[Matt Crowley]

PAL DV AVI should be very fast to render, even with some transitions, titles etc.

Is preview playback smooth? It should be flawless on that system.

Have you tried rendering a small section to see if that goes any faster, or trying a different output format like MPEG2? If different formats work faster, there may be some issue with DV codecs on your system.

[Matt Crowley]

Rendering 50p to 25i (eg MPG for DVD) should result in smooth, interlaced output when viewed on a device that correctly handles the interlacing (any PC media player with good deinterlacing, or any standard DVD player and TV). Some media players might not correctly handle interlaced x264 AVI.

To output 25p video (eg for youtube or only PC viewing), you’ll need to disable “resample” for each video event (right-click the event and choose Switches > Disable Resample). That will prevent Vegas blending two 50p frames to create one 25p frame. It will simply drop every second frame to give smooth 25p output.

[Matt Crowley]

Make sure you haven’t mistakenly disabled FFV1 in the ffdshow decoder options (under Codecs in the ffdshow decoder configuration)

[Matt Crowley]

In addition to all that, laptop LCDs (and cheaper desktop LCDs) often have relatively poor viewing angles. Even if you’re in the correct position to view the center of the screen, the top and/or bottom (and sometimes sides) can appear quite different due to the change in angle between your eyes and the screen surface. This is especially noticeable for highlights and blacks. In this case you need to use a better external monitor.

[Matt Crowley]

Insert an “audio bus” track, and assign the instrument tracks to that. Then you can automate or adjust the level for the bus track to set the level of the instrument mix, without affecting the vocal. I don’t owm Vegas Pro so don’t know exactly how to do this, but that’s the general idea.

It’s also perfectly acceptable to pull the master level down a bit to lower the overall level. That will give you some headroom to boost the vocals a bit.

[Matt Crowley]

Ctrl+U clears any group that is selected, i.e. removes all items from the group. This could be lots of events, or just a single video and its audio.

Press G to group all selected events (for example a video and its associated audio).

You can just press U to remove one event from a group, leaving remaining events still grouped. If you do that on a single video-and-audio event, it is equivalent to clearing the group.

[Matt Crowley]

Customize keyboard shortcuts appears to be a Pro-only feature. I’d like to be able to assign keyboard shortcuts for common operations (I have VMS 10), but most of the defaults are reasonable.

The underlined letter on right-click context menus is only useable once you have the context menu up. Right-click on a file (or press your keyboard’s context menu key) in the explorer, then press T and you’ll get the trimmer. I have the option in preferences set to open files in the trimmer on double-click (Open in trimmer instead of timeline).

[Matt Crowley]

For something like this, you should be setting your project settings to match the desired output format (eg 640×360), then dropping your 4:3 footage on the timeline and cropping the video event with the crop aspect set to “Match output aspect”. Crop the 4:3 event so that you just get rid of the letterboxing, then render with the same frame format (eg Internet 360p).

[Matt Crowley]

If you open a VEG file by double-clicking it in Explorer, does it open in the new Vegas or old?

If it opens on Vegas 10, then the system is associating VEG files with your old installation and you need to update the file association.

Try activating the “Check project file type associations…” option in Vegas 11 preferences if it isn’t already active, then restart Vegas. If that doesn’t help, you might need to manually change the file type association. How you do this depends on which version of Windows you’re running.

[Matt Crowley]

For importing as a still image sequence, Vegas seems to like having a sequential number SUFFIX as part of the file name. Using a prefix number won’t work, and having gaps in the sequence will limit the import to the contiguous files before or after the gap.

This will work:
IMG0912.png
IMG0913.png
IMG0914.png
IMG0915.png
IMG0916.png

This won’t use all files since there’s a gap:
IMG0912.png
IMG0913.png
IMG0914.png
IMG0916.png
IMG0917.png

This won’t work at all. Needs to be numbered suffix:
0912IMG.png
0913IMG.png
0914IMG.png
0915IMG.png
0916IMG.png

It’s also possible that Vegas won’t use some file types as a sequence. Stick to common formats to be sure. Only JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, BMP and variations on these are support in VMS. Vegas Pro might support more formats. Check the file types under Image Sequence in the File Types list in the Import dialog.