It's been a while but...

I know it's been a while since I last posted but I've been learning Sony Vegas Pro 8.0. Man, what a unit! This thing does stuff I could never get Adobe Premiere to do: work properly.
I just finished 'Great Wenert Fishing Moments' though it's not yet posted on youtube.com. Look for it later this week.
I guess the question is: what does Vegas do that Premiere wouldn't?
Well, allow me to describe the configuration of my editing computer. It's a Quad core Gigabyte MoBo with 4-GB of DDRII 800 MHz RAM. The Video card is a nVidia 7950GT. Runs some pretty good benchmarks but even better it renders movie files like it was on fire.

I want to say that Sony has some weaknesses: the Event FX dialog needs work. Scaling was great for small and medium res pictures but large Megapixel pix need more room on the screen.

Pixelan effects don't show the source shots in its preview window but I'm hoping that Pixelan will fix that little inconvenience.

Another weakness in Sony's editor is its titling: Apparently a short afterthought. Needs some creative flexibility, like the scrolling credit tool. Three or four ways to roll credits doesn't cut it. Flexibility is the key to great applications.

Yet another weakness in Vegas is antialiasing ripples. Haven't found yet the equivalent to Premiere's antialiasing feature. I know it in there somewhere just haven't found it yet.

The most important victory over Premiere was that I was able to edit a full 10-minute video made up of several hundred stills without even a burp.

You see, in Premiere, I could put up 5 to 6 minutes of mateial in the timeline but had to bracket (no more than 30-seconds of shots to work on at any time. It made for some really difficult editing and effects work. But what made Premiere the loser for me was that if I had a sequence on the timeline and attempted anything like 'Levels,' Adobe would crash. Very disgusting and not productive.

It's completely different in Vegas Pro. Put 'em up one-at-a-time, mess with each one, add effects, transitions -- tweak the way the transitions work... do it all anywhere on the timeline -- no crashes.

Finally, Vegas renders like it's on fire. Adobe works on geologic time. Forever to render. That got really old.

Oh yeah, Sony Vegas Pro is around $400 whereas Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 is almost $900. Screw that.

All in all, my choice for video editing has become the Sony Vegas Pro 8.0.
Try it out and find a lot less frustration in your editing endeavors.

Ciao...