You bring up a lot of things at one time and I'm not sure what your questions are as you seem experienced. @Richard-Bril

For hard drive speed, hit control/alt/delete and go watch the performance monitor. See the MB/s that your hard drive is doing when playing back multiple streams at a time and compare to its theoretical maximum performance. If you're getting near max it might be the bottleneck.

It's not a bad idea to get a modest capacity SSD drive (1TB?) and use as a working drive for current projects, especially if you ever do multicamera. Other than that, I doubt better hardware is going to solve your problem.

There's no way you're going to have smooth multiple streams of 4K60p, esp. with effects placed on it. Highly compressed GoPro files are trouble in general. For GoPro I'd consider transcoding to start with to ProRes 422 or making proxy files. Unless you are outputting 60p I'd use 60p as a special effect (slow motion) and edit at 24,25 or 30p. For playback speed, pan/crop is also very CPU intensive in Vegas.

For proxy files I don't see why you'd ever need to recreate them. Create once from the source, do all your edits and then do things like keying and color grading in best/full which uses the original file. Proxy files are only for smooth playback while editing.

Most of the videos I currently edit come from either a Sony camera, GoPros or smartphones. 

That is central to your question, and not your hardware, which is fine. But it's fun to talk about hardware, isn't it?

Your gopro and vfr smartphone footage are not editor-friendly. This becomes more crucial when you are adding effects as you have described.

You should be using a lightweight proxy or digital intermediate during editing, no question.

Thank you so much for these answers, I really appreciate it. I'm at the tail-end of editing the first episode of a little kids video I'm putting together with my youngest son. I've been working at it for several weeks and I'm sure I've made things harder for myself than they needed to be with not knowing exactly how to go about things, but since I've come so far with the workflow that I'm using, I'll finish this first (of many) episodes, then come back to this thread and hopefully share what I've done (in a concise manner) and learn how to do better going forward.

Thank you again,

Richard

I recently finished the first episode of the project that I started this thread about and even though I don't have time right now to create screen shots of my project workflow (the layers and renders to new tracks, etc), I will do that shortly...so that I can hear from you all if there is any input that can help me improve the workflow for the following episodes...so they don't take me as long to edit as this one did!

If you're interested, here is the first video I put up on youtube:

Wow! That was quite impressive! The use of sound fx was perfect for me. Was this done entirely in Vegas? I'd been interested in your workflow and "how". What specific equipment and mic was used. Did you script it?

An amazing video that will engage young people!

Thank you. I'll be happy to go into more detail later when I have the time. Apart from some.....

• Photoshop work on the chroma key background layers
• Rendering out some of the overlay effects (which were After Effect templates)...to Alpha+RGB MOVs so I could use them directly in Vegas

.....everything was done in Vegas. The chroma key was done using BCC's Primatte Studio, the camera movement was done primarily with Active Camera...and about 30% was done with manual keyframe editing in the pan/crop tool (using Smooth between 50%-100%). I used 4 cameras; 2 Samsung Galaxy 9 phones (one on a slider, the other on a tripod), 1 Sony mirrorless camera and 1 GoPro7 on tripods. I mixed the audio of the 4 cameras together at about 25% level and the other 75% of the audio level was a Rhode mic overhead recording into a Zoom. I did lots of rotoscoping in the pan/crop tool creating and tracking masks. I'll share more later.

Best Regards

Looking forward to the breakdown!

I'm sure you son loves it and has pointed all his friends to come and watch.

I'm working on a project right now which uses a lot of chroma key. I shot this with 4 cameras, all at 4K. Before applying any chroma key I put all 4 camera tracks on top of each other in the timeline in Vegas, synced them up and started basic editing. Even with no effects or color grading applied, the computer would sometimes give me some choppy behavior, especially when scrolling backwards. I'm more than a month in to this project and I'm still finding my way as far as proper work-flow ethics with how to handle projects that put a strain on the computer.

Proxy files?--Intermediate renders?--1080p renders for editing and then Intermediate for the final render?

Here's a screen shot of my main Vegas window for this project.

https://www.screencast.com/t/lepxIFPb

• I usually have my Video Preview set to Preview (Half) so I can see problem areas.
• I use 4 Dell 24" monitors and always use a dedicated monitor for full screen previewing (not the Video Preview window...which is like a second preview...but used for things like PiP, or taking samples for chroma key with Primatte, etc.
• Scrolling forwards is always more seamless than scrolling backwards. Even doing motion tracking, going forwards is 2-3x faster than doing it backwards, so I always motion track from the start of a clip and go forwards. Not sure if this is normal.

I quickly noticed that using Pan/Crop keyframes that implement movement (zooming in, or panning), slows down the playback or cause more choppy behavior. So when I'm doing a lot of pan/crop work, or painstakingly rotoscoping things out by drawing keyframes frame by frame, I turn off all effects, mute all tracks not being displayed and lower the Video Preview to "Preview (Quarter)". This lets me jump from frame to frame faster than waiting 2 or 3 seconds...which is how long it can take with all effects loaded up.

To create the backgrounds for this project I found myself layering quite a few tracks on top of each other (11 so far) https://www.screencast.com/t/IOeFBYF3NP

I initially wanted to use motion tracking from the chroma key camera layers (that had camera movement) and apply that motion tracking info to the 11 background layers (grouped and child/parented), but it seemed impossible to achieve that properly because some of the camera angles are slanted and I needed to use Track Motion to (3D Source Alpha) angle the backgrounds to match the cameras. So I ended up rendering down the background layers to a single video track and this made it much easier to work with. I rendered the backgrounds down to Intermediate formats so as to not lose quality after having put so much effort into them. This created quite large rendered files.

I realize this can go on pretty long if I go into all the details...so I'm going to try to get to the chase.

The computer I'm working on cannot keep up with all I'm throwing at it, it's too choppy (the playback) to properly edit. So I decided to render each clip (of the foreground "camera" layers together with the background rendered layer) to an Intermediate high quality file and then edit the comped foreground cameras and background images as a single clip (the average "clip" being 3-5 seconds). The thing is that to render the 11 minute project to Intermediate before being able to edit, takes 13 hours...and after doing this a few times and then tweaking things because there were little problems throughout and needed to be redone, I decided to render down to a 1080p clip instead, do all my editing on the 1080p clip and once done with the editing, render the original tracks down to Intermediate, copy/paste event attributes from the 1080p clips to the new Intermediate clips and hope that all works. I'm in the process of doing that now and it's not easy.

I suppose it is similar to creating Proxy files in some ways, the difference I see is that Proxy files need to first come from some source material and if I'm constantly tweaking the source clips (for chroma key, color grading, keyframing, etc), then I'd have to keep making new Proxy files after every tweak.

I'm sorry of this is too confusing, but I figured I'd try to start somewhere. Thank you for making it this far and if you have any ideas, I'd sure be happy to hear them.

Kind Regards

If you use After Effects this program works great for keying without using green screens https://aescripts.com/goodbye-greenscreen/

@Richvideo Thanks. Not sure the key quality is the same as a real chroma keyer...especially on the hair...based on the short video promo

@Richvideo Thanks. Not sure the key quality is the same as a real chroma keyer...especially on the hair...based on the short video promo

I got some decent results using it, I assume if you already have a green screen background you would get even better results with it since it does so well with non-green screen backgrounds.

It is much easier than rotoscoping it in AE.

My test clip

https://www.dropbox.com/t/dLpWLFmEdKDiYoQY

That's a pretty good key around the hair. Frizzy hair is the hardest to get a clean key on. I often use 2 separate masks for the chroma key, one for the head/hair and another for the rest...and use different chroma key settings.

That's a pretty good key around the hair. Frizzy hair is the hardest to get a clean key on. I often use 2 separate masks for the chroma key, one for the head/hair and another for the rest...and use different chroma key settings.

Disclosure: I did do a little masking to clean up the hair a bit- I used an inverted mask and used the original footage to fill in where the key was not clean on the hair but it was still Wayyyy easier than drawing a mask for each frame. This app is just a good time saver if you happen to have a clean plate to work with and you decide later that you want a different background.

It would be great if Magix added something like this to its deep learning add ons, I would find this use of AI more helpful to me than the colorize tool.