Yes, velocity envelopes are in Vegas Pro only.

Dang. I studied the family product comparison matrix closely before i decided on Plat and never saw any mention of velocity envelope, not that i was looking for it at the time, but shoot.

Ritsmer, you can only reduce velocity to 0.25 and that's it, plus no easy way to ebb and flow it without tons of editing - an envelope is the perfect solution and so intuitive. I don't need most of the stuff that's in Pro but no in Plat - except for that feature. It makes we wonder other editing features are in Pro and not Plat but that aren't listed in the feature set, tech specs or family comparison matrix.

I've been reduced to taking a section i need to slow to slower than 0.25, rendering to another track, bringing back in, and then i can slow it down to where i need it - but i'm doing lots of rendering and pasting and copying and resizing, fairly time consuming. Plus, every time i bring the rendered bit back in, it overwrites blank audio onto my audio track unless i first create a spare audio track, then delete it once the paste-in is complete, but then it crashed after doing that a few times, just a clunky process.

If you drag the new clip on top of what's already on your timeline, you should be able to click the audio part of it, press U to ungroup, then delete the new audio. What's underneath it will still be there unaffected. You'll probably want to have auto-ripple turned off while you do this.

Another option is to right-mouse-button drag the new clip to the timeline. When you let up on the button Vegas will ask if you want to add only the video (yes, in this case), only the audio, or both.

A third option is to render the new clip without including audio. Then there isn't any audio to bring back in and Vegas won't add anything to the audio track.

very cool about the right-dragging, i will check that out!

i wanted to render without audio, but i'm not quite clear on the best format to export in, and at any rate couldn't seem to find a way to do video only, though i know when i did my first project render to go to DVD architect i was able to render audio on 1st pass and video on another pass

format defaults to Windows .avi and i tried that first, then tried mpeg-2 sony concept (same format used to export for sony DVD architect) and seemed to like that better, but still somehow got audio (albeit blank after muting the audio track before export), but i'd rather export with no audio track even created.

Don't your custom render settings have the option to Uncheck "Include Audio"?
If not, that's yet another reason to consider the upgrade.

Really, with your experience with various DAWs, I think you'd be much happier hanging out over in the Pro forums . . .

I studied the family product comparison matrix closely before i decided on Plat and never saw any mention of velocity envelope, not that i was looking for it at the time, but shoot.

C'mon, do you really think that a comparison chart will show every difference in the two programs??? I'm sure that there are still other differences that you still don't know about.

The problem is which of those differences are important to you. Everyone has slightly different needs when editing.