by LivingFlame » Fri May 16, 2008 10:47 pm
If I'm working on Windows, I very much prefer Sony Vegas Pro. It's just always felt a lot less clunky to me than Adobe Premiere (which is what I used first). The workflow seems smoother and Vegas seems to be less taxing on my system.
If I'm working on my Mac though, I use Premiere. It's mostly because I was able to get more useful programming with the Adobe Production Premium CS3 package than I could get with the Final Cut Studio 2 package.
(The CS3 package came with Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, Soundbooth, Encore, Flash, and Bridge. The Final Cut Studio package comes with Final Cut Pro 6, Motion 2, Soundtrack Pro 2, and DVD Studio 4. It has a few other things with it, but they are things that shouldn't even be standalone programs (Compressor, LiveType, Color).)
Add to that the fact that, after educational discounts on both packages, Final Cut Studio costs $699 and CS3 costs $599, and it was a pretty simple choice for me.
I have used Final Cut Express (not Pro, but I assume they aren't vastly different from each other), and I have to say, it's amazingly similar to Premiere. If you know Premiere, you can pick up Final Cut within half an hour of using it. I don't know why so many people claim that it's so much more powerful than Premiere, but I couldn't see a difference. They both seemed equally stable to me, though I still find Vegas more stable overall.
I'd still like to get my hands on Avid, though, just to play around in it for a while. I really want to know what makes it worth so much more than everything else out there (as far as NLEs are concerned). $2500? Dang.....
... yea ...