Chris and jeff,


I second what you say here, restrictive is the key word!!! I have also moved away from audition sense I have become more familiar with vegas audio!!!

How does one get away from after effects though?

I use both apps for different things.
I fond Vegas 9 64bit is a lot more stable and faster than my CS4 at the moment.
Ive been using premiere since version 1 and think I know it pretty well.

I use Vegas with scripting to add video bugs and underlay... which saves a lot of time in my work flow. But I do most of my editing in Premiere.
I am really waiting on the Cineform real time system for Premiere.
Cineform is a fantastic piece of software and I do miss it in CS4.
To be honest at the moment Vegas kicks Prem into touch regarding speed... but I will go back as soon as the cineform stuff is ready.

Both pieces of software have their place in my video editing armoury.

How indeed. And I think the answer will be 'you can't and probably never will completely'.

BUT, I will say that I resort to After Effects less and less these days for simple compositing jobs. I used to do pretty much all my title sequences in AE but now it's only when I want to exploit virtual cameras in 2.5D space, or do any particle or heavy text work (I just don't get on with ProType Titler, sorry!).

If I was charging £20k for short corporates I would probably invest in an AE-skilled compositor/animator, but I am at the £5k end of the budget spectrum and I find myself wanting to spend less and less time/effort/money jumping between apps. As such I try and do as much as I can (ideally 100%) in Vegas - in itself this makes me more creative, I believe, and I find myself doing things one might think Vegas was not capable of doing.

Couple that with the great third party filters coming out of NewBlueFX, Magic Bullet etc and I'm finding fewer and fewer occasions when I need to go elsewhere. (One exception is for keying, which I tend to do in Ultra, which I find easier than AE's keyers and more effective than Vegas's).

Err....I always drag and drop my video clips onto the timeline in Premiere.
And you don´t need Explorer for that.

Well, I guess I couldn't make it work for some reason.

As of the last version of Premiere I tried - 4 I think - you still had to drop files in the bin before you could drop them on the timeline. Not a big deal, but an odd extra step.

Much worse is (was?) PP's inability to correctly lay two clips next to each other. Two ten second clips with a one second fade does NOT equal twenty seconds on the timeline!

Any time saved is probably lost screwing with Vegas' bad audio rubber bands though. Carpal tunnel sufferers need not apply!

Files disappearing is a file system problem. Drives puke on us maybe every 6 months. Reformat and they work fine. Sorry if it's your project that was lost; you'll do it better the second time. :)

"Two ten second clips with a one second fade does NOT equal twenty seconds on the timeline!"

Do you mean a cross dissolves between clips? If so then it's normal that two 10 sec clips are not 20 seconds long, if you mean a fade to black at the end then I don't understand you, could you explain that a bit better?

Also, what is the intention of the first post, someone had major problems probably caused by a poor system setup and without any further details you trow it on this forum with the only intention of glorifying Vegas, unless there is another educational purpose to it that i missed. Sorry guys, but a post like this is not very constructive.

Yes, Joe, an odd extra step indeed.

Noa, the OP didn't make sense for the reason you point out, but that has already been discussed.

It's not really odd, it depends on how you structure your data for a project. I first organize my project on my harddrive putting everything into separate folders, I start with a main project folder and then create separate folders in that for my mt2 files, one for my zoom or iriver, one for the music and so on and when I open a project in premiere I just import the folder completely and have a bin that is organized from the start. All my data is easy to find back in the premiere bin and in the project folder on my harddrive because both match.
The fact that Vegas has the windows explorer build right in though is something i wished premiere had, makes it easier to organize.

They have that in CS4.

But where is the difference between drag-dropping files from Explorer to timeline vs. drag-drop them from the bins to the timeline?

Right, in the bins you have preview and many aditional information.
Not bad at all in my book.

But to each his own. I heard there are even folks out there that like AVID ;-)

Frank