The dialog box is different in v 12 and 13.

Still, "you can use the color picker, type color values (or names), or use the eyedropper to sample a color from your screen.".

Ah, I see. Yes, those numbers do look confusing.

It would help if poeople would state what version of MS they're using up front. I use 11 so probably wouldn't have replied if it were 12 or 13.

Those are the Red, Green, Blue, Alpha values respectively.

The screen shot may look confusing to USA users, as it looks to us like a list of four [i]pairs[/I] of numbers: "0,0; 0,39; 0,65; 1,0". However, vkmast is likely in Europe, where they use a comma the way we would use a decimal point.

In the USA, you would see the four numbers as "0.0; 0.39; 0.65; 1.0"

In older versions of Vegas, we would have four numbers, each ranging from 0 to 255 -- i.e. 8-bit values for Red, Green, Blue, and Alpha. But some time ago, the Vegas interface changed to use floating point numbers, 0.0 to 1.0, for each of the RGBA values.

@musicvid, I knew that but as TlmL pointed out, it's the comma that makes it confusing.

@TimL, you may be rite about vkmast, but he wrote "color" not "colour" so hmmm.

@MSmart, TimL's "rite". I am indeed in one of those countries in Europe where a comma "," is used as decimal mark. That excludes the UK and Ireland though, which may or may not also explain my use of "dialog" instead of "dialogue". The "color" line was a copy/paste from MSP Help.
Sorry for the confusion. I can only hope that the OP can make something out of this :)

rite Oh well, that's what I get for posting with my iPad.

I think we've done a good job of keeping the OP confused.

I just took a look at my own, v12, and find myself confused by what I see. After selecting RGB, I see the color values represented as decimal values, whether I choose a preset solid or scan around the color space square in the dialogue. Whether I select RGB or either of the other two, the first value stays constant while the others change as I scan around. It is in HSV that the first value becomes a 3-digit number, sans decimal; however, this number goes from 360, with the adjacent slider at the top, to 0. (Alpha goes in all cases from 1.0 max opacity.)
Entering 0-255 values with RGB selected, e.g, 215, 215, 215 for a gray, nothing changes. If I press enter, I get a brilliant blue: 215.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0.
I am used to the 0-255 RGB settings in other applications. Help, please.

"I am used to the 0-255 RGB settings in other applications. Help, please."
The color values have changed. You must enter a number between 0.0 and 1.0 where 0.0 = RGB 0 and 1.0 = RGB 255. Think of it as a percentage from 0 to 100% so all you do is divide your old number by 255. Therefore 215 is now 0.8431 (215 / 255) or 84%.

~jr

Here's my post from this 2011 thread, with a couple of links:"

The annoying thing about the decimal representation is that it's a coarser control. With RGB we can set 256 distinctly different levels per channel. With decimal, only 101. So almost 94% of the possible RGB colors are no longer possible. Even those that are are no longer evenly spaced. The change from 0.38 to 0.39 is not the same as the change from 0.39 to 0.40. It's annoying.

No, more than annoying; a granularity of 2 decimal places ( in Vegas) is neither usual nor desirable from an editing standpoint.
It' laziness. We need 1001 steps, not 256, not 101.
Just my .002