bit on Windows 7 64bit, 6gb of ram, 2.6ghz core i7 that overclocks itself to 2.8ghz when there is load. Video footage is untouched avchd at 15mbps (I don't transcode). With that setup I can't play the video at full quality without stutters in Vegas alas, even if it's just a single video. Hmm, I wonder what is so different about our setups that you can play multiple avchd tracks at full speed and I can't even play one. If I drop the quality of the preview down very low then I can play back a single track, but that's not a very good solution for me.



noworries said:
Yeah I'm about to be in the same boat. I tried Premiere and then Vegas and picked Vegas up so much faster... it's very intuitive.

I'm going to be making the switch myself... I got some CBT to help me along. I figure it's like Photoshop... I used to use Paint for most things because Photoshop wasn't intuitive... but once I sat down with some training things got a lot easier.
Click to expand...

Interesting, I've also avoided Photoshop because it seemed complicated, and I just use Paint Shop Pro all these years :) But my needs of paint programs are very little so it's worked out ok.

Anyways I just downloaded the Premiere trial, I'll see how that goes. To switch to Premiere will cost me around $900 ($600 for the app, $300 for the gpu), so I guess an alternate idea could be to stick with Vegas and just spend that $900 building a dual core i7 machine.

Oh yeah, does anyone know how many installs the Premiere license allows? Vegas allows 3, so I have it on my office pc and my laptop. Is Premier the same?
 
I've always been a pc guy, i've just got a new imac after a big decision time, and a CS5 production premium package. I always used premiere but to be honest i've never seen premiere this much solid and stable, even without the GPU accelarator card(can't imagine with card).Video exports are look to me 10 times more quality then pc, 10 times faster render times. Now i'm trying to find out the reason of all this miracle. Is it because of imac, premiere, or 64bit system, or the combination of all:)
 
Lumiere said:
Video exports are look to me 10 times more quality then pc, 10 times faster render times.
Click to expand...

What operating system you're running doesn't make any difference with render quality. You're either using different settings or are mistaken with a quality increase - the program is exactly the same regardless of your operating system, the only difference is the system specs you're running and that would only effect the render times, not quality. And if your speeds have really increased 10 times then it's because you're using a higher spec imac than the PC you were using.
 
Todd_Kopriva said:
Here are the resources that we provide to make learning and using Premiere Pro as easy as possible.

If you have any questions, let us know.
Click to expand...

Thanks, much appreciated. I just bought an NVidia GTX 470 on the weekend to make sure I get the full Premiere experience, so I'm looking forward to trying it this week.

Three questions for you:

1) How many installs are allowed per Premiere license? With Vegas Pro I get 3, which helps as I can install it on both my office pc and my windows work laptop.

2) Is there any tool to import/convert Vegas projects into Premiere?

3) Are PC and Mac versions considered separate purchases, or can I buy one license and use Premiere on both of my work laptops (one is Windows 7, the other a Mac)?
 
Perhaps other process' are running on your pc? For instance, if indexing is on and running, it will seriously affect things. (Google to see how to disable it).

Same goes for some antivirus programs.

Also, maybe run "crystal mark" to see how fast your drive access is...

Good Luck!

SteveG


joker454 said:
Hmm, I wonder what is so different about our setups that you can play multiple avchd tracks at full speed and I can't even play one. If I drop the quality of the preview down very low then I can play back a single track, but that's not a very good solution for me. ...
Click to expand...
 
sgogo said:
Perhaps other process' are running on your pc? For instance, if indexing is on and running, it will seriously affect things. (Google to see how to disable it).

Same goes for some antivirus programs.

Also, maybe run "crystal mark" to see how fast your drive access is...

Good Luck!

SteveG
Click to expand...


I have a cpu meter running and all the cores are idling until I play back footage in Vegas, then they max out. So I'm pretty sure it's cpu related. Also I just installed the Premiere CS5 trial, and I can overlay three hd videos and play them all back at full resolution and full speed with little cpu use so it's definitely not a disk limitation. Man, gpu playback support is real nice I must say!

A new question, what is the Premiere equivalent of Vegas Pro's 'regions'? Basically I'll make a bunch of clips on one project file in Vegas Pro, and mark each clip as a region. Then I name reach region to what I want to final filename to be. Finally I batch render all the regions in all the video formats I want, and Vegas will spit out all the versions of all the videos all properly named in a directory. I can't figure out how do that in Premiere though! Anyone know how? Maybe I'll make a new post for that question.
 
Edited my first video in Premiere today. I haven't gotten everything figured out yet--but so far my experience is far superior than vegas. Much easier/faster/powerful in about all aspects.

Not looking to get in a war over it... but I won't be looking back at vegas now.
 
I'm trying to transition one baby step at a time, though pretty unsuccessfully. Simple things like quick fades keep me returning to the speed and efficency with vegas, but the extra features make me want to keep going.
 
KnoxHotch said:
Simple things like quick fades keep me returning to the speed and efficency with vegas
Click to expand...
- Use Ctrl+D for video
- Use Shift+Ctrl+D for audio

Or, remap it to any other keyboard combination that is better for you by going to Edit > Keyboard Customization.

/Roger
 
Well I had actually tried the Premiere Trial for a few days and decided to buy it as the trial has no audio so I couldn't get a true feel for the app. Overall I like Premiere but I will be returning it alas. It has a fatal flaw for me, one that was not apparent in the trial because of it's lack of audio support. Unfortunately Premiere insists on making intermediary audio files anytime I import any footage. The problem with this is that these files are huge! For example, a shoot I did on the weekend had 14.1gb of video footage, and Premiere created an additional 7.53gb of "conforming audio" files. Vegas on the other hand creates no such files and just works naively with my video files. Unfortunately this is a a deal breaker for me. It probably won't matter to most people, but for me I'm dealing with terabytes of video files, so to suddenly increase my storage needs by 50% (local hdd, hdd backups, raid backups, optical backups, etc) is simply not feasible. Oh well, I guess I'll just stick Vegas for now. I'll definitely miss the gpu assisted timeline though :)
 
Why would you backup intermediary files of any kind?

Storage is cheap. Since you can get 2TB drives for $120, that's $60/TB. Figure if you have 1TB of video, you're going to burn $60 + 0.5TB ($30) in intermediary files. At $0.06/GB you're 7.5gb of extra files costs about 50 cents.

I know you have more expensive storage where you're editing video, just considering archiving cost.

Just something to consider. For me my time would be worth more than the storage expense, but I'm just an amateur. I am a professional IT guy though.
 
noworries said:
Why would you backup intermediary files of any kind?

Storage is cheap. Since you can get 2TB drives for $120, that's $60/TB. Figure if you have 1TB of video, you're going to burn $60 + 0.5TB ($30) in intermediary files. At $0.06/GB you're 7.5gb of extra files costs about 50 cents.

I know you have more expensive storage where you're editing video, just considering archiving cost.

Just something to consider. For me my time would be worth more than the storage expense, but I'm just an amateur. I am a professional IT guy though.
Click to expand...

Well I frequently revisit past projects for a variety of reasons so they always need to be ready to go with whatever media they need. The confirming process takes too long to wait for so I have to keep the conformed audio files around permanently. I also archive stuff in many ways to keep off-site like at bank vaults, etc, and having to special case intermediate files just complicates things. Having to backup the intermediary files means some of my shoots won't fit on a single blu-ray anymore as well. Basically there's lots of issues that it brings up. If it was just a 10% storage hit then it wouldn't be bad, but at 50% size increase it's too much for me to handle right now.

I'll keep an eye on Premiere, maybe some day they will remove the need to conform the audio files. I figure it must be possible since Vegas doesn't need to do that. Generally speaking I liked Premiere so I'll re-evaluate it again on CS6.
 
I've switched to Premiere from Vegas and I want to murder it every time I use it. Even after watching the lynda training videos, it seems like there are so many extra steps to get things done in premiere that were so easy in Vegas. Unfortunately I also wanted to murder vegas when my renders stopped at 50% and no one makes any decent plug ins for it.
 
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