I'm pretty new to video editing and Vegas, so I'm looking for a bit of advice on how to work with several synced hour-long video/audio streams of the same events.
For my first attempt, I have placed each video on a separate track, and used Composite Envelopes (with default Composite settings) to select which camera footage to use. This has made doing cuts and cross-fades trivial using the composite envelopes, which I really like. However, I have experienced a few disadvantages and wanted some input about them.
What I'm wanting to do is simply cut or crossfade or transition from one camera's footage to one of the 2 other video tracks. I always want just one track at a time to be showing, except for during the crossfades of course.
An oddity I've seen is that when the top track is at 100% Composite Level, during an all-black section, the other tracks still faintly "bleed through" in the preview. Also, with 3 video tracks, vegas really bogs down trying to do the preview, even when the top track is at 100% (meaning the other tracks shouldn't matter, but it still seems to be processing them).
Another thing is that rendering is going horribly slow using Compositing; for my 1.2 hour project it's taking 12+ hours to render. I can't do network rendering as MPEG-2 will be my output format and one of my video takes is also in MPEG-2 format.
The default compositing mode seems to be "source alpha". Is this correct for what I'm doing?
I've noticed Vegas has something called "takes". But it seemed to me that using those would be much less handy than the nice Composite Envelopes. But are takes what I should be using in this sort of situation? Is this the only way to use more types of transitions than the simple cross-fades I get with Composite Envelopes?
Thanks for any advice to this video newbie,
-Ben
System Details:
Vegas 5.0 + DVD
AMD AthlonXP 1800+ 1.54Ghz
512MB DDR
For my first attempt, I have placed each video on a separate track, and used Composite Envelopes (with default Composite settings) to select which camera footage to use. This has made doing cuts and cross-fades trivial using the composite envelopes, which I really like. However, I have experienced a few disadvantages and wanted some input about them.
What I'm wanting to do is simply cut or crossfade or transition from one camera's footage to one of the 2 other video tracks. I always want just one track at a time to be showing, except for during the crossfades of course.
An oddity I've seen is that when the top track is at 100% Composite Level, during an all-black section, the other tracks still faintly "bleed through" in the preview. Also, with 3 video tracks, vegas really bogs down trying to do the preview, even when the top track is at 100% (meaning the other tracks shouldn't matter, but it still seems to be processing them).
Another thing is that rendering is going horribly slow using Compositing; for my 1.2 hour project it's taking 12+ hours to render. I can't do network rendering as MPEG-2 will be my output format and one of my video takes is also in MPEG-2 format.
The default compositing mode seems to be "source alpha". Is this correct for what I'm doing?
I've noticed Vegas has something called "takes". But it seemed to me that using those would be much less handy than the nice Composite Envelopes. But are takes what I should be using in this sort of situation? Is this the only way to use more types of transitions than the simple cross-fades I get with Composite Envelopes?
Thanks for any advice to this video newbie,
-Ben
System Details:
Vegas 5.0 + DVD
AMD AthlonXP 1800+ 1.54Ghz
512MB DDR