1st wedding with Sony Vegas…7hrs of footage!

[Philippe Gosselin]

Hi Mike,

If you have a decent computer why don’t you edit as is?

I’ve always dropped the footage in the trimmer, trimmed and dropped on the timeline and went from there. Granted I renew my machine every year or so, so it can keep up. I shudder to think of the hassle of rendering all clips to an intermediate format.

[Mike Clouse]

Thanks Philippe

By doing this clip by clip (trimmer then timeline) ,do you think Vegas will
choke?..I have a fast machine core I7 ,8gig ram,two monitors.I just do not want any Vegas crashes(or preview problems) during a long edit if I can avoid it by breaking the 30 min final product up into say..6-minute segments then putting it back together for the final render. Does this make sense or am I being overly cautious on this?

Thanks for the help!

Mike

[Jeff Schroeder]

Tell us something about your computer (specs). You should be able to edit just fine if, after applying color correction and whatever, disable the fx in the video preview window, and lower the preview quality. (don’t use good or best.) Some i5 and most i7 machines can handle this.

Jeff

2-Xeon X5680 @ 3.33, EVGA SR-2 Mobo, 48GB DDR3, GTX 580 3072MB, 16TB Attached Storage, Win7, Vegas 11 x64

[Mike Clouse]

[Jeff Schroeder] “Tell us something about your computer (specs). You should be able to edit just fine if, after applying color correction and whatever, disable the fx in the video preview window, and lower the preview quality. (don’t use good or best.) Some i5 and most i7 machines can handle this”

Hi Jeff
Well I mis-spoke on the specs before,its a AMD Phenom II 1065T 6-core processor with 8 gigs of Ram,Radeon 1 gig 6850 Graphics card,one 2t hard disk,and 3t external.
I do usually have to lower the preview to good for smooth playback.
So color correction and all VX,FX done on each trimmed clip? Is this
how you would handle the 7-hours of footage,or render each trimmed,color corrected clip to later bring back into the final product?

Thanks for the help Jeff!

Mike

[Jeff Schroeder]

Mike,

You should break the project into several smaller projects. Before Wedding, ceremony, travel, reception, etc.

I wouldn’t render each event one to be brought in later. I would only render once, when finished.

I would take ‘snapshots’ of my color correction, so I could maintain consistency in a given environment. (i.e. all the church shots match, the outdoor shots match, and reception shots match.) Save all your color correction fx chains so you can quickly add new events from the same camera/environment.

Plan your work well, so you can render overnight if need be. That processor will be sufficient as long as you don’t expect highly treated events to preview at best quality.

Jeff

2-Xeon X5680 @ 3.33, EVGA SR-2 Mobo, 48GB DDR3, GTX 580 3072MB, 16TB Attached Storage, Win7, Vegas 11 x64

[Nigel O’neill]

I shoot multi-cam weddings and collectively I can have twelve hours of footage on the timeline from 4 cameras with a mix of HDV, AVCHD and stills. No problems in Vegas (I am still on 10c, though because of my Vasst plugin).

You need to ask yourself (or your client), do they really need 6-7 hours of product? Are they really going to want to watch it all over again? I tend to do a shortened version (set to music) of the bridal preparations unless there is more significant component such as a blessing ceremony (common is Asian cultures) which I include. Sometimes there is also the groom getting shaved by his best man and then dressed by his groomsmen(Greek culture), but once again, I tend to cut that down to music interspersed with short segments of ties being straightened or a witty comment coming from the father of the groom, best man etc.

I then include the wedding ceremony in full, and the bridal party entrance, speeches, cake cutting, bridal dance, a bit of the guests dancing and departures. If anyone is willing to go on camera for a one-on-one interview, I do that and call it ‘messages’. I also include a photo montage that lasts about 8 minutes and then typically do a highlights version of the wedding of around 10 minutes.

Typically, I start with about 6 hours of footage, but can do the whole wedding in around 3 hours (including the montage, introductions, extras etc) which just squeezes onto 2 DVD’s.

My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 10e (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Mike Clouse]

Thanks Nigel

Great tips! I am going to use them all!
Now back to Vegas……

Mike

[Mike Clouse]

Thanks Jeff…not sure how to do color correction “snapshots” but
I will do a search on this term and see what I can find.

It sure is nice to have access to the experts here on the COW!

Thanks for all who help!
Mike

[Nigel O’neill]

Mike

As the other posters suggest, you need to be very organised and structured. See you after about 60 hours of editing :-).

My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 10e (x32/x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Jeff Schroeder]

Mike,

At the top of the preview window is an icon of a floppy disk labeled ‘save snapshot to file’. You can take pictures of a frame and compare it to your other work. It helps with consistency.

Drag it in over an event you are working on and use the mute or solo toggles in the track controls.

Jeff

2-Xeon X5680 @ 3.33, EVGA SR-2 Mobo, 48GB DDR3, GTX 580 3072MB, 16TB Attached Storage, Win7, Vegas 11 x64