A few gotchas to watch out for when making the switch:

- Vegas doesn't start out with predefined tracks. It kind of puzzled me at first to see a completely blank timeline. It took me a few moments to realize i had to create tracks. Of course, this can be as easy as dragging a media file into the blank timeline window and the appropriate tracks are created automatically. So don't let the blank screen confuse you.

- The Begin/End options are gone. If you were used to working with these you'll have to forget them and learn something new instead: keyframes. Keyframes are almost as easy as Begin/End, except that you have to move the cursor to the end of the clip rather than clicking the End button. It's worth it though as keyframes are vastly more powerful and allow many nifty things to happen very easily. Say you want to zoom in, pan across the frame, then zoom out? In Movie Studio this required splitting the clip in pieces and manually setting the begin of the next piece to match the end of the previous piece. In Vegas you can just drag the image around from frame to frame and Vegas "remembers" the movements for you. You can go back and tweak the movements and Vegas keeps the motion smooth.

- Once you've worked on a project in Vegas you won't be able to open the new version in Movie Studio anymore. You'll still have the original .vf file, but you won't be able to take any new changes you make in Vegas and move them back to Movie Studio. Of course, once you start playing with Vegas you'll probably never want to use Movie Studio again anyway.

Other than these, anything you have done in Movie Studio will move over to Vegas. What you've already learned will work in Vegas just as well and this will give you a very good start at learning it.

Bruce, you can look over my newsletters which has a lot of good information. There's a "Beginner's Corner" series that begins in the 4th issue.

Keyframes are great. However, maybe this post will save you a lot of frustration and a post later on. Vegas defaults to a "smoothness" of 1.0 (or 100 depending on where you're looking (Pan/Crop vs. Track Motion, etc.) instead of 0. This means that if you keyframe movement (or other properties) to track across the screen in a "V" motion (for example), it will inexplicibly move in a smoother, rounder "U" motion. Very frustrating to figure out, but a piece of cake once you know about it.

Have fun, Vegas is fantastic. This forum is even better. Very worthwhile to monitor the forum for problems/tips of other users. Some post links to their videos which show what Vegas (and a lot of creativity!) can do.

Brian

Hi Brian -

Thanks for the tip about the keyframes - That feature is one of the major reasons I am moving up to Vegas from Movie Studio.

I know that with their Acid product, Sony has the AcidPlanet website where folks using the product can put their works for others to listen to - Does Sony provide such a service with Vegas (so folks can post their videos online for others to peruse)?

Thanks.

Bruce