ORIGINAL: tazman

I have read of issues wirh premier dealing with avi's and about Premier being slower than Vegas. Is Premier more resource hungry as far as video card, CPU, etc? Does it really have issues with some video formats?

We're trying to purchase a software solution that will allow us to grow. I like Premier so far because it seems to provide the largest amount of tools that may in the future come into play, but I am concerned about some of the issues I have read about it (stated above). Is it just a particular user's issue or are these known issues with the application?

Thanks,

Vegas vs anything...

1) Vegas is less demanding on a video card, i can runit on a laptop with onboard video. on the other hand i can run it on a system with a 285 in it and it wont be much faster.
where the vid card would help would be layers. i think Vegas is by far the slowest for renders regardless of what system its on.

2)Avid, Adobe, Edius, Liquid (the first to do GPU processing, but i would not touch it now) all will use the video card and now with CS4 Adobe has Cuda enabled.
with these the faster the video the better. (to a point)
it also depends on you 3d titling, what effects how many layers etc.
render are equal to the power you give it.

CPU and HDD are the primary render delay areas (with video falling in there somewhat)
you should use seperate drives to render to . never render to the same drive you are working on raided or not.
raid 0 i feel is an absolute must for any pro level editing (time is money)

so ideally very fast system either core i7 or Xeon
os drive
minimum pair of sata raid 0 for work/capture
minimum pair of sata raid 0 for render to.
if uncompressed real HDD things change rapidly depending on format/codec.

Well, I finally got Adobe Premier and love it!!! Next, getting music form SONAR into Adobe, or video from Adobe into SONAR. Not sure which direction yet.

CS3 was 64 bit well sorta. you could install on 64bit os in 32bit mode and use a full 4gig ram per app. PS, PP, AE.
we have been shipping vista 64 for about a yr now for most or video boxes. still was better than just XP.

Depending on what you want to do, Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9 offers a heck of a lot of bang for the buck. I have it installed on my DAW PC along with S7PE and they play together very well.

If you do decide to go with Vegas, smartflix.com has some great tutorial DVD's that you can rent for cheap.

Any opinions on which has better DVD authoring (Menu creation flexibility)? I currently use Premiere Elements 3.0 and am disappointed in that. I would like to change color on buttons, multi-line menu items, vary the amount of menu items on each page, text animation, etc. Or is neither designed for this? My actual video editing needs are pretty minimal.

Just a FYI
Adobe elements is slower than Adobe Pro as Elements doesn't use the GPU to accelerate creating previews and effects the way other programs—like Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro do.
 
Elements is good enough for me  (it's a price thing) although I do have Premiere Pro CS2 kicking around (never used it for some reason, next video I will).

Took me a sec to realize how old this thread is.  I still struggle with answering these kind of questions.  There simply is no one best solution.  I would advise people differently depending on budget, short and long term goals and experience with editing.  I used to teach video editing.  Most of my students would want to go for the "Pro" version but the lighter version was more than enough to suit their needs.  Even the ones who had aspirations of incorporating motion graphics and 3d compositiing,I would demonstrate that the basic actual editing did not differ that much and they would end up in other programs for those other things regardless of which editor they chose. My two cents in case this thread gets dug up again:
 
If you are planning on a career in Hollywood and want to make yourself marketable in that job area, Avid still rules the roost.  There are some longtime diehard users of lightworks and they have some prominent names and films, but it s a small, if distinguished minority. There is a free version of lightworks worth checking out.
 
For those with less ambitious goals than working in a hollywood production house or want to produce indie films,  Avid is still a consideration but Final Cut and Premiere Pro come into play.  Not that Sony Vegas is less than these two, but third party support and integration with other programs comes into play. In fact, it's integration with other programs that actually gives a slight bump imo to Premiere vs Final Cut. The one program that almost every visual professional uses to some degree is photoshop.  There is literally no major competitor to it.  Of course the knock on Premiere now is the whole subscription based model which is another debate. Being able to jump between Premeiere, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects and Audition  makes Adobe suite arguably the most powerful single vendor video production solution available. The reality is few productions, especially large budget ones use just a single vendor but the budget conscious small operation might.
 
Sony vegas gets brought up a lot and i am a big fan of Vegas.  IMO it is the ONLY NLE with great audio editing ability.  It is far easier for the beginner to grasp while still being powerful.  If you are not doing any compositing(although Vegas can do VERY basic compositing), vegas holds it's own against FCP and Premiere.
 
There are a few other programs in this category too like Edius (popular among local tv affiliates). 
 
 
The next tier is the newcomers and the bang for your buck but not popular among professional category.  Hitfilm,Magix and Power Director offer feature rich products that are much less then the other products listed. On paper they seem like great value and for some they will be. For some they will feel like "almost but not quite", especially if you are used to working with any of the others.  A number of fellow after affects users I know have tried Hitfilm and the reaction is almost unanimous.  It's mostly a "This would be great for someone who did not already own After Effects and Particular".  My humble opinion is if you never plan to d othis professionally or collaborate with vide oprofessionals, BUT still want professional like tools, these are great options.
 
 
Fionally, the Element/lite category.  I seriously believe that most people need no more than these programs.  When I worked at a tv station that aired locally produced shows, I only ran into one producer who created a project that could not be created with Premiere Elements or Vegas studio.  In fact, most could be done wit hMovie Maker except for the titling.

I prefer After Effects over Premiere, even though it needs to render anything and everything before you can view it in real time. I used earlier versions of Premiere (I currently have CS 5.5) and didn't need to read the manual to import, edit and export video. But with 5.5, every time I use it, I have to go back and read the manual again just to export in a format I can view on my computer. For some reason, it's just totally non-intuitive... or maybe I'm going senile.

Just an FYI, just hit file>export>send to media encoder and you will be able to select from any preset you will likely need.
 
Premiere has gotten better by leaps and bounds since 5.5.  The best way to export is to use the media encoder. Even 5.5 included presets for exporting to everything from Youtube ready to broadcast file formats.  After Effects is an awesome program but has too many crippling things for day to day editing.  You mentioned the fact that you have to render everything.  The enormous amount of time spent using workarounds just to do the basics would make any project over 30 seconds needlessly complex. I knew a guy who tried to do all his editing in After Effects until he realized he would sometimes send an hour on what everyone else spent a few minutes on.