Yes, it does depend on the nature and complexity of the project, not just the expected final running time. The harderst projects that I have tried to do in Vegas was a 30 minute highlight reel for my son's baseball team. There were over 5 hours of raw footage to go through, and I wanted to get a few seconds of each player into a 1 minute opening/intro. It was a total pain in the butt, and the way Vegas creates separate .AVI files (with the scene detection option) creates a mess very quickly. The cheap little Pinnacle Studio product is much better for that, since it can capture to a single .AVI file, and generate a separate file with pointers to the individual scenes. I think you can achieve something similar if you use Scenalyzer to capture for editing in Vegas.

When you start adding lots of stills, effects, etc., peformance can start to suffer once I get beyond 30-45 minutes onto the timeline, but I "only" have 640MB of RAM.

I did a nearly two-hour 50th anniversary production for my parents based mostly on stills. No segment was longer than the song it was synched to, and since each was very self-contained in terms of the assets used (i.e., 30 or so photos from a particular era), I had several veggies which I rendered separately. Actually, I rendered them in one instance of Vegas while editing in another one, which worked out really well.

If your entire final output is only going to be 12-15 minutes (although probably more sophisticated), you can certainly do it all in one project, but you certainly don't have to. And you have the option of selectively rendering any part of the timline you want by rendering the loop region only. Can't do that with Pinnacle Studio- it's all or nothing (you have to delete what you don't want to render to render a subset.

You know, you can capture entire tapes as one file and then go through in the trimmer and make subclips. This is what I was recommending in a post farther up. There are many advantages to this, I think, when you've got hours of tape with no log and most of it is waiting for something good.

Rob Mack

but how do you get rid of the unwanted material from the hd?

leslie

Two options:

1) Turn "DV Scene Detection" on when you capture, giving you a new .AVI file for every time you stopped and restarted the camera. Separate the good clips from the bad ones as described above, and delete the bad clips from the hard drive.

2) Put the good clips on a timeline (order doesn't really matter) and use File|Save As and check the "save trimmed media with project" box. This will copy just the trimmed good stuff over to new files. Check to make sure everything's there, and then delete the original files.