Vegas and Adobe After Effects

[John Hartney]

Please don’t attempt to put Vegas in the same class as After Effects… Read the white papers of what each program does.

I say this because I like vegas as a basic DV25 editor and wouldn’t want to compare it to a powerhouse like After Effects which operates in another world of 2d effects generation, vegas is an infant in here, and crippled.

John Hartney
werks.tv
Elgin, Illinois – Chicago area
847.608.1357

[John Hartney]

I guess I didn’t answer your post in strict terms.. we use all the Adobe products to better our end products, including After Effects pro.

Vegas is a quickie for our studio, and we still use all the old Sonic Foundry tools in their current versions. But that may be changing with technology.

John Hartney
werks.tv
Elgin, Illinois – Chicago area
847.608.1357

[Yoyodyne]

Vegas is actually a pretty good compositor but I still use After Effects a bunch for the more complex stuff.

[Lee Mceachern]

I still find After Effect enormously useful. I was on an After Effects forum the other day getting advice on removing three (moving) zits from an extreme close-up soundbite of a teenage girl. It was the critical soundbite in the piece but the client said it could not be used (for in-house personal/political reasons) unless the zits disappeared. I did it in AE using the “tracker.” That’s just a small example. After Effects is a huge program. Vegas and AE are apples and oranges.

[Timothy Duncan]

Richard,

I find that I can do the majority of all my FX work directly in Vegas without having to go to AE. I still have and use AE for specific things, such as motion tracking. I also use AE for specific 3rd party filters that aren’t available in Vegas. However, I usually do not complete the composite in AE, but rather output uncompressed elements with Alpha channel to bring back into Vegas for all the finishing.

Vegas is a lot more powerful than most people every find out. Dig a little deeper.

My summary: AE is a great tool and it can do many things Vegas can’t, but I only have to go into AE rarely because I find Vegas meets the majority of my needs.

td

[Richard M.]

Thanks. Good points by all. Since I have both, I will have to learn a lot more about what each program can do to be able to better utilize. It appears to me that they can easily complement each other.

Richard M.

[Timothy Duncan]

Don’t forget the Vegas to AE plugin that you can purchase from Forged Images:
https://www.forgedimages.com/AEPlugIns.html

This enables you to take a Vegas timeline into AE.

td

[Chris Borjis]

As a regular AE user I’m amazed at the compositing abilities of Vegas
(being an NLE foremost)

though I rarely if ever use it for compositing there is one thing I found
that Vegas does quickly, easily and painlessly and yet takes a very long
time in After Effects and that is the Black & White with isolated colors
effect as seen in “Pleasantville” and more recently “Sin City”

Edward Troxel wrote a great tutorial on that some time ago utilizing the secondary color corrector and I was blown away how fast I was able to accomplish that effect in so short a time compared to doing it in AE.
And it looked so damn professional to boot! 🙂

[Bj Ahlen]

I like vegas as a basic DV25 editor…

“Basic DV25 editor???’

For the last year, I have done nothing but uncompressed 10-bit, animation codecs, high resolution image sequences, and a little bit of high definition.

FCP is used for feature films, and they were still gasping at the LAFCPUG “NLE Shootout” when they saw what Vegas could do.

So I guess I’m baffled by the thought that Vegas is a “basic editor.” :O)

I took the Combustion route instead of AE Pro for compositing, because I thought it was easier to learn (even though I have a fair amount of Photoshop experience).

Still, if I could have afforded it, I would have gotten Digital Fusion ($4K) which blows both out of the water for some compositing tasks.