I think if you download the trial, it will probably answer many of your questions, but the basic operations of Vegas, (audio peaks, timeline, etc) have not changed much since version 9.

I'm currently using the trial which is where my questions came from. Testing the trial and not understanding how to achieve what I wanted with the software the same way I have done previously in other software (namely Premiere).

1. You don't have to wait but performance may suffer until peaks are built.

2. In Vegas Pro there is just one timeline and no way to modify the timeline properties (Vegas Pro offers project nesting instead).

4. Except of the timeline you can use every Vegas Pro window either floated or docked. To dock a window mouse-drag while having "Ctrl" pressed and drop it inside the docking area.

5. Copy an Event which contains the video FX, select other Events, right-click and select either "Insert Event Attributes" or "Selective Insert Event Attributes".
Also you can use scripting to apply particular FX to selected video Events. Scripting is a powerful tool in Vegas Pro.

6. One way is to mute the master bus (and just ignore the Loop-Region build while scrubbing as it wouldn't do anything except you have loop playback enabled or selected the render option to render the loop region only).

7. You can send the media of a video Event directly to HitFilm Pro, edit in HitFilm Pro and when saving the HitFilm project, your Video Event in the Vegas Pro will be automatically updated. This works in the way Vegas Pro then uses the HitFilm project file as a new take in the timeline Event.

There are many others here far more knowledgable than me, but this'll get you started:

When importing do I really need to wait for all peak files to be generated before editing? This step seems to significantly bog down the program (though it never did in Premiere). These are files from a Canon C100.

When editing, where is my timeline located? In Premiere, I can edit the name or properties of a timeline by right clicking on the timeline in my media bin. Not sure how to do this in Vegas.

If by timeline you mean the tracks that make up the current edit, then it is the project. Vegas does not have the concept of several different timelines within one project. So, one timeline = one project (= one Vegas .veg file) Before you throw your hands up in horror about the limitations one significant factor with Vegas is that you can run multiple instances of Vegas and copy assests between them (as well as nest projects).

Is there anyway to hide the presets in the Transitions, Video FX, and Media Generators panels? I don’t really want to see the presets in action. I find this to be clunky and an unnecessary use of space.

Not as fas as I'm aware, but you could resize the Transitions windows/tab so that you can't see all the presets. Personally I don't look at the transitions tab. I find it much simpler to slide one event over another, right-click on the crossover, and select Transition | Insert other (less mouse movement)

When I want histograms/vectorscopes/RGB parade is there a way to dock it into the work space instead of having a floating window?

Yes! Hold Control whilst near where yuou want to dock it and it will become a tabbed docked window (this is the reverse of what ysed to happen when it would default to docking whenever you wre near a docking area)

Is there a way to copy Video FX on different clips? I don’t necessarily want to have to create a preset every time I want two clips to have an identical effect applied to it.

Right click the "from" event and select Copy. Right click on the "to" event and either "Paste event attributes" (copies pan/crop and all FX and other stuff) or "Selectively paste event attributes" (you guessed it)

Is there a way to scrub through the footage, without hearing the audio, and without creating in/out points?

I'm unclear where you are trying to scrub - trimmer or timeline. Whichever, musing audio is only one click away.

What is the integration like for HitFilm Pro? I know ignite exists, but I really like the Hitfilm Pro software and working in a 3d work space. Is there any chance I don’t have to render between the two programs?

You can drag a HitFilm project into Vegas and right click on it to edit it in Vegas, but it will create a proxy file (so it does render, even though you're not doing it yourself) in Vegas so not as fluid as you or I might like. I'd love this to be better.

Of course, while I was typing Marco beat me to it with a far more succinct version of basically the same set of answers :)

Item 6.

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/vegas-pro-timeline-skimming--98892/    

See imaginACTIONfilms post ...

“The simplest way to move the cursor around the timeline in Vegas is to just put your pointer over the cursor ON THE TIMELINE, ie not near the playhead. Hold down the mouse and the cursor moves really fast in either direction.” No Audio.

This is what I use, it only took me about 6 months to discover it when I started!😩 I was using the playhead instead!

Also see page 20 of the manual pdf.

Thank you both for these answers! Very much appreciate it.

@Former user doesn't that create in/out points? Or am I misunderstanding something?

A few new questions I have:

1. Is there any dropped frames indicator I could toggle on so that if the preview drops frames for any reason it would let me know?
2. Is there any bias in the development of Vegas towards any brand of hardware? For instance, Adobe is biased toward Intel and Nvidia, so much so that they don't offer any native acceleration for AMD CPU/GPU at all. Does Vegas work well with AMD components? I'd really like to go back to AMD GPUs with the price of Nvidia getting higher with every generation and my biggest bottleneck being my GPU.

Dragging immediately above the ruler markings does scrub the timeline and simultaneously creates a loop region, but thats different, probably not what you want right now. To quickly remove the loop selected region press I and O. To allow playback to continuously loop within the selection press Q, this toggles looping, turns the selection to a blue colour. Handy for studying a small piece of video intensively, adjust the “rate” by either dragging or right clicking (gives 4 fixed rates) the very small white triangle, bottom left of screen. Also useful to render out a small piece of project rather than all of, to make sure it looks ok, theres a check box in the render as dialog box, its on by default.

When you move the mouse over the vertical cursor anywhere below the playhead, it changes to <—> then left click, hold and drag the cursor where you want, no audio.

Your item 1. immediately above .. the only way I know of for playback is the “Display “ item at the bottom of the preview window, it will show less than project properties frame rate if it can’t keep up.

Your item 2. immediately above .. bias is towards AMD for graphics cards. Correction .. See Nicks post below. There isn’t an in-house bias. I was going by the perceived wisdom that I have seen from previous posters here which is that AMD works better than Nvidia. But thats not what you asked, late night posting can lead to inaccuracies 🤪.

Your item 1. immediately above .. the only way I know of for playback is the “Display “ item at the bottom of the preview window, it will show less than project properties frame rate if it can’t keep up.

Illustrated:

Is there any bias in the development of Vegas towards any brand of hardware?

Ever since GPU acceleration was introduced in VP11, its OpenCL implementation has worked better with AMD GPUs than NVIDIA GPUs. For a couple of example numbers, take a look at this recent comment (2fps!!) and compare with those that follow it. I doubt that there is any intentional bias, and in fact in recent times NVIDIA NVENC rendering was introduced well ahead of AMD VCE rendering. In fact hardware-independence is so enshrined in Vegas that neither Sony nor Magix has published any system recommendation for many years, other than minimum requirements, which can be frustrating.

There's a slightly dated article on GPU acceleration here. I must update it.

Thank you both for these answers! Very much appreciate it.

@Former user doesn't that create in/out points? Or am I misunderstanding something?

 

A few new questions I have:

1. Is there any dropped frames indicator I could toggle on so that if the preview drops frames for any reason it would let me know?
2. Is there any bias in the development of Vegas towards any brand of hardware? For instance, Adobe is biased toward Intel and Nvidia, so much so that they don't offer any native acceleration for AMD CPU/GPU at all. Does Vegas work well with AMD components? I'd really like to go back to AMD GPUs with the price of Nvidia getting higher with every generation and my biggest bottleneck being my GPU.

What? what drop frames? if you want a kick ass system, then spent the money to get one. Just don't expect top performance with low budget system.

I am getting an average 51 frames rendering 4K from GH5 and getting 108 frame down convert to 1080P. As far as drop frames go. I can't reading faster enough to see any drop frame because it zipping it thru way to fast for my eyes to see any drop frames. :) See video link below.

https://vimeo.com/297646675

If I rendering from a 1080P file from Canon 5D3 I get 166 frames.

Thanks @NickHope and @Former user. In premiere it is a little light that goes yellow when you drop frames so I didn't even think to look for a real time readout of the fps.

@BruceUSA I'm curious what your system specs are? Looks pretty impressive.

Matthias. Click on my name to see system specs.

In case you need to see tutorial to adapt yourself to Vegas Pro (mostly are classic tutorials - but the basic foundation is still the same) :
https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/vegas-pro-tutorials--103245/

@Matthias-Claflin ... As per Nicks more accurate statement about “bias” I’ve corrected my previous post re: item 2, thanks Nick.

And I corrected my post from "Intel GPUs" to "NVIDIA GPUs"!

Alright so after playing with the trial more extensively (only 11 days left in my trial), I have a few more questions... Please bear with me as I still feel like a novice when it comes to the way the Vegas workflow works.

1. Is there anyway to automate synchronizing clips (without pluraleyes)? I pretty heavily rely on this feature in Premiere to speed up my workflow. Is this a feature that exists or is expected to exist in the near future? (I just finished editing a 23 clip multi-cam timeline in premiere for instance).

2. I was wondering if there is a way to set up a batch render? I know that I routinely set 10+ projects to render with Adobe at a time (using media encoder). Is this something that exists currently or is expected to exist in the future?

"2. I was wondering if there is a way to set up a batch render?"

If you want to render multiple projects simultaneously, you can right click on the Vegas Pro icon and start as many instances of Vegas Pro as you want or as many as your machine resources can handle. I'm rendering two 45 minute projects while I type this.

Since my wife has me dusting the ceiling fans and such, I won't be needing to use the machine for a while though it is still responsive for non-editing work.

There is a Batch Render script built into Vegas Pro.

There are third party plug-ins also. Vegasaur, I think is one. 

So I've officially made the switch to Vegas now and I definitely don't regret it. I was skeptical about people saying that cutting video was faster in Vegas, but this is absolutely true. Kind of amazed how easy it was to transition. The way it cuts is very intuitive.

That said, I'm not back here posting just to talk about how easy Vegas is to use compared to Premiere, but because I want to do something I can't quite figure out how to do... So I always edit my wedding highlight videos in 2.35:1 aspect. In Premiere, I just made the timeline/project 1920x817 and went on my way. I was wondering if there is a way to stop Vegas from resizing the videos when I drop them on the timeline? I don't want it to preserve the aspect ratio, I want it to drop my 1920x1080 files into a 1920x817 space (cutting off the top and bottom). Is there a way to accomplish this without adding a letterbox?

Welcome to Vegas Pro 😊👍

in case you need some tutorials of Vegas Pro, you can find here.

The tutorials might be old, but the basic is still the same.

I don't know of anyway to make it fit your frame automatically, but the easiest way to do it (unfortunately for each event) , open PAN/CROP> Rightclick> select MATCH OUTPUT ASPECT.

There may be a script or maybe someone could write one that would do this for all scenes.

I don't know of anyway to make it fit your frame automatically, but the easiest way to do it (unfortunately for each event) , open PAN/CROP> Rightclick> select MATCH OUTPUT ASPECT.

There may be a script or maybe someone could write one that would do this for all scenes.

I suspected this may be the best option. I think I'll just nest the project in a new project after I've edited it and then change the aspect on it and match output. In the meantime I'll just use a letterbox crop to make sure framing is right. Thanks for the quick responses as always!

I don't know of anyway to make it fit your frame automatically, but the easiest way to do it (unfortunately for each event) , open PAN/CROP> Rightclick> select MATCH OUTPUT ASPECT.

There may be a script or maybe someone could write one that would do this for all scenes.

Paste Event Attributes will do it, or Selectively Paste Event Attributes if you only want to paste pan/crop settings and not FX etc..

Or you can do it with track motion, but I suspect you would want to nudge framing up or down for individual events, so pan/crop is probably better. Doing that works very nicely just by using the UP and DOWN arrow keys, after clicking on the event pan/crop window for the selected event.

Quite some years ago, a forum member provided a link to:

http://vashivisuals.com/tag/4k-aspect-ratio/

… which has a range of free widescreen templates (png).

It's purely a matter of putting the preferred template on the top video track on the timeline, stretching it out to the length of the project, and that's all there is to it.

I know that Matthias-Claflin said he didn't want to add a letterbox, but the template is just such an easy solution. And it has the advantage of being able to adjust the framing of each shot up or down via pan/crop to refine each shot's framing within the widescreen shape where necessary.