Vegas Studio 10 for Premiere Elements Users

[Chris B]

I've been trying to get to grips with Vegas 10 Studio. Now that the 4 track limit has been increased to 10 it seems like a very viable proposition. I thought a topic here to share experiences of transitioning across might be helpful. (Not that I'm dumping PE - just more options.) The below is based on initial experiences. Please chime in and correct me or add you own stuff.

The Good
There are some really nice plugins. Image stabilisation is miles better than PE. The White Balance tool is great. There are some complex distortion and colour plugins that I haven't got my head anywhere near round.

The transitions cover much the same ground as PE but seem a little more "advanced" then PE. More 3d effects for example.

When exporting HDV Vegas will do it intelligently and not re-encode unnecessary bits. So far it's eaten the HDV I've thrown at it for breakfast - handling it much better than PE.

DVD Architect Studio will make DVDs with HD footage on them and menus.
There seems much less need to "render" video to see what it actually will look like.

For fade in/out there are lots of pre-defined "envelopes".

The "Media Generation" has quite a lot of options including noise functions (for clouds) and Gradients.

The Not So Good
Titles seem more limited - there's no "Roll" that I can see right now. Also there don't appear to be options to add graphics to titles and there are far fewer pre-sets.

My installation seems to have real trouble with DV/AVI files pausing and hanging much in the same way that PE often does with HDV - might just be me - if anyone's got a fix that would be great.

The effects whilst of good quality - and sometimes more configurable - don't seem as easily combined as they are in PE. A lot of the claimed "350" effects are different pre-sets of the basic effects.

There appears to be no 3d transform effects (or corner PIN style effects to fake it).

Stuff that's just different
Clip and Crop are handled in their own special menu. It's sort of backwards from PE in that you adjust the frame size and see the resultant image. I note there's a "cookie cutter" effect that might be used for some of the stuff clip/crop were used for.

The work-flow is very different with the emphasis very much of doing things on the time-line. It seems harder to go through setting in and out points before editing than to do it there and then.

Movement of the image is done on a track by track basis as opposed to clip by clip. Can still be key-framed but you have to "undo" movement for video later on.

The concept of dragging one clip into another to perform a transition is interesting. I often would perform a hard cut on the video but a cross-fade on the audio. Spent ages trying to see if there was an easy way to do this then found there's

"Ripple Editing" is something that is turned off and on with a button. Makes it clearer what you're doing most of the time.

The "Matte" functions seem powerful - basically it's always a track matte - just with a new "parent/child" concept so you can matte multiple tracks at once. There doesn't seem to be things like a 4 point garbage matte or variants although these could be done with suitable source video.

That's all I've got for now - is anyone else on a similar "journey"? What have you found along the way?

Chris.

[Paul LS]

Hi Chris, I have been using the Pro version for a couple of years. It certainly takes sometime to get used to some of the quirky way things are done in Sony Vegas compared to Premiere Elements. I found Elements fairly easy to learn and intuitive... not Vegas.

[Ken Jarstad]

I already ran into the limitations of the Studio titler. The Pro version has the ProType titler and I have no experience with it. I found an article that showed how to create a text document, formatted the way you want - even in a word processor, and paste it into a standard text generator and keyframe it. Works very well for me and that is what I plan to use from now on since I frequently use rolling credits.

http://www.jetdv.com/tts/TTS02-02.pdf

Note: The article is named 'Beginner's Corner - Moving Text'.

Platinum versions can do mult-cam edits by using composite envelopes. I did two shows that way last month and had to render out an intermediate file in order to add lower thirds, logo bug and so on. Having up to 10 video and audio tracks removes that limitation.

I have not gotten into v10 yet except to look around but I am quite pleased with having the secondary color controls which used to be a Pro feature. VMS9P was more adept at restoring poor color Hi-8 footage than Elements v2 but the secondary controls should make that task even better.

One interesting development is that even though I didn't buy the 'suite' this time my Platinum version found all the NewBlue items from the 9 Platinum 'Pro Pack' and automatically installed them. Someone on the SCS forums said this is standard behavior and a good reason not to uninstall v9.

[RJ Johnston]

Chris, your writeup is very good. I found myself agreeing with almost everything you mention.

There are a few credit rolls in Media Generators.

You can also expand titles with Prodad Heroglyph plugins for $99. There's also Heroglyph version for $249.

[Chris B]

Do you chaps also have the problem with DV/AVI - or is it just me (and therefore worth trying to fix).

Another point I forgot to mention.

I spent ages trying to figure out how to easily apply a crossfade to only the audio of a track. Because I have home footage I often crossfade the audio even when I do a hard cut on the video to stop the sound being disjoint. I found the "quickfade Audio" option - but that applies an automatic (very short) fade out when you split a track - rather than just at a new clip. Any idea's anyone?

[Ken Jarstad]

Other than what you have already found the only thing I have been doing is manually adding a fade. Place the cursor in the upper corner of any clip, eh, I mean event, and you should see a pie-shape appear which you can drag and watch the fade shape grow larger. Works sort of like a keyframe. Just above it you will see an indicator showing the duration of your fade. I find it to be accurate and not fiddly - well designed.

[RJ Johnston]

Do you chaps also have the problem with DV/AVI - or is it just me (and therefore worth trying to fix).

I've just been trying some DV-AVI clips and they play back without pausing or stuttering.

Did you capture the clips in another application or in Vegas Studio 10?

[Chris B]

They were captured in Elements. Vegas doesn't seem able to capture DV/AVI from my camera (not tried HD - I use HDVsplit for that). It's not an issue for me as I don't do any SD right now - but the fact that both don't work may be symptomatic of the same problem. I'll have to investigate.

[Ken Jarstad]

It was reported on the SCS forum that the v10 'suite' includes a noise reduction filter from NewBlue. For a few dollars more.......

[mark hansen]

Thanks for the validation of my observations. I downloaded the trial version and tried a few things. I couldn't get over the learning curve. I desided to get a convert program to take care of the ACVHD files and take them into PE and drop the Vegas.

Mark

[RJ Johnston]

It was reported on the SCS forum that the v10 'suite' includes a noise reduction filter from NewBlue. For a few dollars more.......

I just tried the New Blue noise reduction filter on some VHS-C video, and it worked very well. It renders about 2-1/2 times faster than the Neat Video filter (free for personal use if you don't mind a small "neat video" logo in the corner). I don't have time right now to scrutinize the results.

[RJ Johnston]

In the Suite, at least, there is an NewBlue Image Mapper effect which lets you do some fancy transformations.

[Chris B]

In the Suite, at least, there is an NewBlue Image Mapper effect which lets you do some fancy transformations.

Woot! - Corner pin effect. Scratch one of my not so good list. Any more for any more? (also seen the Picture in Picture effect - Which gives you most of "basic 3d" and the "position" controls as well.

[RJ Johnston]

Chris, did you see my earlier post about there being Credit Rolls in Media Generators?

Can you give an example of what you mean by "The effects whilst of good quality - and sometimes more configurable - don't seem as easily combined as they are in PE."

Did you know that for many of the effects, you can edit them while the clip is playing?

[Ken Jarstad]

Did you know that for many of the effects, you can edit them while the clip is playing?

That is one of the astounding features of Vegas. You can adjust things such as zooming in/out on the timeline while the timeline is playing. I have used the audio plugin 'Track EQ' to adjust audio equalization through the audio spectrum in four bands while listening to playback in real time! Vegas beats any audio editor I have ever used and I haven't even played with Sound Forge yet.

Hold down the K key while pressing J or L and it will put you in slow motion playback mode. You can press L several times to play faster and press J to slow back down again. Pressing K again, Enter or the Spacebar will drop you out of slow motion playback mode.