Really Basic Questions…probly gonna make me look dumb.

[Rob Strobbe]

It’s not playing track one. It’s playing whatever is visible. Think of tracks as “layers” of your video, and you’re looking at those layers from the top. Wherever on your timeline you have an event on track one, it will hide anything on track two (three, four, etc). If there is a point in your project where you have an event on track two but not on track one, then you will see whatever’s on track two. The main exception will be when your events have areas that are transparent.

When you render your project out to a video, all of the tracks will be composited into one with Vegas hiding / showing all of the tracks as you have edited them. So when you look in the preview window, what you see is what you get.

If you just want to see a lower track for previewing purposes, then hit the Mute button on the higher track that’s hiding it. (The Mute button is on the track header and looks like a circle with a line through it.) Click the Mute button again to unmute the track.

If you actually need the lower track(s) to be visible in the rendered video, you have several options.

1. Split the event on higher track and delete the parts you don’t need.
2. Right-click the higher track and choose Insert/Remove Envelope > Composite Level. You can then add points (double-click the line) to that envelope to adjust the opacity of the envelope.
3. Right-click the higher track and choose Insert/Remove Envelope > Mute. Similar to #2, but Composite Level lets you have varying degrees of opacity. A Mute envelope is simply on or off.
4. Bezier masking — this is an option in the Pan / Crop tool (if you’re using Vegas Pro) that lets you “draw” areas you want to cut out or reveal from an event.
5. A few other options — the list so far is enough to get you started, I’m sure. 😉

As for speeding up clips, right-click an event and choose Insert/Remove Envelope > Velocity. There, you can drag points up to speed up the event and down to slow it down.

Enjoy.

Rob

[Amanda Faughn]

Ah! Thank you so much! 🙂

[Amanda Faughn]

I tried the Velocity thing, and maybe I’m doing it wrong but it didn’t work the way I wanted it to.

When i try to make the clip slower or faster, it includes some of the parts of the video that i cut it FROM. all i want to do is drag out the piece i’ve cut out.

do you know what i mean?

[Rob Strobbe]

“do you know what i mean?”

Yep. I also know why it does that and what to do about it. First the What. And if you really want to know, you can read the Why. 😉

What to do:

If you’ve used the velocity envelope to speed up an event (“clip”), put your cursor where you want it to end (where you split the larger event (the original video) and split it again. Delete the piece that’s left over on the right (the one that contains the footage you don’t want). Alternatively, click and drag the right edge to trim the event until the event ends where you want it to.

If you used the velocity envelope to slow down an event, you’ll need to extend the event further to recover the rest. For that, you’ll need to grab the right endge of the event and drag it out further. How far will depend on how much you slowed it down, but you can just put your cursor at the end and look at the preview window to check.

Oh, yeah, and do all this after you’ve gotten your velocity envelope the way you want it. Otherwise you’ll just have to re-adjust your event again.

Why this happens:

An event (which is what Vegas creates when you drag a video file to the timeline) is like a window into a piece of media. When you drag a video file to the timeline, the resulting event is large enough to display the entire video start to finish. When you split an event or trim its edges, all you’re really doing is changing the size of that window — how much of it you “see”; but everything that was there before is still in there somewhere.

For example, you drag a two minute file to the timeline: Vegas creates a two minute event that displays the whole two minute video. You cut half a minute off the beginning and half a minute off the end, leaving yourself with a one minute event. Play the timeline, and you will see one minute play from your original video. But know what? The whole two minute video is still in there. All you’ve done is changed the size of the window. (In fact, you can do what’s called “slip editing” where you actually change which one minute will be shown. But I’m sure you don’t want to hear about that right now. Information overload.)

So, to finally get to the point: When you add and adjust a velocity envelope, you’re change how fast the video (the whole video) within the event plays. In the above example, the content that took up one minute of your one minute event would take 30 seconds to play if you changed it’s speed to 200% (sped it up to twice as fast). But your event (the “window”) is still one minute long — how does Vegas fill up the remaining 30 seconds? It simply continues playing whatever comes next in the media until it reaches the end of the event. When that happens, you just re-adjust the size of the event as needed.

The opposite is true when you use the velocity envelope to slow down media. When something is slowed down, it takes longer to play. When it takes longer to play, you need a longer event in order to give it all time to get shown.

I know it sounds kind of odd, but all this will eventually (or maybe already does?) make sense. And the way Vegas treats media actually comes in very handy when editing — even it does make using velocity envelopes kind of flaky.

Rob

[Amanda Faughn]

I really really appreciate all this detailed feedback, it’s incredible helpful. =]

I’m not quite sure I fully understand this velocity thing though.

But before I ask about that again, I have another question. It’s the most annoying thing in the world when you’re playing a clip and it lags. When I’m using timeline 2 to piece together my actual video, and I play it (with track one muted =), thanks again) and it lags..or skips. I have a transition between to clips, and no matter how much bigger or smaller I make the view, it still skips right over that transition. Is there a way to fix this, make it play more efficiently, or does my computer just suck and i’m screwed? lol

I thought it might help to close out of all other programs to make the program work faster, but that didn’t work either. :/

and now about the velocity…if I didn’t want to use that, is there any other way?

for instance, i tried right clicking on the clip > properties > playback rate

and I made the number smaller and the clip seems to be a little slower. does that work too? or am i hallucinating? lol 😛

[Rob Strobbe]

“I’m not quite sure I fully understand this velocity thing though.”

No worries. It behaves kind of funky, and the behavior you’re having trouble will surprise even someone who’s been using Vegas for months or even years. When you’re ready to confront it again, start a new thread with “velocity envelope” in the title, and I or someone else will be along to see if they can make it clearer.

“for instance, i tried right clicking on the clip > properties > playback rate”

This does exactly what you think it does. Higher playback rate runs it faster, lower playback rate runs it slower. In fact, one way to get really fast or really slow playback is to use both the playback rate and a velocity envelope together. (Velocity envelope has a max of 3x, playback rate has a max of 4x. So using them together speeds something up 12x.)

You can achieve the same effect by holding the Ctrl key and clicking and dragging the edge of an event — longer event runs slower, shorter event runs faster.

As for Vegas lagging, that can depend on a lot of things. First and foremost is, yes, whether or not your computer sucks. 😉 What kind of processor and how much memory does it have? Honestly, it doesn’t really take a lot to run Vegas (I have a desktop and a laptop, and my desktop machine is olllllllllld, but I get along okay). But faster and bigger is always better.

Other things that will affect how well Vegas runs are:

1. The number of programs running in the background. Even if you don’t have any windows open, there are likely several programs running that you don’t see — maybe anti-virus software, device helpers waiting to see if you need help with a device, IM apps waiting to see if you want to IM. Most of these will have icons on the lower right of the taskbar. Right-click any of them, figure out what it is, and decide if you need it running while you’re using Vegas. If not, most have a Quit or Exit option. You can also hit Ctrl+Alt+Del to get Windows’ Task Manager, but it’s less obvious what each item there is.

2. The kind of compression being used by the videos on your timeline. Some are more compressed than others, and Vegas has to uncompress those frames to memory before it can display them. That’s actually a fair amount of work. Things slow down especially at a transition because Vegas is not only decompressing and displaying the video, but it’s creating “new” video (the combination of your two events) on the fly. When you use video that’s not so highly compressed, Vegas can concentrate on what it was made for — creating those new frames. Do you know what type of compression (or “codec”) being used by the files on your timeline?

3. Similar to above, if your videos use a different framesize (also known as resolution) than what your project properties are set it, Vegas has to resize everything as well. For best results, be sure that these are the same. For example, if the videos on your timeline are 800×600 (not likely, but just go with it), and your project is 720×480, changing the latter to the former will help speed things along.

4. Regarding memory, one possibility is that Vegas is reserving too much for something called dynamic RAM preview. Basically, this is a way of getting Vegas to render a segment of your project directly to memory so you can see it play in realtime (or close to it). It’s especially good for previewing parts that require a lot of number crunching from Vegas — for example, transitions. 😉 The catch is that there is a setting in the preferences dialog for how much memory Vegas should use for dynamic RAM previews. What doesn’t occur to a lot of people, though, is that Vegas is actually reserving that amount, which means it will ignore that much memory for all other purposes. Not there, doesn’t exist, not use for things like regular previewing.

Item #4 may be moot, though, since the default setting for dynamic RAM preview is actually rather small, so unless you’ve changed it that’s probably not it. If you want to check, go to Options > Preferences > Video. If you don’t plan on using RAM preview, setting this value to 64 will get you release the most amount of memory to standard operations. (Don’t set it for less than 64.)

Now that I’ve said that, though, you may want to actually put dynamic RAM preview to use. You can make a selection of your transition (either by clicking and dragging on the timeline from one side of the transition to the other or by double-clicking within the transition) and then force a RAM preview by hitting Shift+B. Vegas will slowly move through the selection to build a RAM preview. When it stops, you can hit the Play button to see the transition as it was rendered.

If Vegas stops doing the initial render to memory and changes the size of your selection, that means that the dynamic RAM preview setting is not large enough to do the whole selection. Try increasing the number in preferences.

Isn’t this fun?

Rob