I have read more than once about this being a disadvantage, but personally, I think it's a bit more of an advantage. Here's my concept, I'd be interested to hear how other people conceptualize it differently:

A volume, pan or Aux Send seems like something that should be applied to a project along a static timeline. If you want to bring out, say, a bass line in a mix, won't you want to bring that base line out at a specific point in TIME?

Bruce Richardson commented in his article on PROREC.COM:
Users will not be happy when they decide to add a bridge to their
tune, and suddenly all their hard mix work goes to hell in a handbasket..........
-SNIP-
......... One way to potentially solve this--add mixing-node capabilities to the "S" section of the ASR curves. This would give event based micro-mixing potential that would free the track envelopes for broader strokes.

Mr. Richardson is commenting more specifically on "dumb nodes" rather than envelopes actually attatched to the region, but I think Mr. Winogradoff is expressing a similar concept problem (just as an aside, the ability to split a region comes close to offering this already... if you need to adjust the Sustain of a region envelope, just create an additional region, so, in fact adding node's isn't necessary, simply the ability to change the behavior of the sustain section so that it can become a second sustain or decay curve (of course a shape for this curve would be nice too)

Consider the opposite end of the problem:
You're giving a final listen to your completed project, and you find that the vocalist came in just a shade to early for your taste. When you snip out a few frames from the middle of his first word, and move the attack up to meet it, what would you like to happen to all the envelopes on that track?

I'm not doing a great job arguing this, because I can see plus's and minus's for both. How about the ability to lock a node to an envelope? I admit it would be nice to ALSO have REGION FX, but I guess if I really want an effect applied to a specific region, I'll just apply it and re-save the WAV so my region will already have it. "Nesting" mixes is one thing that would be really kewl (the ability to add a vegas file as a region to a vegas file.. kinda like OLE linking).

I guess, overall, it's a consious design decision that Sonic made, and forums like this are probably the best way to hash out the pros and cons. At any rate, Michel, I think that associating the curves with the region INSTEAD of the track is NOT a good move.

Christopher Boyd
Pittsburgh, PA



Michel Winogradoff wrote:
>>Vegas is a great thing I was waiting for a long time.
>>Many improvements can be made
>>The first thing I think about, is that volume, pan & fx
>>curves should be associated to the regions, not to the
>>tracks, so when you move a region, its volume, pan & fx
>>curves move with it.
>>
>>Good luck & long life to VEGAS
>>
>>

From the post-production side, I'll add my support to the 'event-based envelope' argument.

On a recent project I had built an envelope inside a music cue intending to tame a few bars of lead guitar--the sort of thing I might do with a little manual gain riding in a manual mixing situation. It worked well. Before the final mix, however, the voiceover was revised, and the music had to move to accomodate the voice change. When we went to mix, the envelope was still in its original position, the level changed at the wrong time relative to the guitar lead, and we had to stop to adjust the envelope (in several places).

Previous systems in my experience associate envelopes with events, not with timelines. Another advantage to that approach is that if I copy/paste groups of events in order to create alternate versions, the envelopes travel with the events and I don't have to start over again.

I'm sure others have just as great a need for timeline-based envlopes, so an selectable option may be required here.

PSP