This is my first post. I have had a canon camcorder for about 1 year. It came with pinnacle software but after hearing the horror stories I decilded on using Ulead. I tried using ulead on my sons highschool graduation but never finished the editing. So after checking out reviews of software I decided to try Sony Vegas movies studio.
About a week ago I filmed our youngest childs 1st grade play. Much to my dismay the teacher asked me for a copy of the tape after the play. I said yes and decided to put vegas studio to work. I have a toshiba notebook and was using an external harddrive and external burner. I bought the cases and put internal drives in them to save money. They are both firewire and USB2.
I used the Vegas tutorials to get a start. The video itself was about 20 minutes. I added about 5 transitions, some of which worked better than others. I also added text as a title at the beginning over some solid background that transitioned to over the start of the movie (this later part happened by accident but turned out well. I added some photos at the end along with copying the applause at the end to play under the photos, and closing credits. There was one point at the beginning where a little girl was reading something and I used the normalize audio feature to bring the level up. Everything considered it was easier than I had anticipated.
The rendering took much longer than I thought. When I origionally captured I saved to the external hard drive and saved all subsequent edits etc to the external drive. I also rendered to the external drive and I am wondering since it was reading from and writing to this drive if this is what slowed things up.
I had problems burning where the supplied software wasn't seeing my drive. After viewing the various problems posted regarding burning I was looking into other software for this. I decided to try to recomendations the first from sony's knowledge base which said that if you had both firewire and USB to switch to the other format so I switched to firewire. The second recomdation was on this forum which said to have the drive on before you boot up your computer. I did both of these things and the sony burning software saw my drive so I don't know if it was the switch to the firewire connection or turning on the drive before booting up that corrected the problem.
I had 2 different brands of media the first was dvd-r comp usa's own brand and the second was maxcell. The 1st comp usa disc worked but the second and third disc would start up and then give an error message. I switched to the maxcell discs dvd-r and burned several discs in less time.
Other than the initial burning issues overall a good experience.
About a week ago I filmed our youngest childs 1st grade play. Much to my dismay the teacher asked me for a copy of the tape after the play. I said yes and decided to put vegas studio to work. I have a toshiba notebook and was using an external harddrive and external burner. I bought the cases and put internal drives in them to save money. They are both firewire and USB2.
I used the Vegas tutorials to get a start. The video itself was about 20 minutes. I added about 5 transitions, some of which worked better than others. I also added text as a title at the beginning over some solid background that transitioned to over the start of the movie (this later part happened by accident but turned out well. I added some photos at the end along with copying the applause at the end to play under the photos, and closing credits. There was one point at the beginning where a little girl was reading something and I used the normalize audio feature to bring the level up. Everything considered it was easier than I had anticipated.
The rendering took much longer than I thought. When I origionally captured I saved to the external hard drive and saved all subsequent edits etc to the external drive. I also rendered to the external drive and I am wondering since it was reading from and writing to this drive if this is what slowed things up.
I had problems burning where the supplied software wasn't seeing my drive. After viewing the various problems posted regarding burning I was looking into other software for this. I decided to try to recomendations the first from sony's knowledge base which said that if you had both firewire and USB to switch to the other format so I switched to firewire. The second recomdation was on this forum which said to have the drive on before you boot up your computer. I did both of these things and the sony burning software saw my drive so I don't know if it was the switch to the firewire connection or turning on the drive before booting up that corrected the problem.
I had 2 different brands of media the first was dvd-r comp usa's own brand and the second was maxcell. The 1st comp usa disc worked but the second and third disc would start up and then give an error message. I switched to the maxcell discs dvd-r and burned several discs in less time.
Other than the initial burning issues overall a good experience.