Vegas or FCP - need to upgrade

[Peter Rush]

OK so I'm taking the decision to upgrade to HD production which means ditching my Matrox RT/Xtreme system but which direction to take as i also want to move away from Adobe Premiere

So...Vegas or FCP - and if vegas Mac or PC?

Some of your insights would be invaluable...

Cheers

Pete

[Perrone Ford]

Sounds like you have a lot of research yet to do.

How you came to the decision of these two would be interesting to know, but Vegas, for the record, doesn't run on a Mac. Not natively anyway.

FCP has been stagnant for a couple years now in a rapidly moving market, and many are unhappy with that.

Best of luck with your research and eventual purchase.

[Michael Wisniewski]

Peter, why do you "need" to upgrade? What features are you looking for?

[Peter Rush]

Hi - my system is over 7 years old running Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 and using a Matrox RTX Extreme board for realtime editing. Not only is the system buggy and suffers from occasional crashing I want to start editing HD which I can do in Premiere (bearing in mind it's a 7 year old PC) but is not supported by the Matrox hardware so is really slow - too slow in fact.

Having used Premiere/matrox combinations before that were also buggy I think I'll try something completely new - having used FCP for a short while a few years ago I found it easy to use and pretty stable but I have no experience of Vegas.

Just trying to get an idea of what's proving popular at the moment

Pete

[Jim Snow]

Premiere Pro has come a long way since Ver. 1.5. You might want to evaluate the trial version of Premiere Pro CS5 and decide for yourself what you think. Since you can do great work with most professional editors, it's a good idea to evaluate them for yourself. Most advice from others will be biased based on the editor they use. In any case, it sounds like you need a newer and faster computer.

[Chip Thome]

For the first bazillion of my computer years I was a dyed in the wool Mac guy. 10 years ago I had to switch, too much from my day job needed a PC. I just looked now and a Mac Pro here starts at $2500 for the little one and the one with all the stuff, well that's $5000....plus monitors.

After going PC, the price just kept me here. With Adobe available for both, and Vegas and others not having any Mac version, it's been pretty easy to stay. Final Cut is Mac Only, and no one has ever convinced me it was worth the additional gear costs too.

I am in the midst of moving from CS3 to CS5 and am learning to love all the compatibility between Adobe's programs. In my last project, I created titles in Photoshop. One of the main portions of these titles had a spelling error in it. Because all I had done was import the Photoshop projects into Premiere, to fix each and every title all I had to do was open the main template and fix it in Photoshop, save it and it was corrected everywhere I had used it.

If you are looking I wouldn't cancel out Edius or some Avid too. Pick your gear first and then go try everything there's a trial for. I am on one forum board that's all Final Cut lovers and have had one where everyone was Vegas crazy too. This board seems to be accepted of Adobe, so depending on the where and the who, you are going to get a zillion real passionate responses to a question like this.

[Chris Harding]

For PC Users it seems to be more personal choice than anything else so probably the best advice is to try CS5 and Vegas and see what you like.

I have absolutely nothing against Adobe but never really felt comfortable with the interface!! Vegas was the only trial that I was able to use without resorting to a library of manuals so I choose Version 4 ..and have stayed Vegas with it ever since currently on Version 9!!

The bottom line is all do a good job otherwise they wouldn't be on the market!! Do you drive a Ford or GM vehicle??? Both are great but again it's personal preferences!!

Chris

[Nigel Barker]

Originally Posted by Chip Thome

For the first bazillion of my computer years I was a dyed in the wool Mac guy. 10 years ago I had to switch, too much from my day job needed a PC. I just looked now and a Mac Pro here starts at $2500 for the little one and the one with all the stuff, well that's $5000....plus monitors..

To be fair that is the same kind of price for a similar configuration dual CPU Xeon workstation from Dell or HP. There is a gap in the Mac range between the high end professional workstation Mac Pro & the all-in-one consumer iMac that it seems Apple are not interested in filling so the $1000 upgradeable tower PC has no Mac equivalent.

[Noa Put]

As premiere user I can tell you that it won't be easy to switch to Vegas, I tried but it felt like writing with my left hand while I'm right-handed. If the type of work you do is often connected to deadlines your only option is premiere cs5 as that will get you up and running very fast.
Another option, if you want a fast and stable editor Canopus Edius is also a very good choice.

Mac or pc is a discussion I won't get into :) I just recently upgraded to a I7 950 with 12 gigs of memory, a gtx460 2gb card and a blu-ray burner and with usb 3.0 connectivity, the motherboard, psu and cpu cooler where also "high end" parts and that all for half the price what a comparable 4 core mac pro would cost me. (the memory upgrade alone to 12gb on a Mac would cost me almost the same what I had to pay for the whole pc)
For me the choice was easy.

But when I see the new 12 (real) core mac I"m very tempted, no doubt that is a solid "pc" but since I can almost buy 4 new pc's for that price, well..:)

[Chris Davis]

Well Pete, your big decision is Mac or PC. Once you decide that, you can download trial versions and go from there. Since you're already an Adobe Premiere user, I'd go with PC and the Adobe CS5 Production Premium. I also love how After Effects, Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator all work together. Even though I like Vegas for quick and easy edits, nothing beat the richness of Adobe's suite.

I'm a Mac at home and a PC at work. Even though "conventional wisdom" says that Mac is best suited to graphic design and video, I think the current selection of tools on the Windows platform is best.

[Chip Thome]

One heads up if you go PC and with Adobe, you need to have an NVIDIA graphics card with the CUDA technology to take advantage of the Mercury Engine in Premiere. They have it as low as the 2nd form bottom in their lineup, just make sure you get it so you get GPU along with CPU doing the processing.

[Roger Shealy]

Peter, I'm a Vegas 9 user, about to upgrade to 10. I also have CS4 which I bought for my kids homeschooling and am about to recieve the complete CS5 suite. One of my workers used to use Premiere and now enjoys Vegas more, but CS4 had some serious issues that CS5 supposedly fixed.

Vegas is excellent if your main application is video editing and sound and you work by yourself. Hard to beat it for speed and all but the most sophisticated work. Very fast compared to everything else I've observed and the sound editing is very easy and powerful. Vegas 10 works with accelerated graphics if you buy the right graphics card, so native editing of .mov's seem to now be possible (haven't used personally yet as I haven't upgraded). Great one-man-show application. CS5 is getting good reviews and is probably the best solution if you use Photoshop, AfterEffects, and Illustrator. Premiere Pro integrates nicely with these other programs and Premiere Pro is cross-platform (available in both Mac and PC) and many on Final Cut are looking at CS5 as a more modern application that is very similar to Final Cut Pro. A great reason to consider CS5 is the excellent online training offered by Lynda.com. Very comprehensive, cheap, and up-to-date. If you are learning a package, this may be the strongest reason for this selection. I just find the Premiere interface complicated and what I can do in a couple of seconds on Vegas seems to take several lines and actions to accomplish in Premiere. Premiere probably is more sophisticated if you really want to max out the effects, however. If you plan to work in a cooperative environment, Final Cut Pro on the Mac is still the widest used professional platform. Endless amount of plug-ins and 3rd party software. It seems pretty tired, however. CS5 appears to be in the process of stealing market share, but but it will take a few years to take the lead and I assume FCP is working on an overhaul.

So, instead of stressing yourself over all the choices, realize it's hard to choose a bad one from this bunch. Try some trials, see what your friends are using, and get to work with one of them!

[Michael Wisniewski]

Originally Posted by Chris Davis

... your big decision is Mac or PC ...

Sometimes you pick software from perspective of what hardware you own, but there's a school of thought that it's better to pick the software that works the best for you and then let that decide what hardware you need.

Having said that, my personal workstation is a Mac, but my main video editing stations are all PC based. The software I prefer to use on a daily basis runs runs best (for me ) on a Mac, but, the video production software that works best for me, all runs on a PC ... I'm sure that doesn't help at all with your decision, but hopefully gives you another perspective.

[Nigel Barker]

Originally Posted by Roger Shealy

A great reason to consider CS5 is the excellent online training offered by Lynda.com. Very comprehensive, cheap, and up-to-date. If you are learning a package, this may be the strongest reason for this selection.

This is not really a valid reason for choosing CS5 over another editing package as Lynda.com provide excellent training on other professional editing suites notably Final Cut where they in fact have even more tutorials than they do on CS5 including literally hundreds just from renowned FCP trainer Larry Jordan. They also cover Avid but with far fewer tutorials. It is true that they don't appear to have any training on Sony Vegas which is probably because it is seen as a consumer package but to be fair they don't have any on Edius either & that is a professional application.

[Roger Van Duyn]

The major factor is whether you are a hobbiest or a business person. If you are upgrading for personal use, then whatever you "like" or "want" the most is appropriate. If you are upgrading for business reasons, then a cold hard logical evaluation of cost vs. benefit is the way to go.

Hardware price differences of PC vs. Mac have already been mentioned. Although I'm not a Premiere user, if I was, I'd check out whatever upgrade deals they have vs. paying full price for something else. Especially if I was already comfortable with Premiere.

I recently took advantage of an Avid Upgrade offer, purely based on economics. Avid Liquid is end of life, and the full Media Composer Suite at aprox 75% off was too good to pass up. To switch to any other professional editing package would have been prohibitively expensive for me. Now that video is my livelihood, and not an expensive hobby, my motivations have changed.