Work on one time line or create several?

mrmyers wrote on 2/15/2011, 1:41 PM

My film will have six scenes - it is my first project. Is it better to create six different projects and bring them altogether OR create them all on one time line? If the latter how do insert items without having to re situate everything else on the time line?

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 2/15/2011, 2:21 PM

It's entwirely up to you and your preferences. Here's the pros:

- Single overall project: easy of keeping it all together and rendering the final version.

- Multiple scene projects: easier to keep track of what you're doing and an edit partway through won't inadvertently mess up a later scene, sometimes Vegas gets crashy when the project is too big.

Here's the cons:

- Single overall project: hard to keep track of the whole project, easy to have an edit mess up another scene far down the timeline, sometimes Vegas gets crashy when the project is too big.

- Multiple scene projects: difficulty assembling the final project from all the pieces.

The Pro version lets you insert individual project files into an overall project just like they were video clips. You can even still edit them and the changes are reflected in the overall project. Sadly, you can't do this with the Studio version.

There's a few ways you can combine.

- Have multiple Vegas instances open at the same time, copy & paste from each individual scene into the big project. Not always the most successful. It also loses the ability to easily make a change in a subproject and see an immediate impact on the overall project.

- Render each piece to a lossless or nearly-lossless output video file. Use these new files on the timeline of the overall project. Of course, if you have to change something then you have to render that scene again, but that's still faster than having to re-render the entire project. As a bonus, the final render can zip along very fast since all the compositing, transitions, effects, titles, etc. are already done.

- Render each piece separately and join them in DVDArchitect as a "music compilation". Seems wrong at first, but it works dandy. The video will play back seamlessly from one scene to the next and you'll get a simplistic menu that lets the viewer choose a scene. Of course, this only works if your final output is DVD, and it precludes you from making a fancier menu.