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

[Dave Haynie]

[Mike Clouse] “I have to go through all the 7-hrs of footage and see what is usable,but after that I know I cant just dump 7-hours of footage on the timeline and expect Vegas to handle it…..so would something like this work…render a clip or two at a time and save to a separate directory ,then back into Vegas for the final product.”

Vegas will handle that much video just dandy… I have routinely dropped in 3-6 hours of raw video with no problems. I have a slightly faster PC than yours (AMD 1090T), but not dramatically different.

My usual workflow is to apply global effects to all video first. This is color correction and matching (you’re only matching if you use multiple cameras; for a wedding, the definition of “white” is usually the bride’s gown). I shot a wedding once that took place in a dimly lit nightclub; in that case, I added noise processing as well, to all clips. If you do this, and have the disc space, you can render out to Cineform ($), DNxHD, or high bitrate MXF/MPEG-2 as an intermediate form, which will also make your editing go faster than AVC. If you’re using any of these (MPEG-2 at about 40-50Mb/s), you’re not going to see any significant loss over the original video. You will need a good deal of spare disc for the project.

When I shoot a wedding, I typically devote a spare ATA drive for the project and all the assets. If, for some reason, I shot with just one camera, I hopefully have a deal with the happy couple for access to digital photos (I shot one in Florida once covered by three separate pro still photographers… there was at least one photographer in every one of my shots, but I had plenty of stills, which can animated,”Ken Burns” style, as useful B-roll cuts).

If you’re having stability problems with Vegas (not uncommon these days) or just organizing things, it’s certainly possible to break the video up into segments. I usually do this, whether then actual project is a single .veg file or multiple separate projects. For one, I strongly recommend not delivering a long wedding video, unless the customer has specifically asked for it. I prefer to break it up into segments on the disc itself: a montage (if you shot this), the main ceremony, the reception, etc. Even if they do want a single 3+ hr. video, knowing there’s virtually no chance they’ll ever watch that in one sitting, I use the magic of DVD to ensure the segments are separately available… or if really necessary, use it as an excuse for breaking it up into actually viewable segments (a 3hr single video needs a DVD9_R disc, which is sketchier about playing on the typical DVD player).

So you can have a top-level DVD menu with “Wedding”, “Reception”, “Play All”, and “Extras” options. It’s reasonable to create this as separate projects, since that’s how the assets go into the BD/DVD authoring app anyway.

-Dave

[Mike Clouse]

Thanks Dave!

Very good advice! I really appreciate your thought on this..very helpful

Mike