Editing in Vegas

[Steve Rhoden]

I cannot make sense from what you have written here.

Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Film Editor & Compositor.
Filmex Creative Media.
1-876-832-4956

[John Bean]

Of course you can! So long as Vegas can open the video!

If Vegas can not open your video then you are missing the codec for it.

Also, depending on how *powerful* your system is, some high-quality video (high compression+bitrate+complexity) can be too much for your PC to handle.

In that case, you’ll need to either upgrade your system to a more powerful one (latest CPUs, motherboard, RAM, HDD, etc) … or you will have to encode your source video to an intermediate video file that is easier for your system to process and edit in REAL-TIME.

[Hank Roessel]

Thanks for the reply John. I have just started using Vegas. The program does not modify the source file when deleting portions of a video on the time line. How do I delete portions of the source file which I don’t want to keep?

[John Bean]

Edit your video as you desire. Use Vegas’s realtime PREVIEW WINDOW to check your edits.

When you are satisfy, you need to RENDER-AS. This will create a NEW VIDEO with the edits that you made.

DO NOT RENDER-AS using the same filename as your SOURCE video file in the same directory! This will delete your source video file!

If you setup your PROJECT SETTINGS optimally and correctly, and then if you select the RENDER-AS format (template) that best matches the same quality as your original source, you should end up with a new video that is similar in quality to your original (if not equal or better if you know how to edit and apply effects and fixes).

Good luck!

[Nigel O’neill]

Hank

Video editing is non-destructive and will not modify the source to save disk space. When you are ‘deleting’ portions of video, you are in fact trimming by placing markers in the video stream in a proxy file that the software later uses to encode a new file when you ‘render as’. A similar principle applies when adding FX. Video editing on PC’s has come a long way since the days of linear and destructive editing of film stock.

Video editing is a space hungry application, and you will find that during the encoding process, Vegas creates temporary files before writing out the final file, so you really need disk space.

For video editing, the absolute bare minimum of drives you should have is 2: a C: drive of say, 500 GB, and a 2nd drive of say, 1TB. I run 5 drives, 2 of which are mirrored and another 2 are striped, in addition to my C: drive.

You can in theory get a 2TB drive and run that as your C: drive and edit solely on that, but encoding performance will suffer. The overall video editing experience may be impacted as system processes compete for the hard drive. Partitioning 1 drive into 2 or 3 does not help as the same physical read head mechanism has to traverse the 1 drive. Having a second or third drive means you can spread the load.

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