[Mike Kujbida]

“…I am pretty sure Vegas MUST render & recompress.”

It does and that’s why you’ll suffer a drop in quality 🙁
How much of a drop is acceptable is up to you.
I’ve done it before with short videos (less than one hour) and it’s been OK for me.
I’d re-render at the maximum bitrate possible (and maybe do it as a 2-pass as well). As long as it’s under an hour, you can go with a CBR of 8,000,000 (the recommended maximum).
You can avoid the unnecessary re-compression in Vegas by using apps such as Womble’s MPEG Video Wizard or VideoReDo, both of which, unlike Vegas, are smart renderers. That is, they render only the necessary portions and leave the rest as is.

[Mike Kujbida]

Don’t bother with Track Motion for zooming.
It’s great at moving images around the screen or shrinking them down and placing them in a certain position.
If you started with a still image that’s 2500 x 1600 pixels, it changes this to your project size (720 x 480) and zooms in on that. As you can imagine, the result, especially if you do a 2X or 3X zoom, will be unacceptable.
OTOH, Pan/Crop retains the image’s original size when zooming which is why it’s the preferred tool for doing this.

[Mike Kujbida]

If you thought the quality was bad with your DVD method, this will be even more disappointing 🙁
USB transfers aren’t the way to go with Vegas.
Either invest in a Canopus box (ADVC-55 or 110) or an ADS Pyro.
It’s more money but the quality is worth it.
If that’s too rich for you, try to find a miniDV camera on EBay that has a feature called pass-through.
This allows you to feed an analog signal in (what you want to do) and outputs it from the firewire port (the preferred method for Vegas).
The tape transport on the camera can be damaged as all you need is working electronics for the pass-through to work.

[Mike Kujbida]

[Laszlo Kovacs] “I agree, but also disagree this.”

I came across this tip (doubling the text size) at least 3 years ago and have been using it ever since.
I don’t see any performance hit and, as I said, even without doing any zooming, my text is definitely cleaner.

[Mike Kujbida]

If you’re referring to commercial DVDs, it’s because they’re using dual layer discs which, until recently, were not available to us mere mortals 🙂
Now that they are, there’s nothing stopping you (with the exceptions of a burner and authoring software) from burning to that type of media.
Having said that, I’ve done several 2 hr. DVDs in the past few years that have been burned to single layer discs and no one has complained about the quality.
I use a much higher-end 3CCD camera though and that makes a huge difference in the final quality.

[Mike Kujbida]

1) How to get the clips in the same scene/timeline.

Place clip 1 on track 1 and clip 2 on track 2.
Use Track Motion to shrink as desired.

2) How to move them up and down to fit, like my edited-picure illustrates.

Once again, Track Motion.
If you’ve never used it before, grab Vol. 1 – #02, #03 & #04 of Edward Troxel’s free newsletters (PDF format).
The article you want is titled “Creating a PIP using Track Motion”.

[Mike Kujbida]

Laszlo is right!!

Pan/Crop is my preference for doing this kind of move.
I just tried this and, other than some anti-aliasing twitter on the line edges, it was very smooth.

Aother suggestion is to double the text size and there will be a difference in the final quality.
This is done in the size boxes in the Text Event FX box.
Change them from 720×480 to 1440×960.
These numbers are for NTSC. Adjust as necessary for PAL.

One other thing. If you’re using Vegas 6 or earlier, make sure to set the Smoothness value in the Pan/Crop box to 0 before you create any keyframes. This will avoid a title “bump” at the end of your zoom.

[Mike Kujbida]

Park the cursor at the desired point and go Insert – Time.
Enter the desired amount of time into the box that comes up.
Double-click the blank space to highlight it. This is done to avoid having overlaps because the default time was too long.
Drop desired event into that space.

[Mike Kujbida]

I’m confused here with what you’re trying to accomplish.

The normal audio fades raise the volume from 0…

That’s normal behaviour for a fade-in (at the beginning of a clip).

…fade the volume from full volume to a 0…

That’s normal behaviour for a fade-out (at the end of a clip).

Try experimenting with volume envelopes to see if this is what you’re looking for.

[Mike Kujbida]

John, doing it that way makes things (IMO) much easier as Windoze won’t do any strange sorting quirks on you.
In case you don’t know it, you can bring in a series of stills as an animation.
File – Import to the folder that the images are in, click the first one, click the “Open still image sequence” box at the bottom of the screen and then click Open.
Vegas will automatically load all the files in the sequence and import them as an already-assembled animation ready to be dropped on your timeline.