I do Promos for bands all the time, exactly like what you are doing. Since you run the sound for them you should know what songs and parts are their best. When I make promos I usually pick the bands best songs, then I run the list by the band just to make sure they agree, then I go through those songs and try to pick the chorus of the song, usually I will start in the middle of a verse and play it all the way through the chorus then I go on to the next clip. If I can't find a good part there I will sometimes just play the chorus, or I will do the chorus and then part of the next verse.
I could probably send you some samples of my work if you're interested.

Thanks,

Luckily I know what I want it to look like and I am going to be ruthless in what I capture. What I was intending to do was pull out the good stuff, discard the rest and render to an AVI file. I would then open that avi in the timeline of the actual project and chop/move from there. Process wise is this the way to go?

thanks
jack

Samples would be great. Not only am I doing the video but I recorded the show live and have been mixing down 10 of the songs for a CD. Im hoping to use the recorded audio in the video. synching it may be another problem.

thanks
jack

My view is a little different than more traditional methods. Anytime I have a really long project I just bite the bullet and put the whole thing on a single track at once. Doesn't matter if we're talking 20 minutes or a couple hours or more. I put the whole thing there.

Next I slowly work my way through it. It doesn't matter if it takes a hours or a week or more. So what? All I have to do is save the project file. Next time I open Vegas, I just continue on.

Depending on if I think I going to keep more or edit more out I move one category or the other to a new track above. You can easily break long runs in Vegas with the split option.

When you break a event out and push it up to the top track that "hole" doesn't cause any problem. If you want to see the effect of how it plays without what you've cut, jor just how what you cut plays just mute the appropriate track. You can select events to end and slide the balance back to fill the gap and either leave it or push it back to where it was once you're done previewing.

One advantage to this method is regarless how much source material you're previewing its sitll in the original order and you can easily slip it back as it was. Once you're to the end I play again from the start then seriiously edit out stuff I don't want, move it around and so on.

Its easier in the doing then the explaining.

When I do it I usually will just capture the whole tape, but I have tons of hard drive space, the method you want to do will work fine as well if you just want to capture the good parts and then chop it up.

Hi,

Process wise what I would do is the following:
1. Capture the complete tape number 1.
2. Put the whole roll in the timeline.
3. Edit out what I definitely won't use.
4. Print the outcome to a DV tape.
5. Do steps 1. through 4. with the remaining tapes.
6. Use those pre edited tapes as my material to edit the final video.

Hope this helps.

Jaime Chung

Jaime, what's your reason for printing intermediate files to DV tape? Are you limited on hard drive space? It would be a lot faster and easier to leave the clips you want to use on your hard drive ... if you have the space for them. You also risk problems with dropouts and dropped frames by printing to tape and recapturing.

Chienworks, it is not a problem of disk space but of speed to edit. My experience with Vegas has been that the more clips you have in the project the slower it becomes. In my case when editing those 30 minute plus programs, I have nearly a thousand clips coming from about 3 60-minute tapes. The purpose of all this is to significantly reduce the amount of clips in the project. Probably I need a new motherboard with a more powerful CPU (mine is an INTEL Pentium 4 1.4 GHz) and more system memory (currently 512 MB). My computer has four 80 GB hard drives, one for the operating system and three for a/v media data. One of these last drives is used exclusively for the rendered files and the other two for the original source material also for the purpose of improving things speedwise (in this case for rendering).
I agree with you that I risk having drop outs printing to tape, but I always use the best tape I can buy (currently SONY ME) and use it only once. Or sometimes use a DVCAM camera or VCR that I sometimes have access to.
If you have some useful tips I would be grateful to hear about tthem.

Thanks

Jaime, ok. I still think you probably don't need to do the print to tape part. Once you've cut down to just your trimmed selected clips on the timeline you can highlight each one and render to a new file on the hard drive. This would probably be faster than printing to tape since you would be rendering DV to DV, and there would be no quality loss. Render the clips to a new directory, then delete all the captured files. When you move on to the next tape you can render these trimmed cilps into the same directory as the last batch.

Of course, if you have large numbers of clips you're keeping then this is a lot of individual renders. There are some batch rendering scripts available that would speed up the process. Even without the scripts though, i still think this would be faster (and safer) than printing to tape and recapturing. It will also keep all the cilps as separate files, which the recapturing process won't do automatically.

My workflow:

1. Capture as many tapes as will fit on disk, with room left over to create an AVI file that will contain just the "good stuff." (See next steps).
2. Scrub, using "J," "K," and "L" keys to find video I want to keep.
3. Press "S" at beginning of "good" video, and then press "S" again at the end of good video.
4. With auto-ripple turned on, delete the video just prior to this edit (i.e., the video you don't want to keep).
5. Repeat steps 2-4 until you are finished.
6. Run this script: Preview, then name regions using listbox dialog. You have to edit the script to put in your own tag names. What this script does is let you build a database of your clips so you can later figure out which ones you want to drop onto the timeline, and also to help keep track of which ones you have used.
7. When finished assigning region names to all the events, render this video to a new AVI file. Note: You must make sure that you select "Save Project Markers in Media File" in the Render As dialog box.
8. Go to the Vegas Explorer view. Press F5 to refresh the view. Click on the arrow next to the Views icon in the Explorer window and make sure that "Regions View" is selected.
9. Click on the AVI file you just created.
10. In the Region portion of the Vegas Explorer view, you will now see all the regions in the AVI file you just created. You can click on the column headers to sort these anyway you want. You now drag these to the timeline (or press Enter to put them at the current cursor location on the selected track).
11. To keep track of what regions you have used, and where they are in your project, click on View -> Edit Details. In the "Show" drop down, select regions.

I just did a project that had three full one hour tapes, which resulted in over 300 separate "good" scenes, each about 7 seconds long. This technique really helped manage the database of clips.

What helped me most initially was the old fashioned way. I got a three-ring binder, ran the footage and logged each clip, with a short description, until I had several pages of source reels. If I were doing it again I'd have put the information into tables in Word on the computer while viewing the camcorder screen. Once you know what you have, you save a lot of drive space (and time) not capturing the throwaway stuff.

The Tsunami script engine has a capture "good clips" tool for use in the trimmer. I haven't tried it yet, just purchased ($30 US) it yesterday. But it looks like just what you're after. DGrob

I've just discovered a function in Vegas that would enable us to this fast and efficiently:
Process wise what I would do now is the following:

1. Capture the complete tape number 1.
2. Put the whole roll in the timeline.
3. Edit out what I definitely won't use.
4. "Save as" the project to a new directory (and here comes the new thing I discovered) checking a box in the lower left hand corner of the "Save as" window that says "Copy and trim media with project". What this does is to copy all the clips in the timeline (just the lenght of them present in the timeline) to the new directory along with the new ".veg" file of the project. It is even possible to define how many seconds before the in point and after the out point of every clip will be copied to the new directory. And the beauty of it is you have to do no render at all.
5. Do steps 1. through 4. with the remaining tapes.
6. Create a new project and import into its Media Pool all the newly created clips in this new directory and use these as my material to edit the final video.

The best of all is there is no need to get anything else to do this, everything is already built-in in Vegas. So, I agree with you Chienworks, there is no need for that intermediate Print Video to DV Tape that I suggested in my previous post.
Hope this helps.

Jaime Chung

jachungfva,

Wow! This tidbit is definitely worth the price of admission. I completely overlooked this check box. I can see all sorts of uses for this baby.

Thank you very much!

The ONLY problem I have with the "copy and trim clips" is that V4 separates your clips into a video only .avi and a .w64. So if you're going to be importing them into a new project and you try to drag both onto the timeline, they stagger one after the other on the video/audio tracks so you have to line them up manually after you place them on the timeline. Kelly (Chienworks) patiently explained why this happens and the best work-around in my recent post " Someone please tell me why I'm getting separate video/audio files". Now, if after editing your material, you don't still have hundreds of clips to deal with it's probably not a big deal but if so, Kelly's suggestion on the batch render script is definitely the way to go.
Randy

Just curious: what do people have against Batch Capturing (Advanced Capture) in Video Capture? Here's my workflow:

1. Using VidCapture, log all tapes, using the "I" and "O" keys to mark in and out points, and "J," "K" and "L" keys to scrub through the tape. Add comments/rating as necessary to identify clips.

2. Batch capture to folders named after the original tape.

3. In Vegas Explorer window, set up "Capture Comments" in the preferences as one of the fields in "Detail View."

4. If necessary, group related clips ("by song" or "closeups," "guitarist", etc.) in as many Media Bins as needed to quickly find clips.

5. Drag and drop clips as needed on to the timeline and edit.

The advantage of this is that you have a permanent log of your tape (.SFVIDCAP file), if you ever want to recapture at a future date. You also can capture only the parts you want, so you minimize multiple reviews of the same material. Plus, each file is exactly the length you want it to be (an entire song, for example), so additional editing is minimized.

It's a little more wear on the DV gear, but it's no big deal if you have a fairly robust deck.

Just having moved to the DV world, and reading Spot's book concerning Advanced capture, last night, I was eager to try this option and compare it to overall time spent filming, capturing, reviewing, logging, and naming clips. The huge bonus in John Meyer's 'naming regions' script is to my former presence in the analog world, and then compare the two methods. The crux of the matter is naming the clip, and preserving that name in a usable manner. Adv Cap seems to work through the 'comments' section, and John's script in the 'region view'. I highly recommend John's script to anyone doing sports and analog capturing, and am looking forward to the time savings provided by both methods. Kudo's to John. Thanks again John.