Sony Vegas vs Adobe Premiere – Quick Comparison

You cannot talk about video editing without mentioning Sony Vegas and Adobe Premiere – two of the most popular pieces of software on this market. Both products are created by companies that have a solid background in the field, so no matter where you put your money at, you won’t be disappointed.

There are online courses that cover both, such as this Sony Vegas complete beginner’s course or this complete guide for editing in Adobe Premiere Pro, so which one should you go for? We’ll try to make your decision a bit easier by putting them under the scope and see what they each have to offer.

Sony Vegas

Sony Vegas has its roots in SoundForge, a piece of audio editing software developed by Sonic Foundry. The company was taken over by Sony and SoundForge got a massive upgrade, evolving into the full-fledged video editing software we now know as Sony Vegas.

One of the strong points of Sony Vegas is that it managed to find a good balance between aesthetics and functionality. The interface of the application is less crowded than the one of Adobe Premiere, yet all the functionality you would expect to find is there. Sony Vegas is overall more intuitive than its competitor, therefor making the learning curve smoother.

Sony Vegas wins the performance race, being better optimized and thus getting the job done faster than Premiere. However, the fact that Sony Vegas is tied to the Windows platform can be a deal-breaker for some, as it implies that all editing has to be carried out on a PC. Sorry Mac users.

Adobe Premiere

While Sony Vegas aimed at an all-in-one approach, Adobe Premiere seems to be at the opposite end. The program itself is complex and powerful on its own, but can be taken even further by its seamless integration with other applications from the Adobe family, such as Photoshop or After Effects. Although Sony Vegas also supports importing stuff from Photoshop and After Effects, it is easy to imagine that it doesn’t play with them as well as Premiere does.

Adobe Premiere’s flexibility doesn’t stop here though: the application runs on both PCs and Macs, a clear advantage for users that need to switch back and forth between platforms.

In terms of performance, Premiere is still lagging behind Sony Vegas, despite Adobe’s efforts to minimize the gap. They just recently introduced GPU support for AMD video cards, something that Sony Vegas had from day one. Will this balance things on the long run? Only time will tell.

Making the Choice

Let’s recap a bit: we’ve got two award-winning video editing programs. In the blue corner we have Sony Vegas, an intuitive piece of software that allows you to do your edits quick and hassle-free. Assuming you use a PC, that is.

In the red corner we have Adobe Premier, a more professional-looking multi-platform program that gives you more creative freedom by allowing you to take advantage of additional features of external programs, at a cost of being slower and somewhat harder to master.

In the end, it’s not about which program is the best, but rather which one is the best for you.