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Although i have experience doing basic things in Premiere and VirtualDub, i have zero experience with AfterEffects. Is AE superior to Premiere in every way or do the two programs serve substantially different purposes?

They complement eachother. I've never actually used AE, I have to admit. However, AE is supposed to be a special effects and compositing suite and premiere is your standard non-linear editing software. This basically means, you use AE to make your individual videos/clips/scenes and you use Premiere to put these shorter elements together into a longer sequence using tracks and transitions. Of course there are special effects you can do in Premiere but AE is more powerful and it lets you author new content. I feel dumb for answering a question about AE even though I never used it... but I can't help myself.

My videos are also done with premier and then virtual dub, so I have no hands on experience with After Effects. I did some look into it a little bit because I was considering getting it.

From my understanding, you'd want to have both. I believe AE can even be integrated into Premier. It lets you do all the pretty stuff in easier and cleaner ways than you could do it in Premier. For example, if you wanted a handwriting or "tracing" effect, you can do this with a bit of time and creative use of several pictures and the gradient transition, or you can just whip it out in a minute with AE. The difference here is a 15-30 minute job doing a "good enough" trace with premier, or a 1 minute job doing a much cleaner trace with AE.

That's just a simple feature. I'm guessing that if you were to spend that same 15-30 minutes, you could very well make some incredible effects that would either take insane amounts of time in Premier or would just be logistical nightmares.

ikusat wrote:I'm guessing that if you were to spend that same 15-30 minutes, you could very well make some incredible effects that would either take insane amounts of time in Premier or would just be logistical nightmares.

You would be correct.

N

They integrate with each other to make all sorts of things. Some things are not possible to make without using both apps. You can't have professional-level video w/o trapcode shine.

I don't have any experience using any other programs besides those so i can't give you good feedback, but if TBB was still around he would egg you on to DL AE and Premiere 'cause Adobe doesn't care. I'm not sure about that, but nevertheless, they're still great programs and its worth learning AE, there are a bunch of people here that know it, too.