Vegas to Avid « Videomaker Community Forums

matjusm
Member

I've heard that knowing Avid is a must when wanting to become a proffesional editor so I'd like to know- which of Avid's products is most like Sony Vegas? Or can I use any one of them like Vegas (which for me means heavy reliance on drag and drop and trimming and not messing with stuff like in and out points)? My experience (though I admit, limited) with Xpress Pro has suggested otherwise but I'd like to hear a more educated opinion on the subject.

Posted 4 years ago #
On a Roll
Member

hey matjusm,

Avid definitely is one of the forerunners in pro NLE editing. Another popular choice is Premiere Pro. Both of these programs are very similar to one another, and both run on both Mac and PC, making them very versatile.

Unfortunately, aside from the fact that you put raw video in one end, and a finished product (usually) comes out the other, Sony Vegas is virtually nothing like either Avid or Premiere Pro. Way back in the day (back when Sonic Foundry still owned it) I mostly used Vegas for editing. When I finally made the switch to Premiere Pro, I had some serious re-learning to do. If I hadn't used similar NLE's back in my studio days, it would have taken ages to learn all the new keyboard assignments, tools, etc.

Sony Vegas is great software, don't get me wrong. But I would say that your best bet to learning how to play on the big league machines would be to start on the consumer end models of their software. They don't have all the bells and whistles of the pro stuff, but the interface is much more similar, and it will take less time to adjust if you've already used it before.

I sincerely hope that helps answer your question.

Posted 4 years ago #
matjusm
Member

Thanks for the advice. I had no idea that Premiere Pro was so widespread in the pro world.
But is there anything that a high end Avid product can do that Vegas can't? So far Vegas has done everything that I have wanted and compared with Avid, seems to be much much easier to use. This raises the obvious question- why use something more complicated to achieve the same end result?
And one more thing- is there any Avid that allows you to do transitions like they're done in Vegas- by having the length of the transition be the amount of time that the video tracks overlap? I find this a very well thought out solution in Vegas and I was amazed at how Avid simply wanted me to type in the amount of frames that the transition lasts.

Posted 4 years ago #
jburkhart

Well, that's not entirely the case. Certainly if you're talking about the highest levels of editing, on feature films, national TV, commercials, etc. you're pretty much looking at Avid, with Final Cut Pro making small but significant gains every year.

So why Avid, and not anyone else? Well they were pretty much the first out of the gate with useable non-linear editing. The hardware and software costs were at the time so expensive that only production companies and rental houses could afford them. So Avid was entrenched at the high end, with various workflows, and data formats grew up to surround these machines that are still in place.

For example, on the last feature I worked on, the video that was telecined from the 35mm print came with the telecine information in the standard .ALE format (which stands for avid log exchange). I'm sure that you could get that info translated into another file format, but you can get .ALE's right out of the machine, so why bother?

If you do aspire to work at the high end, learning Avid is pretty much a necessity. It can be intimidating and counter-intuitive for someone used to another package, but once you have the program down, it's extremely fast to edit with.

Besides at the end of the day they're not paying for an Avid Operator. They're paying for an editor. Which buttons to push should always be secondary to your skills. And you should strive to keep current with any new technology that helps you use those skills. Which is why so many Avid editors are learning Final Cut Pro at the moment (and also complaining loudly about it). :)
John Burkhart
Editor-in-Chief
Videomaker

Posted 4 years ago #