Vegas Pro for Editors

Mims wrote on 3/10/2010, 9:53 AM

No doubt, Vegas Pro 9c with all it's 'bells and whistles' far exceeds a BetacamSP linear edit suite of a decade ago. And even better than the old days of cutting on a Movieola and physically splicing film. That said, here's my complaint:
Windows invented business office terms like "File Folder, Files, Path, group, etc" .
I would like to see Sony develop a Vegas version for former film editors with terms like 'sound sync, picture roll, sound roll, sync track . Instead of group and un-group, how about lock sync and unlock sync. Trim bin or project bin instead of files and file folder.
These are office terms not edit terms. I can get along with time line and tracks and mute, but some of the choices for terminology that are Windows based, not real world based just make it harder to find out how to do certain tasks within the edit process.
Am I alone?

Comments

Jay Gladwell wrote on 3/10/2010, 10:07 AM

Hi, Mims, welcome!

Having come into cutting video from film, like you apparently, it's a tad challenging. But it's been this way for years. They ain't about to chance it. So you might as well jump in and learn the lingo, just like the rest of us had to.

Best of luck, really!

xberk wrote on 3/10/2010, 11:35 AM

I started cutting film way back -- on viewers, upright moviolas and eventually flatbeds. It never bothered me that the terms used in computer editing software is basically tied to the world of computers as you are using a computer to do the editing. When your "picture roll" appears on your computer display, it is a digital image displaying the contents of a file. Why would we call it anything but what it is?

One thing -- if you don't know about it, is that Vegas will display your timeline as A & B rolls. Just right click on any track header (or label area) and select " Expand Track Layers" - this will create and A & B roll display on the timeline. This has some uses but it really only resembles the format for negative cuts where we used A & B rolls. Ever do your own negative cut?

Jay Gladwell wrote on 3/10/2010, 5:00 PM

Where I started as an assistant editor, I had to learn conforming, but it was the head honcho who did it all. Never appealed to me.

Depending on what I'm doing in Vegas, my tracks look like A/B rolls. I still miss the tactile experience of editing film. I liked the "feel" of working with film. You certainly don't get that working with digital images. But it's a whole lot faster getting to the end result!

PeterDuke wrote on 3/10/2010, 5:09 PM

I have never edited film. In Premiere Pro I think they talk about bins. I wondered at the time why they didn't call them folders.

I have just started using Windows 7 after XP, and spent some time turning off the "simplified" or "helpful" features I find get in the way.

Life marches on and you have to go with the flow sometimes.

kairosmatt wrote on 3/10/2010, 7:08 PM

xberk,
Just played with "expand Track Layers" and it is wierd. Tried to add a couple of extra events in the middle of a edit and the crossfades got very...interesting. Hard to follow what was going on there.

What would you use this for??

kairosmatt

rs170a wrote on 3/10/2010, 8:45 PM

What would you use this for??

If this is what you were used to, you would.
Apparently early versions of Premiere worked like this.
My first NLE was a dpsVelocity and that was the way it worked.
Dissolves were done with one clip on track 1 and another clip on track 2.
Titles (alpha channel) were on track 3.
I had a heck of a time getting used to Vegas when I started with it.
Couldn't figure out why I couldn't see my titles until I sat down and read the manual :-)

p.s. Mims, welcome to the "paradigm" that is Vegas!!

Mike

xberk wrote on 3/10/2010, 8:55 PM

expand Track Layers...What would you use this for?

One use (maybe the only really useful one) is to allow adjustment of "handles" that are covered by an overlap. For example, if you have a 5 second overlap between events and a velocity envelope running right through that overlap, you may have a "node" or velocity "handle" that you cannot adjust as the overlap is covering it. In other words the "handle" is trapped UNDER the overlap. By Expanding Track layers, the overlap is still there but each event is now accessible separately even during the overlap. Not something that comes up every day.

rmack350 wrote on 3/10/2010, 10:19 PM

Sometimes track layers are just a good visual aid to show you what's happening. If you've gotten squirelly with your slicing and somehow left little slivers of events all over then this view can show them to you. For instance, it's very easy to see a single-frame event in this view.

It's also a great view to use to teach people Vegas.

Rob Mack

Yoyodyne wrote on 3/11/2010, 12:24 AM

"Dissolves were done with one clip on track 1 and another clip on track 2.
Titles (alpha channel) were on track 3."

Oh man, I'm having flashbacks to my Fast Videomachine and Premier days. I could never figure out the appeal of a/b track editing. I guess that's one of the reasons Vegas made sense to me.

Chienworks wrote on 3/11/2010, 3:47 AM

A/B made a lot of sense back in the video tape editing days. If you wanted to transition from one scene to the next you put the first scene in tape deck A and the second scene in tape deck B. The edit controller would roll them in sequence so that the transition part from both decks played simultaneously so that the video mixer had both signals running through it in order to perform the transition as it was recorded in real-time on the output tape deck. This was just The Way It Worked due to physical requirements and limitations. Early NLEs copied this structure because this was the way video editors worked.

Then Vegas came along growing out of it's audio-only background with no preconceived notions of How Video Should Be. The programmers were used to doing an audio transition by overlapping clips on the same track. When video was added it was natural for them to have transitions occur by overlapping two video clips on the same track. That's just the way Vegas worked. So they showed it to the masses* and the masses were like "whoa! mess with my head, man! no way!" and Vegas said "yes way." And some of the masses adopted and accepted, but some balked and whined because that just wasn't the way it was done.

So Vegas added the function to expose A/B layers to appease the whining masses. And those of us who understood Vegas' way were like "oh, that's freaky. why would anyone want that?"

Vegas, it's the better way, but it got there by breaking the old paradigm and some folks made the leap while others didn't.

*Amusing Freudian note: when i first typed this word i left off the "m" and didn't notice until i went back to proofread my post.