As long as all three run at a constant speed you should be fine. Even if they run at different speeds you can Ctrl-stretch/shrink some of the events to match the speed of the others.

The problems you might have with sync come up if one of the sources has a variable speed or if any of them paused during the recording. Each time there is a discontinuity of this sort you'll have to resync.

Can I align all three and fade and cut each in and out during the timeline?

Or must I cut and align each segment manually?

I don't know what you mean by each of these questions.

I guess what I meant was if I could crossfade between more than two video tracks like I do in Sonar for Audio tracks.

The PRO version of Vegas has a multi-camera mode .. but the Movie Studio version does not. Since there is no "multi-camera" mode you have to do it "manually"

Yep that answers it, thanks.

The PRO version of Vegas has a multi-camera mode ..

If you are comfortable editing in VMS you will find the transition to Vegas Pro pretty easy. Just some more options (like custom rendering and unlimited tracks) and functionality (like the scopes and multicam editing). Everything else is pretty much the same.

You could download the Vegas Pro trial version and discover for yourself how easy and intuitive multicam editing is -- you can do most of your rough cuts in real time.

While you are at it, download the trial version of PluralEyes. It is the future of music video production in Vegas. That is not an overstatement, and I've been doing this for a while . . .

Suggestion: All of the "bold" text in your posts is really not essential. We can read your statements (and your purposes) just fine.

How's the learning curve for Pro I wonder.

If you can handle the "cost curve" the learning curve is essentially 0. Vegas Pro looks almost identical to Vegas Movie studio but with more features available, more options, unlimited number of audio and video tracks, etc.

Vegas Movie Studio
Solutions for multi-cam editing in Vegas Movie Studio have been discussed a couple times in the past year or so. Try searching the VMS forum for "multicam" or "multiple cameras" or similar.

In simple terms, you synch all of your footage on separate tracks. To do the initial edit, you use track motion to shrink and move each track so you can see all three or four cameras playing simultaneously in your preview window. Then you play through your video and hit "m" (to create a marker) wherever you think you need to change camera angles (maybe add a note about what camera to switch to). Next, you remove track motion on all the tracks and go through and split and cut out upper tracks wherever you want a lower-level camera to be visible. To create cross fades you need to add a fade out to the upper tracks.

Vegas Pro
(From a very wordy post I made about 6 months ago...)
Vegas Pro version 8 and later has built-in support for multicam editing. (In older versions add-on packages Excalibur and Ultimate-S provided multi-cam editing features, but not quite as described below.)

Basically, if you have three cameras you would put the footage onto three separate tracks and slide things left and right until all three are synchronized. Then you select all three tracks and click on Tools >> Multicamera >> Create multicamera track. Those thee tracks will be combined into one track with multiple "takes" on it. (always save a copy of the project just before you combine them into one multicam track because there is no way to go back once the track is created)

Once you have a multi-cam track you can toggle in and out of multi-cam view. In multi-cam view your preview window would show all three original source tracks in a 2x2 grid, or 2x3 grid, etc., depending on how many source tracks you had in the multicam track.

Now, as you play your video or as you scrub through manually, you can just click on one of the miniature views wherever you want to change to that camera. Clicking basically puts a "split" in the track at that location and changes the "take" to the selected source. I think if you ctrl-click you get a crossfade when switching cameras. Otherwise, if you want to add transitions you can manually do so at any of the splits, just like with any other pair of events.

If you toggle out of multi-camera view you go back to the normal viewing mode and can watch your video like regular, so you can see what the output file will look like.

If you do get the Vegas Pro trial than also get the Plural Eyes trial it is for multicam edit automation it will analyze your footage and than create your sync points for you.
http://singularsoftware.com/autosync/index.html

Paul B

Vol 1 #9 of my newsletters discusses several manual methods for multi-cam editing. Then ending scripting method is only for the pro version (and the scripting methods have evolved tremendously since that issue was written 6 years ago).

Like TimL suggested, do a search, there's a few good threads discussing the subject. Just increase the Search parameters to include the last 2 years.

This tread explains multicam by Chienworks is probably what you're looking for in Studio:
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=12&MessageID=649995

I've used this techique w/ much success.



Also, if you need more info you can do a search on multicam or multi cam and increase the date of the search to 2yrs for additional treads.