Editing stills will get you a long way, too. Making slideshows, adding comments and or music, using pan/crop and all sorts of transitions or effects, colour corrections, adding text; you can have a lot of learning fun just by putting slideshows togenter.
Tor

I've seen Spot's books in retail stores, you may have to ask for help to find them, easy for a single title to get lost in the forest, his books,tapes, Ed's, who else, I forget I think are on Amazon and Barnes and Nobel's web sites. There are all kind of tutorials on the web now about Vegas. On my site, Spot's COW, etc., we both have fairly extensive lists to others that wrote some.

Take the time to download the Vegas manual in PDF format, it has lots of solid informaiton in it,(the 3rd version has/had a munch of basic how-to and downloadable tutorials) much more than the little introduction booklet that's part of the package. Many have taken it to some local print shop to get it printed, bound, a few have done it themself.

The best way to really learn any software, Vegas, Photoshop, Flash, whatever, is just use it. Lots. The more you do, the more you'll learn. Also as its been said countless times THIS and its sister forums is also a good source to learn about Vegas and other Sony software. I think the PDF file is still on this site somewhere under products, then Vegas. Didn't bother to check, it should still be there somewhere. Also there is a FAQ, it rarely gets mentioned. Don't forget Kelly's site where you'll find hundreds of vids made by the people here.

If you're simply looking for information, take a look at my site and read through the newsletters. Also look at VASST for the many articles and training materials there. More DVD training materials can be found at Gary's site

If you have a friend who'll let you use some of their footage, that'd be a great way to practice.

Load their footage onto your machine and go crazy. Then when you get your camcorder, you'll already have months of practice under your belt.

As for learning resources, I suggest you look at the materials VASST offers, and those of Gary Kleiner.

www.vasst.com AND www.vegastrainingandtools.com

Windows XP usually comes with 2 sample video files. They're located in My Documents/My Videos folder. In WMV format, they're adequate to play around with....

From this screen, choose "Download" above.
Choose "Updates".
Choose "Vegas Video Update 3c".
Download the Vegas 3 Manual, then the Vegas 3 Tutorials.
Make a new folder and extract both files to the new folder.
The Vegas 3 manual has a section called "Tutorial and Sample Projects". Print this section only.
The files you extracted from vegas3_tutorials.zip are referred to and used as you go through the tutorials.
Even though you are using Vegas 4, these tutorials and projects from Vegas 3 should work about the same.
When you are finished with all of the above, go back to "Downloads", "Updates", and choose "Vegas Update 4e". If you are not using the 4e update already, I recommend that you download and install it now.
Download the Vegas 4 manual, then download the "Vegas 4 Sample Projects from Vegas CD", which is a huge file. You will now be able to load the Vegas 4 sample projects and study the portions of the manual that apply to each project. I hope that this has been helpful. Good luck.

JLK

Here is a list of Vegas links. Scroll down to tutorials. I recommend the Vegas Tips and Tricks Newsletters.

Also vasst.com has a Vegas portal that has a lot of veg files you can download and play with. However, Vegas 5 files will not play in Vegas 4 so you have to check for that.

There is stock media for download on the VASST site, plus a huge number of Vegas 4 veg files that will open in Vegas 4, 5, and 6.

And also... you might like to watch some Sony seminars on Vegas abd DVDA tapes at last years NAB conference in Las Vegas