Best way to handle removal of material from timeline?

jeh wrote on 6/30/2003, 10:41 PM

So I have this largish project. Three cameras were running for a total of two and a half hours. The target material though is 14 dance routines, total a little under an hour, that occurred in three different time blocks over the 2.5 hours. I have all my tracks syncd up and the cuts and dissovles between cameras for each performance are where I want them, resulting in a master video track.

(Thank you, Excalibur. It is easy enough to tweak one dissove here, and add a cut there, after Excalibur has done its work, but I would have hated to do all of these by hand. Why, in its fourth major version, does Vegas not have multicamera support built-in? Hmm? I was VERY surprised at this omission. Anyway.)

Now I need to collapse the time between the routines. In other words I need to collapse the master timeline to omit the stuff between the routines that I don't want. In some cases there's a lot of this, in others, not much.

What's the best way to do this? Just select all tracks and go whacking stuff out, with "ripple" in effect? It seems so... final. But as I said in another post I'm not completely comfortable with this "non-destructive editing" concept yet.

It actually does seem a bit error-prone, given that ALL tracks have to be carefully selected during the deletions.

I did have an idea to help plan the edit - I rendered the whole thing to a new file, then opened that in a second project and did the cuts there. Now of course changes in the original set of edits won't be propagated to the new file, but that's ok, because this new file was just for planning and practice.

Still, I approach the actual "final cutting" with a bit of trepidation.

Is there an easier way? What would really be handy would be a way to mark regions on the timeline for "skipping" during rendering. Sort of like ctrl-K does (but only for previewing) to a selected region in Sound Forge.

Comments

jetdv wrote on 6/30/2003, 10:58 PM

The general method I use is to remove all clips between the sections, highlight the area, and then ripple edit it shut. However, if I want the clips to overlap, I must select ALL clips after the current position and then manually drag them to the position I need.

filmy wrote on 6/30/2003, 11:12 PM

If I am getting you it sounds like you are having some of the same issues that I am with editing and taking out edits you don't like. The bottom line is that there isn't a real "easy" way to do it. It is a bit frusterating to be sure - tonight I was doing more work on the film I am cutting and this was a dialog scene. Several times I hit the delete key on a split or an insert and of course the audio was still left over. (And if ripple was turned on than everyhting just sort of pulled up over that audio) On another thread where I mentioned the same thing I got told various things to do, none as intuative or 'easy' as just selecting the take and hitting the delete key.

So - several options - one is just do it like it says in the help and/or manual. Another is just delete each event as it comes along, but keep an eye out for left over audio. In your case you seem to also want to keep other versions of your edit - so just do your rough cut and save a copy and call it like 'Editors fine cut'. Work on that and than save a copy and call it 'Directors cut' and so on. And than there is the way you already did - render out the cut and cut down from that. (This is not so weird - many many things have been cut this way in the past. Feature films would often have their promos cut from the locked print. Certian sections would have internegs/interpositives made from select scenes and than cut down from that. A theatrical trailer would be cut down to a 60 and the 60 would be cut to a 30 and so on. Great thing about NLE's is you can go back again if you need to and not have to hear 'oh man - but we cut the negative already, we can't replace that frame')

So - there isn't really one way to do what you want to do, you just need to pick the method you are most comfortable with. The other option is you could take each 'routine' and save it to it's own project. Work on it routine by routine basis. When you have each one locked just re-import it/them to one final project. Either by rendering or by doing the 'cut and paste' method that has been mentioned on the threads.

jeh wrote on 7/1/2003, 12:09 AM

thanks to both of you so far. I do like the idea of chopping the thing up and reintegrating later.

The notion of saving different .veg files for different stages (many different stages, since I'm new at this) is something I've already been doing. It's great. :)