[Steve Van pelt]

Dude, how do you get that I’m not in the United States? My profile is completely empty. Is it because I communicate in complete sentences and thoughts and use proper, literate American English diction, punctuation and spelling?

I understand and appreciate that the internet is full of dunces and you can possibly misconstrue the fact that I’m you know, literate, for foreign nationality, but I can assure you that this is not the case.

RE: your video. That’s cool and all that you spent a ton of effort screencasting a video tutorial but I’m still not going to watch it. Why not spend less effort making a hypertext document with you know, screenshots saved in .gif or .png format, placed into tables with markup tags and subtitles and alt texts formatted in a searchable and skimmable document, one suitable for you know, printing out and leaving on a desk so one can sit and read and glance back and forth between the subject and documentation and actually you know, learn the way people have learned things for millennia?

I appreciate your effort, but you, and everybody else that insists that learning can be done via screencast are being more of a hindrance than an asset to learning.

[Steve Van pelt]

Okay, things I’ve learned to answer my own questions.

1. Impossible. Web2.0 sucks. I ended up buying a book on Vegas 8. Thanks for nothing, internet.

2. I found the “create subclip” button in the trimmer. This remembers my in/out points.

Oh wait, no it doesn’t. Double-clicking anywhere in the trimmer window does a “select all” and wipes out the clip I made.

3. No idea yet. I can’t figure out how to select/grab one clip on the timeline and move it. Click-and-dragging on any point in the timeline moves the entire timeline from that point forward in time. What do I do if I want to move a clip at the beginning of my timeline? This makes no sense whatsoever.

4. Clicking in the timeline is still arbitrary, nothing makes sense.

4a. Uh, I guess I have to make new tracks any time I want to do an edit more complex than butting two clips against one another? Is there another way to do this or am I just going to end up stuck with five video layers and ten audio layers? And what if I want to do an insert edit? The only way I can think is to create a split, insert the second cut on a new video track then switch to the “selection edit” tool, marquee the affected tracks and drag them to the end of the clip I inserted? There was a button for that in Avid.

Also: I can’t figure out how to delete one track from a selection. Using the “select tool” I can marquee off one clip on a track, but hitting delete or backspace wipes out both the audio and video tracks. Hey great. So it appears that my option here is to create a new track, drag the material I don’t want to see or hear to this track and hit the mute button.

What’s a “ripple edit” anyway? Clicking it doesn’t seem to do anything other than change my cursor into a cursor that does less than “normal edit”. The icon for “auto ripple” makes it seem as if by clicking it, all your clips, separated by big chunks of black in the timeline will magically butt up against one another seamlessly. Clicking it does nothing.

Vegas seems like it might be easy to use, at least it doesn’t freak out for no readily apparent reason like Avid is wont to do. It’s just the editing controls are absolutely alien to me. I guess I can understand if someone who never did any analog linear editing got their first exposure to NLE via Vegas taking to it like a fish to water, but I was taught on analog equipment first, to learn the fundamentals of video editing before being taught Premiere and Avid