I wrote one of these a while back, but I thought I'd post another one since I was reminded in the Pro Tools LE post that a lot of people haven't uncovered some of Vegas' most powerful editing features. They can be elusive, but they have saved me from hunting down any other program since Vegas 1.
As mentioned recently:
Add takes to events. You can add multiple "takes" to a single event by right-click dragging from the Vegas explorer or trimmer onto an event in the timeline. The context menu will ask you if you want to Add as Take, Add across Tracks or Add Across time. Add as take drops the new media "into" the event. You can add as many as you want, and as long as you have the preference turned on to view event names, you'll see what take you're viewing. The "T" key toggles between takes when you have the event selected. This is extremely powerful when recording multiple passes at a vocal or ADR session. Just loop record into an event as many times as you want and toggle through the takes and pick the one(s) you like. If you want to use part of one and part of another, make a split in the event where you want to separate them and then toggle through the takes now in the two new split events. This is awesome for comping a vocal. (And don't forget the ever cool option of adding a stereo file to a mono event or even adding different format files to a single event - so cool)
That last part brings me to one of my favorite features. Drag Crossfade. You can hold alt and ctrl while left clicking over a crossfade and actually move the crossfade back and forth, essentially moving the in and out points of the adjacent events. This is invaluable for finding a good spot to crossfade between to events - whether you're comping a vocal line in the middle of a sustained note or trying to edit a song verse and chorus, etc. Truly awesome.
And if you didn't already know - alt-left click drag within the event. This is another one of those "I couldn't live without"s. This allows you to slip the material within an event, changing the actual content of the event without moving the event itself (no trimming needed). So, if you're trying to join two events together and one is a little off timing, just slip it so that the beats line up...
Check the help for these editing tools and more. There are ones that trim the end of the event while slipping the front of the event. And also, important to note, is that the alt-ctrl left click drag crossfade works even if there is no crossfade. It works just to change the point at which you split an event into two.
Subclips: In the trimmer, you can create new media pool elements without launching en external editor like Sound Forge. Just load a file into the trimmer, make the selection you want to use in the project, right click and select Create Sub-Clip... and name it. Now that appears in the media pool as its own entity for use wherever you want, over and over, in a project. These do NOT save as files to the hard drive, however. They are per-project clips.
Further to the topic of subclips, the addition of nested .veg files in Vegas 6 is very cool, too. Eventually, I think this is going to be "live" but for now when there's audio in a .veg files, Vegas will build a proxy render of the project when you drop it on the timeline. This allows you to use an entire other Vegas project within your current one. Chop it up, move it around, even nest a couple of .veg files within a single event and create different "playlists" in a single event. Need to edit the source project? Right click on the nested .veg and choose Edit Source Project and it opens a new instance of Vegas with the original project ready for editing. Save the project and close and the nested .veg file will update itself. 2 Caveats: You need to save projects with the options to save the project path in the file in order to open the source project later on and you also need to have the preference to close media files on loss of focus of Vegas turned ON. (Something to note about dropping .veg files onto the timeline: make sure you have trimmed your projects so that the end of the project is truly the end and you don't have something lingering far past where you want the end to be. Otherwise you will be rendering a longer proxy than necessary.)
The change to auto-ripple in Vegas 6 is nice too. When you have complex projects with lots of events and envelopes and you're not sure what the results of a ripple edit will be until after you've done it, now you can turn on auto-ripple and when you click to drag an event, you see all the events and envelopes that are affected move with the event-drag. This makes me rest a lot easier when moving stuff around. I used to find I had destroyed an envelope point long after I had already made my ripple edit.
For you people who edit voiceover with room tone: Create a room tone loop clip in the trimmer that loops with no clicking or popping. Save as subclip. Drag subclip onto an empty track. Make sure the Looping switch is enabled for this event. Now trim the event out to be far longer than any event you might place on it. Now lock it. Turn on Fade Event Edit Edges. Now place your voiceover tracks on top of this looped, lock room tone event. Edit away! Anywhere where you leave space between events will automatically have room tone and it will automatically be crossfaded with the events on top of it by the amount set in the Fade Event Edges preference. This has saved me so much time, I can't even tell you. This way you never have double-room tone, which you would get having a room tone track playing on a separate track.
If you want to preview loops in the Media Manager and have them match the tempo of the Vegas project that's open, you need to enable the Preference in the Audio tab in Preferences that says Import Audio at Project Tempo. Otherwise, you will hear all media in the MM at its native tempo. I actually was one that argued strongly for this during the beta testing... I still would like to have a button on the MM itself that I could toggle, which would "Preview at Project Tempo" or "Preview at Native Tempo".
A documented new feature in Vegas 6: sync detection and repair for audio/video events. VERY handy new feature which lets you know when you've slipped a piece of audio or video out of sync with its counterpart. Repair by either slipping of moving. Very cool.
Also, I resisted the media manager at first when I was beta testing. I told them I hated it and thought it was too memory intensive. However, after getting some serious explanations from the designers and thinking through its uses, I now find it to be an amazingly powerful tool. I enable it when I want it and disable it when I don't. Simple as that. But think about this: I have thousands of sound effects and loops. When I work on projects that require sound effects I'm always searching through folders of effects not knowing really what I have and where. Granted, it's going to take me some time, but I'm eventually going to tag all my sound effects myself so that when I want a dog barking, I can search for "dog" or "bark" and hear all my choices. But even deeper, I can tag media on a client basis - now I can search for all media that might have been used with a particular client or on a particular project. With Media Relationships turned ON, I can now find any media that relates to any other media by different criteria: did I render using this media, what do I preview it along with, etc. etc. There are endless possibilities. And I guarantee you, it will get less CPU and memory heavy over time. It's extremely complex and more handy than it is harmful, IMO
Now, I could also write a whole post about things I think are wrong with Vegas. But that's not the point of this post; so don't harangue me for being Mr. Pro Sony. I'm just trying to help because I know that when I finally found a lot of features I wish someone had told me about them long before. And, as a beta tester, I can personally tell you that the developers aren't sitting around saying "How can we make Vegas 6 suck?" or "How can we do something to really screw the audio users? That would be fun!" Obviously that's not the case and I didn't get a lot of what I wanted in Vegas 6, but, hey, I don't work there and I don't know what internal pressure they might have to do one thing and not another. But I DO know that they read these posts and DO care about what we think. Most forums don't see the developers respond at all. I think it's pretty amazing to have the actual people coding this software around to help.
And, if you're going to bitch about bugs, do it, but do it helpfully: as a tester I know that I email them a lot saying "Hey, I was working away and Vegas crashed on me!" and you know what? They have never fixed a crasher based on that kind of email. You need to tell them your system, your OS, your sound card, your drivers, your video card and MORE IMPORTANT, give them a step by step repro of how to make the problem happen again and again. That is the ONLY way they will be able to fix a bug. As much as you like to think that when you write an email saying "Vegas crashed" that they're going to say "Oh, well let me hire a band and try to use Vegas all day and get it to crash", that's not going to happen. They'll try, but chances are they won't find what's affecting YOU. So, do us all a favor and help out more.
As mentioned recently:
Add takes to events. You can add multiple "takes" to a single event by right-click dragging from the Vegas explorer or trimmer onto an event in the timeline. The context menu will ask you if you want to Add as Take, Add across Tracks or Add Across time. Add as take drops the new media "into" the event. You can add as many as you want, and as long as you have the preference turned on to view event names, you'll see what take you're viewing. The "T" key toggles between takes when you have the event selected. This is extremely powerful when recording multiple passes at a vocal or ADR session. Just loop record into an event as many times as you want and toggle through the takes and pick the one(s) you like. If you want to use part of one and part of another, make a split in the event where you want to separate them and then toggle through the takes now in the two new split events. This is awesome for comping a vocal. (And don't forget the ever cool option of adding a stereo file to a mono event or even adding different format files to a single event - so cool)
That last part brings me to one of my favorite features. Drag Crossfade. You can hold alt and ctrl while left clicking over a crossfade and actually move the crossfade back and forth, essentially moving the in and out points of the adjacent events. This is invaluable for finding a good spot to crossfade between to events - whether you're comping a vocal line in the middle of a sustained note or trying to edit a song verse and chorus, etc. Truly awesome.
And if you didn't already know - alt-left click drag within the event. This is another one of those "I couldn't live without"s. This allows you to slip the material within an event, changing the actual content of the event without moving the event itself (no trimming needed). So, if you're trying to join two events together and one is a little off timing, just slip it so that the beats line up...
Check the help for these editing tools and more. There are ones that trim the end of the event while slipping the front of the event. And also, important to note, is that the alt-ctrl left click drag crossfade works even if there is no crossfade. It works just to change the point at which you split an event into two.
Subclips: In the trimmer, you can create new media pool elements without launching en external editor like Sound Forge. Just load a file into the trimmer, make the selection you want to use in the project, right click and select Create Sub-Clip... and name it. Now that appears in the media pool as its own entity for use wherever you want, over and over, in a project. These do NOT save as files to the hard drive, however. They are per-project clips.
Further to the topic of subclips, the addition of nested .veg files in Vegas 6 is very cool, too. Eventually, I think this is going to be "live" but for now when there's audio in a .veg files, Vegas will build a proxy render of the project when you drop it on the timeline. This allows you to use an entire other Vegas project within your current one. Chop it up, move it around, even nest a couple of .veg files within a single event and create different "playlists" in a single event. Need to edit the source project? Right click on the nested .veg and choose Edit Source Project and it opens a new instance of Vegas with the original project ready for editing. Save the project and close and the nested .veg file will update itself. 2 Caveats: You need to save projects with the options to save the project path in the file in order to open the source project later on and you also need to have the preference to close media files on loss of focus of Vegas turned ON. (Something to note about dropping .veg files onto the timeline: make sure you have trimmed your projects so that the end of the project is truly the end and you don't have something lingering far past where you want the end to be. Otherwise you will be rendering a longer proxy than necessary.)
The change to auto-ripple in Vegas 6 is nice too. When you have complex projects with lots of events and envelopes and you're not sure what the results of a ripple edit will be until after you've done it, now you can turn on auto-ripple and when you click to drag an event, you see all the events and envelopes that are affected move with the event-drag. This makes me rest a lot easier when moving stuff around. I used to find I had destroyed an envelope point long after I had already made my ripple edit.
For you people who edit voiceover with room tone: Create a room tone loop clip in the trimmer that loops with no clicking or popping. Save as subclip. Drag subclip onto an empty track. Make sure the Looping switch is enabled for this event. Now trim the event out to be far longer than any event you might place on it. Now lock it. Turn on Fade Event Edit Edges. Now place your voiceover tracks on top of this looped, lock room tone event. Edit away! Anywhere where you leave space between events will automatically have room tone and it will automatically be crossfaded with the events on top of it by the amount set in the Fade Event Edges preference. This has saved me so much time, I can't even tell you. This way you never have double-room tone, which you would get having a room tone track playing on a separate track.
If you want to preview loops in the Media Manager and have them match the tempo of the Vegas project that's open, you need to enable the Preference in the Audio tab in Preferences that says Import Audio at Project Tempo. Otherwise, you will hear all media in the MM at its native tempo. I actually was one that argued strongly for this during the beta testing... I still would like to have a button on the MM itself that I could toggle, which would "Preview at Project Tempo" or "Preview at Native Tempo".
A documented new feature in Vegas 6: sync detection and repair for audio/video events. VERY handy new feature which lets you know when you've slipped a piece of audio or video out of sync with its counterpart. Repair by either slipping of moving. Very cool.
Also, I resisted the media manager at first when I was beta testing. I told them I hated it and thought it was too memory intensive. However, after getting some serious explanations from the designers and thinking through its uses, I now find it to be an amazingly powerful tool. I enable it when I want it and disable it when I don't. Simple as that. But think about this: I have thousands of sound effects and loops. When I work on projects that require sound effects I'm always searching through folders of effects not knowing really what I have and where. Granted, it's going to take me some time, but I'm eventually going to tag all my sound effects myself so that when I want a dog barking, I can search for "dog" or "bark" and hear all my choices. But even deeper, I can tag media on a client basis - now I can search for all media that might have been used with a particular client or on a particular project. With Media Relationships turned ON, I can now find any media that relates to any other media by different criteria: did I render using this media, what do I preview it along with, etc. etc. There are endless possibilities. And I guarantee you, it will get less CPU and memory heavy over time. It's extremely complex and more handy than it is harmful, IMO
Now, I could also write a whole post about things I think are wrong with Vegas. But that's not the point of this post; so don't harangue me for being Mr. Pro Sony. I'm just trying to help because I know that when I finally found a lot of features I wish someone had told me about them long before. And, as a beta tester, I can personally tell you that the developers aren't sitting around saying "How can we make Vegas 6 suck?" or "How can we do something to really screw the audio users? That would be fun!" Obviously that's not the case and I didn't get a lot of what I wanted in Vegas 6, but, hey, I don't work there and I don't know what internal pressure they might have to do one thing and not another. But I DO know that they read these posts and DO care about what we think. Most forums don't see the developers respond at all. I think it's pretty amazing to have the actual people coding this software around to help.
And, if you're going to bitch about bugs, do it, but do it helpfully: as a tester I know that I email them a lot saying "Hey, I was working away and Vegas crashed on me!" and you know what? They have never fixed a crasher based on that kind of email. You need to tell them your system, your OS, your sound card, your drivers, your video card and MORE IMPORTANT, give them a step by step repro of how to make the problem happen again and again. That is the ONLY way they will be able to fix a bug. As much as you like to think that when you write an email saying "Vegas crashed" that they're going to say "Oh, well let me hire a band and try to use Vegas all day and get it to crash", that's not going to happen. They'll try, but chances are they won't find what's affecting YOU. So, do us all a favor and help out more.