Getting started. Rendering and widescreen

milhouse wrote on 12/27/2002, 4:03 PM

Hi everybody. I finally got my copy of Vegas. Is there a "newbie" website or somewhere I can get basic info? The manual is lacking.

Anywho, here's what I'm trying to do. There are probably several questions here.

A buddy or I are working on a short (5 minute) film. Several different scenes or cuts. Do I need to do the whole thing in whole Vegas project or can I do each scene separately then put the rendered output together? (This is what I've been doing, but not sure what is the best way to render.)

Then I'm trying to get a final widescreen VCD. I've just been setting the project to widescreen or cropped to the 16:9 TV size. Is that all I need to do? What about the "Burn CD" render? The one I tried looked AWFULLY crappy. How much can I expect from VCD?

Thanks.

PS-Digital camera in by firewire.

Comments

snicholshms wrote on 12/28/2002, 3:41 PM

Hi Milhouse:
There's lots of tutorials that will allow you to learn the many functions in Vegas. Start by doing a search on this Forum for "tutorials" and you'll be busy learning Vegas for a while. You'll get good results from this Forum by posting individual, specific questions.

Regarding editing practices...Everyone has their own style and organizational skills. I don't use scene detection. I just capture the raw footage into a folder and then put the entire clip into the timeline in Vegas. I sort out the stuff I definitely will use at first look and move all the stuff I DON'T THINK I will use to lower tracks. Then I start "playing" with the various scenes, organizing them and adding any FX. I render both video and audio as an intro, several middle segments and an ending and keep all the original tracks in case I have to go back and change something later.

I leave the audio "as is" (as much as is possible) until I have pieced the video portions together. I turn off all track FX and such. Then I play around with all the goodies in Vegas, ACIDPro and Sound Forge until it sounds good. I render the video and audio together as an .avi which is now my master. Sometimes I render the audio out separately as a large .wav file, work on it then render it back to the video as an .avi file. This way the audio has a consistent sound instead of sounding "chopped up".

You will develop your own flow and style with practice. I began by just playing around with small segments to learn the fundamentals of Vegas to get me started...That was about a year ago and I've got a LOT yet to learn! But that's part of the enjoyment in this business/hobby...the "learning journey". What a kick to play a video that looks and sounds great...and to have a clients and friends RAVE about it!
Good luck,
Steve