Adobe Premiere or Sony Vegas - which is better ?

[Bansaw]

We have two pieces of software here at work and I have to choose between Adobe Premiere and Sony Vegas 6.0.
Which one would you choose and why?

My first impression of Premiere is that it takes a long time to render, but I don't know much about its functionality etc...

Any comments?

[guns1inger]

I use Vegas for a couple of reasons.

First and foremost, I like the way it works. It suits my workflow better than Premiere does. I like it's audio functionality and the flexibility of unlimited timelines.

On the downside, it does not have access to the same range of plugins as Premiere.

My second reason for not using Premiere is that I have never seen it running stably. I know people here use it regulalrly and swear by it, but ont he occassions when I have either built a box to run it, or had professional AV suppliers provide custom installations on request, Premiere has been unreliable and unstable, often crashing, not being able to detect cameras to capture from etc. It has always been unlucky for me. I believe that Adobe has only created one great piece of software - Photoshop. Everything else has been of much lower quality. Vegas, on the otherhand, has never let me down.

[Bansaw]

My first impression is the same guns1linger. Premiere seems like a bit of an elephant to me. I like Vegas a lot.
Anybody else out there give me a good reason to go with Premiere over Vegas?

[edDV]

My first impression is the same guns1linger. Premiere seems like a bit of an elephant to me. I like Vegas a lot.
Anybody else out there give me a good reason to go with Premiere over Vegas?

It all depends on the type of editing you want to do and the products you need to access.

I've used Premiere since the first year it was released under Adobe's name. I concur that it has been unstable in most versions athough V6.5 is very stable under XP. Premiere Pro was a full rewrite and v1.5 is fairly stable. I still use Premiere for layered graphics intensive project work and I like the way it works with Photoshop. I rarely use After Effects but it also integrates nicely. I never liked Encore or Audition.

I got Vegas a couple of years ago and find I use it more for everyday tasks and video/audio centric projects. I've been a long time user of Sound Forge so I was able to adapt quickly to the user interface. Vegas is super stable and can work in the background without consuming much in resources. You can even open multiple projects as separate instances. Vegas has great audio functonality and integrates tightly with Sound Forge.

As far as straight A/B editing, I'm still faster on Premiere but a new user may find Vegas easier to learn.