I live in northern Lake County, Illinois, so I'll see if I can tune in!!! I'm a V4 + DVD-A user, too. Before I watch it, I'd love to know your specs: what kind of camera, sound equipment, etc. you used during production.

Kudos to you!

Dan

Jolly good show old chap! I go to the are institute of atlanta and I've been telling people how good sofo's vegas. All they talk about is final cut and xpress dv. I hope this helps boost sofo so that they will upgrade vegas; even as good as it is there is still room for improvement. Like I said jolly good show brian!!!

Congrats on the PBS airing. I work for an independent producer that creates "Think Tank" and PBS documentaries. They edit them on Media 100s, but I did show the editor the feature sheet for V4 and she was impressed.

G

i want to know how does one go about editing 45 hours down to 26 minutes?? what are the organizational strategies to narrow down the clips?

Statas,
Isn't that what is known as Kill your darlings?
Tor

Hi Brian,

Hope I can find it in MI....



Here's a mail address:

press@sonicfoundry.com


They will be happy to know...




HTH, MPH

Tips:
http://www.martyhedler.com/homepage/Vegas_Tutorials.html

Thanks for the salutations everyone. Heres a few answers for the questions I was asked on this forum.

I had to use what I owned at the time of the shooting (which spanned 2 years of off and on trips to go film them). This is all that was used:

A sony trv-900 series camera
Canon zr10 (not used much.. dont like the look of this camera)
MKE 300 Shotgun microphone (very nice for a 1/8" jack input)
various still cameras (digital/35mm)
Vegas Video 3.0
Photoshop 7

I wish I had an ag-dvx100, a few more mic's and a decent sized crew. I didnt have anything but my camera and a microphone. I had to do everything (Sound, film, talk, etc..) at the same time. I guess this was a good reperesentation of guerilla filmmaking. I could write a book on my experience and what I did..lol.

Editing 45 hours of footage to 26 minutes. Hmm.. well, this was VERY VERY hard to do, but let me tell you, VV3 helped alot. I would batch capture as many full tapes I could fit on my 100GB and 80GB external HDs. Load the entire captured tape .avi file into vegas's trimmer, then mark each clip I wanted to use for the film. I would then proceed to cut out the excess footage to open up more room for the other tapes. I would log EVERY clip in a notebook and put a description of it so I could reference it when I wanted to use it. Its a long process, but works well. Organization is key for this. I learned alot about this in film school (wow, I never thought I would say i learned something in film school..jk).

I have recently been working on AVID media composers and they are good systems for alot of post production needs, mainly using uncompressed video footage. I have been talking to alot of post production companies here in the milwaukee area and it just seems they cant contemplate the fact that they spend thousands of dollars for there systems amd vegas can compete with them. Anyway, I could not imagine cutting my documentary on any AVID system. It would have taken me twice the amount of time to log everything and edit the video; thank god for Vegas. SoFo needs to keep rocking with their products; I just purchased my Vegas+DVD upgrade and I cant wait to use it! Lets hope everyone buys this and lifts SoFo on top.

Hey Brian...nice to know there's another one out here in Milwaukee using VV!

And coincidentally, I work at Milwaukee Area Technical College, home of Channel 10 :)

Don't work in the TV station tho.....

Pete Fanning

If I am not being too presumptious---how much did they pay you for the finished product---I would love to compare prices with my local market----Anyhow, great job and congrats---you should feel very good about yourself!

Very Funny!!!!! I just edited 3 hours of documentary footage to 7 minutes 30 seconds. Talk about painful...

Congratulations, Brian. Keep up the good work. And I share your high opinion of VV.