Switching to Vegas after a background in Final Cut. A few questions.

[Drew Tanner]

Hey, I have a background in Final Cut Pro and Vegas too (although version 8). I actually went the opposite way as you did, starting in vegas.

The spacebar thing can be changed in the options, but you can also use ENTER, which will start/pause the video at its current location.

As for navigation, you can drag the timeline from the timecode strip at the top. Mousewheel scrolling + SHIFT does the same thing. Mousewheel + CTRL moves the timeline up and down (if you’re dealing with a lot of tracks).

And finally, if the playback is choppy you can try setting a lower quality on the preview window (above it in the drop down list). Or you can select an area of timeline and use SHIFT + B to do a quick render to memory. This is a kickass feature if you have a lot of tracks/compositing and want to see it play back smoothly.

As for the phone video, I don’t know. I suppose you could always use something like virtualdub to export it. Hopefully somebody more knowledgeable about formats can help you.

Vegas is great once you learn its little quirks. Btw, speaking of quirks, if you have trouble pinpointing a place in the timeline to edit: CTRL/SHIFT + click on the event. This always annoyed me until I figured it out. Because sometimes you want to highlight the track to cut and the cursor moves slightly when you click. This always annoyed me until I figured it out. good luck 🙂

[John Rofrano]

First thing I notice is that pressing space takes me back to where I first started playing it, rather than pausing there.

As Drew said, you can change it. Use Options | Preferences | General and down by the bottom of this list check Make spacebar and F12 Play/Pause instead of Play/Stop

Also, navigating around the timeline is annoying as hell because I seemingly can’t drag the pointer around as that just selects the piece

If you hover your mouse over the ruler at the top of the track area it will change to a hand. This indicates that you can drag the ruler to scroll the track area back and forth. You can, of course, use the scroll bars at the bottom and the sides. Double-click the bottom scroll bar to toggle between the entire project view and normal view. Double-click the vertical scroll bars to toggle the track height from minimized to normal height. Finally, you can scrub the timeline by dragging the top of the Timeline Cursor sometimes referred to in other NLE’s as the Current Time Indicator (CTI).

As for the phone video, I don’t know. I suppose you could always use something like virtualdub to export it. Hopefully somebody more knowledgeable about formats can help you.

FCP would have you transcode everything that you edit into Apples ProRes422 format. Vegas lets you edit native formats but sometimes this doesn’t perform well. In those cases it’s best to transcode these to another format as Drew said. Cineform is the digital intermediary of choice on the PC. It is visually lossless. You can buy it for $99 USD (Cineform NeoScene) at Videoguys.com. M-JPEG works great for SD and HD but is more lossy.

~jr

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