Mike Jones Digital Basin
cinematic media rinse cycle

re-thinking the NLE.

A question came up about the strenghts, pros and cons of two NLE's - Vegas and Premiere Pro; both which I use daily. On the surface it seemed just the usual "my NLE is better than your NLE" discussion - but based on a range of comments and toughts Ive been jotting down of late; I think there is a bigger picture here to look at. Since I admire a great many things about bot these tools I thought I'd dig past the shallows to the deeper guts...

I use the Adobe production suite everyday and have more than a dozen years behind After Effects, Premiere, Photoshop and Illustrator. It is indeed an amazingly comprehensive suite of applications built on a level of inter-app integration that no one, but no one else, is even close to.

BUT... Its also a suite of apps that have some significant flaws and some horrible inefficiencies. It also, in regard to Premiere as central NLE of the suite, a distinctly different idealogical approach to Vegas - differecnes woth digging into as they come out of the same logic.

With Vegas and Premiere Pro you arguably have the same sensibilities in the two - both are aiming towards a integrated workflow where production elements and phases are integrated rather than disparate - But the two have taken different approaches. For Premiere its all about talking and working tightly with other Adobe apps. Its about Premiere being part of a tightly knitted framework of sepeartly functioning tools. A framework that is extremely broad across the suite of apps but highly focused within each app.

Vegas on the other hand is somewhat the opposite approach - one tool, one application, that brings disparate elements inside its fold rather than seek do outside what can be done inside.

Both approaches have enormous benefits for media producers. In Premiere Pro you have a powerful and focused NLE with huge potential to bring in elements form related Adobe apps - After Effects projects on the PremPro timeline is my favourite. In Vegas you have almost total internal integration - total audio control and options, comprehensive compositing - without ever leaving the Vegas timeline.

As a straight visual editor there is really nothing between them - minor things that are mostly about personal preference; PremPro's source window/lift/extract/ripple/ 3-point system is slightly slicker than Vegas. Vegas' real-time, preview options and timeline controls are much more efficient and flexible.

A colleague once astutely commented that Premiere felt awkward and pedantic whilst Vegas felt too loose and scattered. Neither statement is technically true but the comment might have some weight in terms of 'feel'. Premiere is very fussy, Vegas lets you do anything. Both these have severe draw backs - the former can be seen as tedious and clumsy; the later can be inaccurate and disorganized. It's as much about working out what type of editing personality you are to know which is the right tool for you.

As an audio system Premiere looks great on paper, it seams to have all the things you'd want but in reality of use audio in Premiere is awfully clumsy and poorly implemented. The simple fact that Stereo and Mono sound clips cannot occupy the same audio track is just absurd beyond comprehension. Arming and recording tracks is tedious 5 mouse clicks where one should do. I've endless had problems with getting PP to talk to different sound cards and it especially doesn't seem to like having more than one sound card to choose from. Audio in Premiere is sadly a great disappointment - it promises so much but once you get hands on it presents as audio designed by people who dont work with audio! The only bonus for Premiere in regard to audio is that audio tools in Final Cut Pro and Avid are EVEN WORSE, so Adobe are at least one up on two of the competition... :) Audio in Vegas is a hands down no contest. The most complete audo tools on the market, comparable to any dedicated DAW never mind that its actually an NLE... or is it??? We'll come back to that.

As a compositing, motion graphics and effects tool Vegas also has significantly more power, options and flexibility than Premiere Pro. 3D track motion, unlimited point bezier masks, parent/child track control, track displacement and height mapping, bin/event/track and output level effects, split-screen preview, velocity envelopes, motion blur envelopes, transition envelopes, track level keyframing, generated media, ability to have simultaneous multiple versions open and working independently, adjust effects during playback with real-time preview, compositing envelopes; all these are things that Premiere just cannot do or doesn't have.

Of course Adobe's absolutly valid response and caveat to these criticisms - audio and compositing weaknesses - is that PP talks directly to After Effects and Audition/Soundbooth; so you don't need to do these things internally. Premiere Pro doesn't need to be a compositing and effects tool - its got After Effects for that. It doesn't need to have super-slick audio tools, its got Audition/Soundbooth for that. The Adobe concept is much like all other traditional NLEs - Avid and FCP - that these 'other-things' can, and are, to be done outside the NLE not in it. The NLE is for assembly not generation.

This is not a sentiment I buy into. I think it is old-school thinking and a retrograde way of conceptualising digital production that adheres to 'the way its always been done' mentality rather than the future what it might be...?

This is not to say that compositing in Vegas is as good as After Effects - not by a very long shot! But as a long time AE user I have to say that I use AE less than half as much as I used to because there is a huge chunk of things I used to have to go to AE for that simply dont have to any more, I stay and do it inside Vegas. if faced with the choice to go to another application or stay on the same timeine in Vegas I'll take the later any day if I can achieve the same reuslt. Very often I can and do just that.

The other important element here is to think beyond the right now - and peer into the future a bit. Vegas in many ways points the way - Take audio in Vegas as a potential example for the future of compositing in an NLE. Audio tools in Vegas are comparable to any DAW on the market; they are totally comprehensive and aside from midi sequencing there is nothing you can do in Pro-Tools, for example, that you cant do right on the timeline of Vegas. From live input monitoring, 24bit 96k recording, punchin punchout, monitor wet rec dry, surround sound, control surface mixing, automation control, pitch and tempo correction, loop sequencing, enveloping, you name it... Vegas proved that an NLE and a DAW can coexist in the one application without trading off features or performance of either. Is it really very hard at all to imagine complete After Effects like functionality built inside an NLE? Can this be anything but right around the corner?

So the techno-concept this introduces which goes way beyond just which 'NLE is better', is to fundamentally prompt a re-consideration of what the NLE is? Is the NLE the system-point of assembly for media elements created elsewhere, in other tools? Or is there a direction here for the NLE to become the single integrated creative production platform on its own?

The former is certainly where most of the market NLE's are and FCP and Avid most certainly treat the NLE as assembly point rather than creative point of origin and imagery generation. Adobe have taken one small step outside this - Premiere Pro still as assembly point but one that sits much closer to the creation points. Vegas by comparison takes another step beyond this again; seemingly seeking to make the NLE much more than an assembly point, to re-invent the NLE into a creation platform not just an assembly one.

The other significant cinematic evolution that's important here is the legacy of cinema stemming from live-action photography. When the "camera on the real-world" is the almost exclusive source of cinematic content it makes sense that the NLE is almost exclusively an assembly point for that photographic form. But in the 21st century live-action is very quickly becoming an 'option' rather than a 'given'. A physical camera is an option not an inherent apparatus. The virtual camera, machinima, compositing, layers, 3D graphics, gaming, interactivity all fundamentally change what the moving image is. And so too ultimately we have to re-consider what our tools are and what our role as editors is?

This post could have been a litany of pros and cons of Premiere vs Vegas - or any other NLE's. I could have said Premiere is still unstable, a memory and system hog, inefficient and inflexible. I could have said Vegas is disorganized, sloppy, completely lacking inter-app integration and missing key hi-level elements such as 10bit and wide third-party plug-in support....

But all these are the trappings that change with the wind. Underneath is a bigger picture and I think conceptually Vegas is looking further ahead than other NLE's. Vegas seems to be re-thinking What the Editor is an what the NLE is supposed to do? Whilst other NLE's are simply re-enforcing old established patterns that may well have lost their usefullness and relevency in the digital age.

Old editors and old NLE's die hard...

I would argue that the new generation of editors and media makers - those who see the moving image in all its manifestations - those who see little distinction between gaming and movies, between live action and animation, between physical camera and virtual camera; will be drawn to a tool like Vegas which embraces those new ideas and brings them under the one production hood; into the one production space; rather than be chained to the old linear, hierarchical, segmented, disjointed workflow that privilidges certain types of media and reinforces the lower status of others.

Posted at 01:14PM Apr 14, 2007 by Mike Jones in video  |  Comments[9]