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Unique envelope types? (panning/masking/video fx)
Hello, one bother I’ve been enduring for a while now in Vegas is that you can’t merge clips that are split into one single clip. I enjoy the Composite envelope and have worked with many, many layers piled on top of one another for fading effects. But why is there no envelope for the really fun stuff like panning, masking, re-timing clips and visual fx?
You can add nodes and fade in/out over clips without wishing you could merge them. But when it comes to having to add keyframe after keyframe at the start and end of every split clip across a linear progression of clips just to keep your Panning going… I’m beginning to think there MUST be an easier way.
I have found that to “fake merge” you can simply import a .veg into your project and it’s treated as just one audio or visual track or both (I guess it imports the audio and/or visual Master Bus from another project?). Or you can render what you want merged as uncompressed video/audio and import that, but somehow whenever I do that I tend to get poorer quality coughed back up at me after that compared to what I had to begin with. It’s also tedious and more of a last resort work-around than a good practical solution.
Nevertheless, at least you can edit the panning/etc to all those clips at once.
I still wish Vegas would just have a simple old Merge option. There have been so many times when I needed it with all the splits I make to time music to video… Hundreds easily, possibly thousands of splits in this last project. 12 minutes and 17 layers, lots of masking and AfterFX fun too. But I could REALLY use more efficiency in my work.
I know there’s “Grouping” but from what I can tell that only affects speeding up or slow down the events in the Group. Useful, but why not combine their Panning and VideoFX too?
I’m using Vegas Pro 8.0c. Any thoughts?
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4 Replies
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You’re right, of course, it would be nice. The closest option we have is Render to New, and that acts the same way, except that you can’t split out the components again. You CAN embed the .veg in the rendered file, which allows you to re=open and later edit the finished render, assuming the components are on the HDD>
Douglas Spotted Eagle
VASSTCertified Sony Vegas Trainer
Aerial Camera/Instructor -
Thanks for just a quick response, wasn’t expecting that! Ah, to have one of the pros tell me I’ve maxed out my options is a bitter sweet wine indeed…
When you say “Render to New” is that the same as what I mentioned before? Just pick out the stuff you need and do a regular uncompressed render? I guess it is better than no options at all.
And embedding the .veg into your rendered movie itself? Sort of as a back up for your project files? That could come in handy. So if I distributed it to an online video project sharing community, someone could just scan it with their own Vegas and pick up where I left off 🙂
Or wait, does that mean if I import the rendered movie (say a .avi) into Vegas, it wouldn’t just be an audio/video stream, it would be all the tracks and keyframes and composite nodes and so forth?
Because that’s another thing I’ve wanted to do: share the details between .veg projects, not just getting the one combined stream but being able to access all your previous Vegas editing specifics from a different project. Like if one wished to import a scene in the movie WITH all the original splits/keyframes/masks and so forth.
Is what you mentioned a way to do this? (maybe if I could open 2 Vegas projects at once then I could copy from one and paste into another? I’ll have to try that out, but I doubt I’d have enough computer memory left to manage it even if it works…)
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Yes indeed, if you open 2 vegas projects at the same time, you can copy events from one project to the other. This is the normal way for Vegas users.
Douglas also mentioned the Render to New Track option. I use that one very very often, specifically for short pieces on the timeline with a lot of ‘effects’. It compromises all your tracks on the selected region to 1 new track. So your preview is enormously enhanced in that way. And at the same time all your original stuff is still present in the project. So it is easy to change anything and repeat the Render to New Track.
There is no need to use the uncompressed avi for the Render to New Track if you render your final project to DV-avi. The pieces that you rendered already to the new track will just be copied without loss, but saving you the time of re-rendering.Theo
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Yes! Finally found the option and that’s a good trick, makes the whole process feel somewhat more automated, less tedious. Thank you and Douglas!
It also opened my eyes to the idea of actually naming your tracks to make things a bit more easy to follow.
Now if only I could find a way to make those new track clips already start with the same Media Settings as where they were copied from, so I wouldn’t have keep changing the aspect ratio back to widescreen. Also can’t seem to find a DV format to dump in to that allows 704×480. Well, you can’t have everything! Time for more putzing around I guess 😀
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