Vegas vs Premiere vs avid xpress vs Pinnacle Liquid, etc.

[harley2ride]

I've done a lot of reading through this and other forums, and I know that there are tons of different softwares and methods folks use. I've tried adobe premiere 6.5, but find it difficult to navigate, and for the past year, I've used Vegas 5. It works good, but there is little in the way of free tutorials, and limited plugins. I played around a bit looking at Pinnacle Liquid Edition, and was impressed by all of the free video tutorials available, and it's apparent ease of use and power. I currently use Vegas more for hobby, but I do some work for pay. I'm hoping to get some pro's and cons for the upper level stuff from folks who have actually used some of these softwares. Currently from what I'm seeing, even Pinnacle Liquid Edition 5.5 seems to be more powerful that Vegas 5. Any expert opinions?

[jabloomf1230]

I wouldn't say I'm an expert, but I have both Premiere 1.5 and Vegas 6 and I do a lot of video editing, etc. with it. I started out on the original version of Premiere (1.0), which was buggy, very powerful, but not particularly intuitive. About a week ago, I took Premiere off my computer and I solely use Vegas, which is easily Premiere's technical equal and at least from my perspective, easier to use. There's a lot of online training material available for both. Adobe products have online activation, which limits you to installing the software on your primary computer and a laptop, which is a limitation to some people. And if you switch OSs (like to Win XP x64) it uses up an activation. Just like with Microsoft's products, you can get a new phone activation key if you need to.

The worst thing about Vegas is that I am drooling over buying the Sony HD "bare bones" ($1,600!!! ) camcorder, so I can really play around. If I procrastinate long anough, probably Canon will come out with a competing HD model and make my decision even harder.

Both Adobe and Sony have excellent technical support. Adobe's complete production suite is seemless, although I don't see that as a major advantage. With Vegas, you also get DVD Architect 3, which is a great DVD creation tool. It's main flaw was that it was weak on supporting new DVD burners, but Sony support has recently done a much better job in correcting that flaw.

A final note, if I wasn't going to shell out the big bucks for one of the high end products, then I would go with the freeware VirtualDub, which is pretty good in its own right. The "mid-level" video editing software in the $50-$150 range will eventually wear out its welcome, as you run up against some limitation.

[edDV]

It all depends on what you want to do. You can find many forum discussions using advanced search. Here are some for starters
https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=269668
https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=273212
https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=268286
https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=249547

Vegas tutorials can be found here
http://www.blue7media.com/vegas/

[mikiem]

FWIW, the new prem pro is out, with some interesting features. Be interesting to see if the Vegas folks keep up this spring with v 7.. Vegas was originally developed by Sonic Foundry -- perhaps the nicest folks ever talked to online. Sony kept the developer team intact (at least originally), didn't in my opinion bring out anything dazzling for v 5 - 6, stopped a really generous upgrade program for the 1st month a product was out. In fact, haven't seen much in the way of advertising till this week when they have an entry level app for free after rebate at comp. The number of entry level stuff, & all the focus there might mean something about the future, maybe not.

That said, Prem Pro takes learning, while Vegas seems the kind of app you can just dive into and discover stuff later. It's very capable though, & has so far maintained a lead in audio handling as one would expect (don't know about latest Prem Pro).

Adobe to me has always seemed a bit *off*. They do things their way & that's that. It's not going away tomorrow, but from their initial upgrade policy with prem pro, seems maybe they're well aware of that, & of limited market choices now they have Macromedia & Corel seems to be stagnant. While Vegas is accepted nowdays, Knowing prem might be worth something career wise.

Never liked Pinnacle personally... Every time I was in the market research & reading complaints always seemed to turn me off of whatever product they offered.

One editor you haven't mentioned is the lowend Avid http://www.avid.com/products/xpressdv/ Seen some really decent reviews in the past, so might want to check it out.

Edit: forgot DVD... Never impressed with Encore, but again new version out. Would barely run on Athlon system I had -- no prob with anything else. DVDA is nice if you need to time text subs, but otherwise I think DVD Lab Pro has it beat hands down for a lot less $. Biggest pain in the kazoo -- restrictions on importing m2v files.