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I am absolutely confounded by Vegas
A friend said that I’d love Vegas so I gave the 8.0 trial a download.
When I was in college (ART SKOOL – TV Production), I learned NLE on Avid Xpress and Media Composer machines, which emulate an A/B Roll machine. I’m totally comfortable with the whole Avid paradigm of in/out points, timeline patches and the red and yellow insert/overlay edit buttons.
Vegas doesn’t seem to do any of what I’m used to. It’s frustrating to say the least to even try and edit with Vegas and I’m on the verge of just giving up.
I’ll bullet out a few of my main stresses. I’d love it to get an answer.
1. Most (all) online tutorials for this software are youtube videos. I don’t care too much for web2.0, I’d much rather have a hypertext web page stating the facts instead of some mush-mouthed cretin slurring his way through a screencast, wasting ten of my minutes and answering zero of my questions.
2. I guess I can halfass an in/out point in the trimmer window by doing a CtrlA to select the whole timeline and then drag the selection cursors to an in and out, but if I click off the trimmer timeline anywhere, it forgets where my in/outs were and I have to do the whole clip over again. What am I doing wrong?
3. On the timeline, there doesn’t seem to be any way to do an insert edit. I can’t just find an arbitrary point on my timeline, add an in point and just tell the software to lay my track down there, either overwriting or moving the video down the line, the red and yellow arrows in Avid.
4. Clicking on the timeline seems arbitrary. Sometimes a click and drag will cause a selection, sometimes it will grab onto the clip and move it, sometimes it causes a transition and sometimes it just selects one track. All of these come off as completely arbitrary. I can’t figure out how to click and drag to get Vegas to do what I want it to do. In Avid, there were lock/ignore buttons and pick whip-type patches for each track, Vegas seems to be missing this feature.
4a. For instance, if I lay down a cut of video and audio and wish to do a cut halfway in which the video changes but the audio track remains, how do I do this? In Avid, I’d just lay down the V/A tracks, hit the lock/ignore toggle in the Audio track, create an in point and then do an insert/overwrite edit. This is an incredibly simple task that I was taught in my first week of analog cuts-only editing and it’s completely confounding in Vegas. How do I do this?
The only thing I can think of is to create a split in the timeline where I want the cut, delete the video track and then replace the video track. However, I can’t do this as I don’t see any obvious way to select just a video or audio channel.
This is all first week video editing stuff and I absolutely can not figure out how to do any of it in Vegas and none of the tutorials seem to cover it.
All I really want are in/out points and insert/overwrite buttons. I love how Vegas handles basically every filetype known to man – Avid DV’s requirement that all media be of exactly the same format/bitrate/codec always seems to mean it’ll choke out on video captured on two different days – but, Vegas’ editing paradigm is so alien to me that it’s like teaching a dog how to fix a car.
I am so lost and frustrated here, can you guys help me out?
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11 Replies
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When you talk about a trial version of Vegas Pro 8, I suppose you are talking about 8c. To work with in and out point in Vegas, you can check this tutorial:
https://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/news/article.asp?articleid=61&keycode=64140
Currently Vegas has reached version 9c Pro. There the method to work with in- and out points has even been developed further. However, realise that you can work very easily with Vegas without using in- and out points in the way you were used in Avid software.
Theo
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Vegas is so much easier than Avid to me. Just click on a video event on the timeline to select it. Put your curser at either edge and drag to shorten, or or put your curser where you wand to split an hit the s key. Just click on an event on the timeline and you can drag it left and right for timing, and up and down to different tracks. The Vegas help file is very good and you can use the search button, (Binoculars) to find answers to specific questions.
Don’t give up on Vegas just yet. If you learned Avid, you can easily learn Vegas. -
Okay, things I’ve learned to answer my own questions.
1. Impossible. Web2.0 sucks. I ended up buying a book on Vegas 8. Thanks for nothing, internet.
2. I found the “create subclip” button in the trimmer. This remembers my in/out points.
Oh wait, no it doesn’t. Double-clicking anywhere in the trimmer window does a “select all” and wipes out the clip I made.
3. No idea yet. I can’t figure out how to select/grab one clip on the timeline and move it. Click-and-dragging on any point in the timeline moves the entire timeline from that point forward in time. What do I do if I want to move a clip at the beginning of my timeline? This makes no sense whatsoever.
4. Clicking in the timeline is still arbitrary, nothing makes sense.
4a. Uh, I guess I have to make new tracks any time I want to do an edit more complex than butting two clips against one another? Is there another way to do this or am I just going to end up stuck with five video layers and ten audio layers? And what if I want to do an insert edit? The only way I can think is to create a split, insert the second cut on a new video track then switch to the “selection edit” tool, marquee the affected tracks and drag them to the end of the clip I inserted? There was a button for that in Avid.
Also: I can’t figure out how to delete one track from a selection. Using the “select tool” I can marquee off one clip on a track, but hitting delete or backspace wipes out both the audio and video tracks. Hey great. So it appears that my option here is to create a new track, drag the material I don’t want to see or hear to this track and hit the mute button.
What’s a “ripple edit” anyway? Clicking it doesn’t seem to do anything other than change my cursor into a cursor that does less than “normal edit”. The icon for “auto ripple” makes it seem as if by clicking it, all your clips, separated by big chunks of black in the timeline will magically butt up against one another seamlessly. Clicking it does nothing.
Vegas seems like it might be easy to use, at least it doesn’t freak out for no readily apparent reason like Avid is wont to do. It’s just the editing controls are absolutely alien to me. I guess I can understand if someone who never did any analog linear editing got their first exposure to NLE via Vegas taking to it like a fish to water, but I was taught on analog equipment first, to learn the fundamentals of video editing before being taught Premiere and Avid
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I just made a very small Vegas basics tutorial and am uploading it to youtube. I will post it here when its done. It shows some of the simple hings your asking about. Danny
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Here’s a Vegas basics tutorial I just made showing you some of the things your asking about. I see by your setings that your not in the USA otherwise you could call me for more details. If you have a webcam, you can download Skype and we could video converence for free and I could show you what you want to know. Hope this helps, at least a little. I also recommend reading the help file when you get the time. It’s long but very informative. Danny
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7VaCmeHNVA -
Dude, how do you get that I’m not in the United States? My profile is completely empty. Is it because I communicate in complete sentences and thoughts and use proper, literate American English diction, punctuation and spelling?
I understand and appreciate that the internet is full of dunces and you can possibly misconstrue the fact that I’m you know, literate, for foreign nationality, but I can assure you that this is not the case.
RE: your video. That’s cool and all that you spent a ton of effort screencasting a video tutorial but I’m still not going to watch it. Why not spend less effort making a hypertext document with you know, screenshots saved in .gif or .png format, placed into tables with markup tags and subtitles and alt texts formatted in a searchable and skimmable document, one suitable for you know, printing out and leaving on a desk so one can sit and read and glance back and forth between the subject and documentation and actually you know, learn the way people have learned things for millennia?
I appreciate your effort, but you, and everybody else that insists that learning can be done via screencast are being more of a hindrance than an asset to learning.
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Oops, that not in the USA was from someone elses post. I’m just tryin to help you dude. Don’t wanna watch it then figure it out for yourself!
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Danny,
I was wondering why you removed the video. Thought iot might be interesting. But after reading the posts, I understand. Some people really don’t want to learn, they want to complain. -
I totally agree with you removing the video! It’s not worth to spend more words on this topic…
Theo
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Did you do the basics tutorial yet? Am interested in muting live video and inserting song over it instead. Help! Thank you in avance!
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