Adobe Premiere Elements/Vegas Movie Studio; what can you tell me?

January 4, 2005 6:28 AM

I'm looking for opinions on Adobe Premiere Elements and Vegas Movie Studio + DVD.

I know that both have been discussed individually to some extent on Ask.Me but I'm now looking to buy one of the two and am hoping for some more direct comparison. Both seem to do the basics of editing very well and are priced the same. I've tried both demos, so I’m familiar with both. I think I'm leaning towards Vegas Movie Studio at the moment, as it seems to run a bit smoother on my crappy computer. Is there anything IYHO that I should consider that might make one a better buy than the other?

PIII 500mhz win2k/winxp (yep, old). I’m mostly just hoping to do basic editing/splicing/color correction of video from a firewire-connected Canon DV cam.

posted by soplerfo to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

I've been very happy with Vegas 3, and arrived at the decision after much research. At the time, it seemed much more sturdy and gave away nothing in functionality to Premiere. I thought I was going to need the additional tweaky features of the "full" product, but in hindsight, I haven't done much that the Movie Studio couldn't have handled. And I'm sure the product has only improved since. Have you discovered the Creative Cow yet? If you dig into Vegas and Premiere forums I bet you'll find some comparison-type questions. (Also, my PIII system is similar to yours, and the full Vegas software has always run happily.)
posted by Tubes at 8:57 AM on January 4, 2005

Having used both on low-spec machines, and with cannon DV cameras, I second the recommendation for Vegas as the quicker and easier solution for simple video work (pretty robust, too). However, I've run into a few problems with it that that you may want to test with your demo version. I've never had any issues dumping the video from a camera to the machine, but Vegas seems to semi-regularly hiccup on exporting the video back out to tape (my machines are even sadder than yours, though- PII 400s with XP and a gig of RAM). I guess if your final output is DVD, that won't matter so much, but Premiere has never given me trouble printing to tape.
posted by drumcorpse at 12:00 PM on January 4, 2005

(On a low-powered PC, it's a good idea to shut down all other processes before rendering or outputting to tape -- regardless of the software. You might even do an alternate boot profile to only fire up your editor when that's what you'll be using.)
posted by Tubes at 2:02 PM on January 4, 2005

(note to Tubes- thanks for the tip, but alas I have already tried it, to no avail. Booted without nonessential processes, taken machines off the network, clean solid-file defragged renders... and it still stutters just as frequently on tape output. I suspect it just wasn't designed with my machines in mind.)
posted by drumcorpse at 3:40 PM on January 4, 2005

Response by poster: Thanks for the info folks. I'm playing around more with both demos, I'm still really up in the air about it.
posted by soplerfo at 7:01 PM on January 4, 2005