I'm looking for a video editing software. I narrowed them down to 2, Adobe Premiere Elements and Sony Vegas Movie Studio 4.0. I need some help on making my final decission.

I downloaded both trail version and played with both a little.

1. I want to be able to edit and export the project to DV formated .avi file (for later re-editing without lose any video quality) to Harddrive.
2. Export to RealVideo format (for web download). I prefer RealVideo over WindowsMedia and Quick Time because the size of the file and video quality. (please let me know if you know a better format)
Premiere Elements -vs- Vegas Movie Studio

I'm looking for a video editing software. I narrowed them down to 2, Adobe Premiere Elements and Sony

Vegas Movie Studio 4.0. I need some help on making my final decission.

I downloaded both trail versions and played with them a little.

1. Export to DVD.
2. I want to be able to edit and export the project to DV formated .avi file (for later re-editing without video quality lost) to Harddrive.
3. Export to RealVideo format (for web download). I prefer RealVideo over WindowsMedia and Quick Time

because the size of the file and video quality. (please let me know if you know a better format)
4. Add text to screen.
5. Add chapters to DVD export for easy nevgation.
6. Export to web friendly format per chapter. I want to be able to export each chapter to a file on it's own rather than a huge file for web download.


Seems like there is no RealVideo support from Premiere. Is there any easy way to convert to RealVideo using 3rd party software under Premiere?

thanks

ps. I know most forum don't allow cross posting. Can I create a thread on Vegas forum and put this link there so I can get Vegas user's opinion too?

Viodea, My limited comments:

I briefly used Sony Vegas Movie Studio after spending over a year specifically looking for a good editing package and then ended going with Vegas 5. I consider Sony Vegas Movie Studio to be the best buy for under $100. Since then Adobe Premiere Elements came out so I never tried it. Both should do a fine job of creating menus for DVD. I assume Elements is a good product and editors have reached a point where there are too many features for the average user. There are also other DVD authoring programs available so you do not have to stay with one package.


I do not deal with RealVideo at all. In it's early days it caused a lot of problems on systems. There are no RealVideo components on my three systems. WindowsMedia is free and for me has been easy to use but I do not web downloads. I have only use Quick Time a minimally. I don't really know about the support issue of RealVideo and Premiere. It could be a licensing issue, It may be possible. I am assuming that if you save your edited video as DV-AVI you should be able to encode that file to RealVideo. If not, then one more reason to stay away from it.

6. Export to web friendly format per chapter. I want to be able to export each chapter to a file on it's own rather than a huge file for web download. --- I'm not sure of the process but it would be the same as any other file downloading from a web site. I generally create individual DV-AVI edited files for my chapters, then batch encode them, then bring them into my DVD authoring program. That is just the way I do it because of my preferences. Normally, none of my video is good enough to watch for more than 10 minutes.


Rich

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thanks for your reply.

I would definitely go with Vegas. My experience with Adobe products has not been impressive at all. Adobe is not exactly known for stable, easy to use programs, whereas Vegas is. About the only thing Adobe makes that's worthwhile at all is Photoshop, and that took me 2 years to master. I would save your future heartache and go with Vegas. It's extremely easy to use, extremely reliable and stable and is exceptionally powerful.

thanks for you reply. I got the adobe premiere & photoshop elements package already. I haven't had stability issue with adobe product. Well, at least much better than the pinnacle studio that I had.