Premiere Elements v. Vegas Movie Studio

[cdeemer]

Been messing with Vegas Movie Studio and here are my first impressions. For the basics -- trimming a clip, fading in and out, panning, zooming -- Studio strikes me as easier, quicker and more intuitive than Elements. However, PE clearly is much more powerful a program. I think for simple projects I wanted done in a hurry, I might choose Studio. But for more sophisticated projects, stick with PE. Like other Sony manuals I've seen, the Studio manual sucks but the online tutorials and help are actually pretty good.

[Ronnie]

What are your second and subsequent opions fo Movie Studio? When I bought my AVCHD camcorder, I new PrEl would have a rough job with it, but I was ready to leave tapes behind. I don't do that much video editting. I figured Adobe would either catch up or I would jump ship if things got too bad. I have made it this far without too many problems, but this morning Amazon sent an email advertising Movie Studio. Some smarting rendering and fast responce would sure be nice. Do you have any experience of opinion on this?

[Steve Grisetti]

I think you're going to find that just about any program is going to be challenged by AVCHD footage, Ronnie. It's kind of the nature of this very highly compressed, high definition format. It's not so much that software that needs to catch up as the hardware. As we say often on this forum, most people who are successfully working with AVCHD are doing so on a quad core processor with a full 4 gigabyte RAM load.

Is your hardware anywhere near those specs?

But that said, Vegas MovieStudio, as a whole, tends to be much less of a resource hog than Premiere Elements. So it may well handle AVCHD a bit more efficiently. But, without a powerful enough computer, no PC-based software will edit AVCHD well.

[Ronnie]

According to the email I got, today only Amazon is selling Movie Studio Platium for $34.99. I must have gotten the email before they updated their web page, because before going to work, the web page listed it at $65 or so. I check after work and the price was $34.99, so I just ordered a copy.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ref=pe ... PDKIKX0DER

I have a quad core with 3 gb ram.

I went from a D8 tape to a HCSD card camcorder. Love the camcorder

As you know Steve, PrEl has always worked great with DV-AVI files, so its performance was never an issue with the D8 camcorder. I have owned DVDLab since my Pre 6.5 days, so I never was interested in DVD Architect Studio, which it seems, that many have turned to for more flexibility than PrEl for DVD authoring. At $65 I was ready to learn more about it, but at only $35 dollars, I got to give Movie Studio a first hand try.

[Steve Grisetti]

Can't blame you, Ronnie!

[tiny]

That's interesting, because I found PE very intuitive and VMS extremely difficult to use. However, since you like the way Vegas works, it might be best to just buy a higher end version of it, you can get really high end versions for very good prices. I even recall the highest end version (without DVD authoring software) on sale at at Bhphoto a while back for a really low price.

[Paul LS]

I'm with you Tiny... I use both PE7 and Sony Vegas Pro 9.... I find PE7 much more intuitive. Vegas is a good stable editor and supports a wide range of formats but it definately has a harder learning curve than Premiere Elements.

[Ronnie]

I have received and installed Movie Studio and DVD Architect Studio. I also went from 3 GB to 6 GB of ram in my computer while waiting for the software to ship. I spent the weekend camping with my boys, so I have not used it much. My wife shot some AVCHD of my daughter practicing tumbling. I made a real short video. I split a clip, trimmed the ends, and scaled it using several key frames. I knew what I was doing in PrEl, while this was my first time using Movie Studio (MS). I did not find any Bézier curve type feature in MS, and I struggled with getting a preview of my work. This may have been a limit of my knowledge of MS or it could be features that PrEl has the MS doesn't. MS was very stable and responsive. I thought PrEl functioned better with the increased ram. So far, my experience has been similar to others in that MS is stable and efficeint. PrEl is feature rich and has a very good interface.

[AVITRY]

Yep, I always thought that if Vegas changed it's user interface to a PE style interface Adobe would be in deep doo doo.