filmy,
hadn't read your original post before, have to say it makes me feel much better. My biggest project to date was cutting 8 hours of holidays video down to 90 mins and I struck just about all the issues you did. At the time I just thought it was my lack of experience.

The 99% opacity issue is a real pain, as far as I know it's not a bug, just poor design. Say I want to insert a clip on thrack 3. I used my Shuttle to move the cursor to where I want the insert point but need to select track 3 to make certain that's where VV will insert the clip. If I clcik anywhere in the timeline apart from exactly where the cursor is I'll move the damn thing so I click on the track 3 control box. Now if I move the Shuttle I'm actually moving the track opacity slider. This is fine if you realise whta you are doing, late at night when you're under pressure it's a bloody pain.

VV needs serious work on its interface. Using the same set of controls to do different things based on what has focus is a formula for problems.

Anyone who has any doubts about the fallacy if this type of interface should read the findings of the Three Mile Island investigation.

I'd also agree about 'that other' program. The one (only?) thing I found great in it was I could unlock the audio (It would never do that of its own volition), move it anywhere and then lock it back again, I didn't have to go hunting for it. Alternatively I could lock it to another video event same as VV but being able to find what it used to belong to was very handly.

Mind you now that I know VVs foibles a bit better I have less problems with it. Mostly i don't see bugs, it does work consistently it's just that that isn't intuitive in many ways.

I did see a comment about VV to the effect that anyone familiar with teh Windows paradigm will find VV easy to pick up but I have o wonder if that's really such a good thing.

Looking at it another way, many high end VCRs have those lovely jog/shuttle controls. But that's all they do, there's no way on earth you could ever sell a VCR where the same thing could somehow be used to control audio levels.

Maybe I'm totally at odds with the rest of the VV community, its an issue that hasn't had much (any?) discussion yet I do recall quite a few posts from people having issues due to the way the interface works. be interesting to hear how others find it.

Okay, this looks great, no need to convert to 24p.
What are the horizontal lines specs for the camera.

Some DV panasonics were 625 lines , but the small cams are now leaning towards 500+ something and getting worse.

This seemed to me to be important if you ever wanted to convert vids to show on broadcast out of a TV station. There cameras are heaps of horizontal lines.

farss,

Though I hate to get drawn into a debate about subjective things like interface design, here I go anyway...

Would your 99% opacity issue not be resolved simply by clicking the track 3 control box **before** setting the cursor position? You can then click anywhere you want on the timeline, use your Shuttle to refine the insert point, and track 3 will remain selected. This sequence makes more sense (to me, at least), and is in line with the whole "select, then do" PC paradigm.

That said, upon actually trying to reproduce your problem with my ShuttlePro V2, I find that with the current driver set the jog and shuttle controls no longer trigger the arrow keys, but instead use F3/F9 for jog back/forward, and Ctrl-F17-F23/F17-F23 for shuttle back/forward. These keys do NOT affect faders, and are not affected by the current focus (except for the trimmer). I know older drivers used repeated hits of the arrow keys to do these things, so it's clear that Sony/SF added some extra shortcut keys to make the ShuttlePro more useful. You might want to visit www.contourdesign.com and grab the new drivers.

All this assumes you're using a Contour ShuttleXPress/Pro/V2, not some other brand...

Though I've only done a couple of long projects, I have done a couple of weird ones with massive track counts, and I've found the Vegas interface to be extremely intuitive. With a big monitor and the ShuttlePro, there's nothing else that comes close in terms of ease-of-use. Most of the quirks I've run into have been the sort of thing where you say "oops, gotta watch out for that next time," you do, and it doesn't happen again.

To farss and filmy:

I wrote a script to look for the 99% opacity issue. Get it here:

Audit Script