Editing Advice: What's the Best Vegas Workflow?

TheOkinawaBadass wrote on 2/8/2009, 10:39 PM
Hey all, I am currently getting set to edit over 30 plus hours of HD footage into what I hope to be a documentary feature of around 45 to 60 minutes (not really multicam, or FX centric). I am fairly familiar with the Vegas tools, yet after spending a week constructing an 8 minute teaser, I found that the levels I needed to use seemed a bit unwieldy (used 9).

I'm just curious as to what your ideas are and the steps I need to take in the Vegas organization process for this to get done over the next 6 months of work that I'll need to put into it. Like what setting's should I set that would increase convenience? Any aesthetic recommendations? Do I edit everything all together or should I edit the scenes individually and render them out? Should I get some Vegas training videos just in case (any suggestions?). How compatible is Vegas with other programs (flash, FX, color correction, AVID)? Best Scripts and plug-ins?

Thank you all for the support!

Comments

farss wrote on 2/8/2009, 11:24 PM
My advice for this kind of project is to break it down into simple elements. Time wise split into scenes. Edit each scene as cuts only. This seems to be the way big features are done and it makes perfect sense to follow the same process even if you're doing it all yourself.
Avoid the urge to 'fix that little sound or color while I'm here". Get the basic story told, review it, recut it until you're happy with it. Then as the phrase implies lock the vision. Then do the audio, then do the color correction. Oddly enough I have heard of people locking audio and then vision, your movie may work better that way.

The advantage of doing a cuts only edit first up is things do go wrong you have a very good chance of moving your project. Also you can easily get audio or color correction work done on other systems. It also avoids the problem of having to go back through the entire process if you realise your basic storytelling is not working.

Bob.
i c e wrote on 2/8/2009, 11:49 PM
I agree a hundred with Bob. Cut everything before you even think of effects or color adjusting. Once you go down that road you could be asking for trouble.
two other pointers, though I'm hardly an expert, I find it much easier to edit with the storyboard on top and preview and explorer etc. on bottom. To do this go to Prefrences-Display-then uncheck the box at the bottom.
Also you might want to consider how you put the video on the tracks. like put all the same time of day or color tone one and darker shots on another or whatever but that way you could put the same effect on the whole track rather than each clip so it looks uniform, you know?

peace,

ice
logiquem wrote on 2/9/2009, 6:10 AM
I second the idea of spliting different sessions to different tracks. It help to visually follow your project and the track based fx feature is so efficient... I use it for video and audio also.

I have made many 15-30 min. long domcumentaries from very long form interviews and i must say that i strongly prefer to work with one master project and many other instances of Vegas running to split the stock footage. I also often use some smaller "intermediary" projects just for chapter storybording (kind of) duty.

This is really where Vegas shines btw...

I never had any problems with long projects in Vegas so i prefer to keep everything in the same master timeline for final editing. I remember the Adobe Premiere days when i had to split everything in 10 min. chunks just to make shure that i can open the project, but that is old story and i never had to do this again with Vegas.