Learning multitrack editing

Philip wrote on 3/21/2018, 5:57 PM

Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here, since I'm a relative novice in editing. However, when I see some screenshots or other videos on editing, often there are three or more tracks of video and more of audio, with many, many short clips interspersed on alternating tracks. With respect to workflow, for a hypothetical, I understand that, for a given scene with multiple takes, different shots, etc., a LS could be laid in and MCUs, CUs, etc. laid in in tracks above, trimmed so that the shots intersperse, as in a dialogue. What's not clear to me is the workflow-process by which this may be done without lots of little pieces of clips resulting. So, here's my real question: does anyone have favorite tutorials, preferably in Vegas rather than FCP or Premiere, that cover this workflow process clearly? Maybe more for Pro than MVS, I would guess, but fundamentals should apply to MVS as well. Wouldn't it be great for someone to compose an online course, with downloadable footage for following along, lesson by lesson? Has someone done anything like this?

Comments

Musicvid wrote on 3/21/2018, 9:48 PM

There are 42 pages of discussion, tips, quirks, and best practices at your disposal on this forum search...

https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum-search/?query=multicam

fr0sty wrote on 3/22/2018, 2:25 AM

You could lay out the tracks where you want them to come in (or sync them if all cameras were rolling at once), create a multicamera track by highlighting all video tracks used and selecting Tools>Multicamera>Create Multicamera Track, then enable multicamera mode in that same dropdown menu. Then you can cut/fade between angles as the video plays like a live video switcher by clicking on each track as it plays, or holding ctrl and clicking for a fade, giving you a rough cut. From there you can go in and fine tune the edits and transitions, and since Vegas only mutes the unused portions of the clips, you can restore or trim away video easily.

Or there's the longer route of manually chopping and deleting with the S and delete keys until the video is trimmed accordingly (or adjusting in/out points by dragging the edges of the clips). Of course, since Vegas "sees" from the top track down like any other NLE, you don't need to trim tracks that are covered by another track. You'll end up with a bunch of smaller clips, but only the ones you want where you want them. The top way is faster, but also requires more from your computer.

If neither of those helped you, consult the thread above or YouTube, where there's video tutorials for just about everything related to Vegas.