import Vegas EDL to FCP 4.5?

[Glenn Chan]

Some ideas I can think of:

A- You could finish the edit in Vegas. Versions 5 and 6 of Vegas have really strong audio tools (no point in going Pro Tools) and strong color correction tools.

On the other hand, the learning curve may be a bit high. If you’re used to FCP, Vegas will make no sense to you. As well, a lot of things are not obvious (example: s is for split/blade edit). Vegas doesn’t create broadcast-safe colors by default, although you can make it do so. In Vegas, 16-235 on the histogram is the legal range for luma values (ignore the waveform monitor). Laying black (16 16 16 in Vegas RGB units) underneath will make fade to blacks right.

B- You can try:
EDL, XML from Vegas, Vegas to AE or PPro and then Automatic Duck to FCP, AAF export from PPro, AAF from Vegas, or try to manually conform the edit.
I think some of those options don’t work, from what I remember from reading the Sony Vegas forums at Sony’s site.

Another thing to watch out for is that Vegas captures AVI and is slow with Quicktime. FCP is the opposite. So you may need to re-capture in FCP, which isn’t a big deal since you can tell FCP to batch capture things (right click a clip, select batch capture). If there’s timecode breaks on the original tapes, that will be a problem.

C- If you just want to do the color or titling or audio stuff in Final Cut, you could just print to video and capture into Final Cut that way. What exactly do you need to do on your friend’s film?

[Kristin Tieche]

Thanks for your reply.

My friend is not an editor, and basically assembled a rough cut on Vegas 2.0. She did an ok job assembling the story, but her cuts aren’t really up to par in terms of what you expect to see with a finished film. So it needs some major polishing, and some major color correcting because a lot of the footage is too dark. This is why I want to export an edl, and recapture in final cut, which I use every day and know all the ins and outs. Will try some of your exporting EDL tips. Thansk again!

Kristin

[Kristin Tieche]

Hi, thanks for the tips. My friend opened her project in V6, and she was able to export an AAF, which is still not readable in FCP 4.5, but is readable in After Effects, where it opens all of the media files, but not the timeline or sequence, which still doesn’t help us work on her sequence. Plus I’m not really familiar with using AAF files.

However, the thought of going forward with the polishing in Vegas 6.0 is encouraging. Can anyone suggest a good Vegas tutorial book for FCP users?

Thanks!
Kristin

[Glenn Chan]

Vegas can also export XML, but I have no idea if it’ll work. The two programs handle dissolves differently, which could also be a problem. And Vegas XML formatting is probably different from what FCP is expecting so that may not work.

A good way to describe Vegas is: “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”

2- If you want, you can do all your color stuff in Vegas. Vegas’ color correction tools are pretty nice and better and worse than FCP’s in some ways.

The basics:
Only use the Sony DV codec. This is the default.

Look at the histogram (under video scopes) to see if your values are in legal range. 16 is black, and 235 is white. The histogram is right, the waveform monitor can be wrong depending on how its set (so just ignore the waveform). A lot of the filters and transitions assume black = 0 and white = 255, which isn’t right. This is different from Final Cut.

Filters can be applied at the media, event, track, or video output level. This can save you time.

In the video preview window, you can copy things to clipboard. There’s another button which lets you show the clipboard contents to compare stuff.

To fix dark shots, you can use the color corrector. Gain, offset, and gamma affect brightness. Hold crtl and use the mouse wheel to get smaller increments in adjusting those settings.
To fix dark shots, increase gain and decrease gamma, or just increase gamma.
You can also play around with color curves, but you should make a preset with two points so blacks stay at 16 and white at 235. (Sorry if this is confusing.) Use the black to whtie gradient generator and the legacy broadcast safe filter to help you. Right click points on color curves to reset tangents.

To get noise reduction, go to https://mikecrash.wz.cz/
Get the free filters. Dynamic noise reduction and the smart smoother can be used to give you ok noise reduction. Use low settins on the dynamic noise reduction… like around 7-8 to avoid motion artifacts.
Third party plug-ins can do a better job. You can frameserve out to Virtualdub and there’s free NR plug-ins for it (i.e. MSU).
The latest version of AE has nice noise reduction.

With Vegas, you should preview on an external crt-based broadcast monitor to get accurate colors (the video preview is off). In Vegas 6, you can get better monitoring if you use a windows secondary display, using color profiling and studio RGB.

(Maybe this is all a little complicated?)

3- Helpful Sony Vegas resources:

Forums:
https://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowTopics.asp?ForumID=4
https://www.dvinfo.net/conf/forumdisplay.php?f=54

Tutorials:
https://www.creativecow.net/articles/vegasvideo.html

If I wasn’t lazy I could be writing better tutorials on how to color correct in Vegas.