Hi There -
My wife just got finished shooting a short film on DV and we're now in the midst of trying to assemble and edit it in Vegas. It's proving to be a challenging experience trying to figure out the best and most efficient method of dealing with all the raw footage - organizing it, naming it and having it easily accessible. Because this was a hand-held camera, doc-style film, there are no typical naming conventions for scenes: i.e. CU Kiv's face, WS living room - because things chnage throughout each shot - it might go from a wide to a close up to a medium shot. Plus for what hopes to be a 20 minute short there is about 6 hours of footage because it involves a one year old and there is a lot of coverage.
Issue # 1:
Bins.
When we first tried setting up the project, we had all the media in one project with the Project Media open on Monitor 2, as big as possible, with the thumbnail view. This was OK as long as the project was open. We were looking at footage, trying to organize it in sub bins. However, if we closed the project and tried to re-open it, it would freeze indefinitely. The only way to open it was to make sure the Project Media was docked the way it is by default and on list view of some sort. Obviously a memory issue.
Annoyance with Sub-Bins:
- any time you undo, the bins collapse their view.
- Individual clips are not draggable from one project to another from the Project Media. You have drag bins.
- Bigger issue, and one that I hope can be addressed for Vegas 7: events should be draggable from the timeline into the Project Media. It's one of the things that really baffles my wife, because her workflow has been to drag all the clips to the timeline so she can easily see everything and go through it and chop, chop. But then she wants to drag clips to bins and name them. Ideally, a dialogue would pop-up when dragged to a bin asking for a name for the clip. Now, I realize this is why you added Nested projects, but they are less intuitive and more complicated for someone like her, who is used to Final Cut (originally). Even though she has now been using Vegas exclusively for a couple of years, some of this is still hard to get her head around. Also, I know you can create a sub-clip, but when you do it from the timeline (and this is a real drag) it doesn't ask for a name. And if you then go to the Project Media to rename it, it doesn't rename the clip on the timeline. So, what I would like to see is a way to drag from the timeline to a Bin in Project Media, have it pop-up a dialogue asking for a name, and voila. If you drag multiple selected clips, I would like it to "cook" them into a veg file. I know - wishful thinking. And what to do about effects and stuff? well, in cases like this - where you're just trying to organize footage, that doesn't come into play at all. This is just media organziation stuff.
OK, I digress. Sort of.
Other issues:
One big annoyance for my wife has been the ctrl-alt arrow command, which takes you to the next or previous edit. She finds herself constantly wanting to use this but will inadvertantly find that a different track is selected and that command will send her cursor back to the beginning of the project - or the end. Or somewhere she doesn't want to be. I understand her frustration. Unless you have a project with just one video track and one audio track, you could end up anywhere if you're working quickly. It would be nice if there were some way to "lock the view" to a particular track where you're working from extensively to avoid this problem.
All this having been said, I would love to hear suggestions on other workflow ideas for this stage in a film edit. At this point we've divided the project up into smaller projects with only 3-5 scenes in each. Then I was suggesting to her that we have a project per set of scenes that would act as a nested "bin edit" which would contain all the footage from those scenes strung together in order, with markers per scene, that we would then add to the trimmer. From there she could grab footage to assemble a working edit on the timeline. But the problem with that is that in the trimmer, you don't see the beginnings and endings of the clips, so you'd have to go through and mark them all...
so, I'd love to hear what people's workflow methods are in these cases, for organizing a lot of footage to edit.
Thanks in advance and I look forward to your responses.
Charles.
My wife just got finished shooting a short film on DV and we're now in the midst of trying to assemble and edit it in Vegas. It's proving to be a challenging experience trying to figure out the best and most efficient method of dealing with all the raw footage - organizing it, naming it and having it easily accessible. Because this was a hand-held camera, doc-style film, there are no typical naming conventions for scenes: i.e. CU Kiv's face, WS living room - because things chnage throughout each shot - it might go from a wide to a close up to a medium shot. Plus for what hopes to be a 20 minute short there is about 6 hours of footage because it involves a one year old and there is a lot of coverage.
Issue # 1:
Bins.
When we first tried setting up the project, we had all the media in one project with the Project Media open on Monitor 2, as big as possible, with the thumbnail view. This was OK as long as the project was open. We were looking at footage, trying to organize it in sub bins. However, if we closed the project and tried to re-open it, it would freeze indefinitely. The only way to open it was to make sure the Project Media was docked the way it is by default and on list view of some sort. Obviously a memory issue.
Annoyance with Sub-Bins:
- any time you undo, the bins collapse their view.
- Individual clips are not draggable from one project to another from the Project Media. You have drag bins.
- Bigger issue, and one that I hope can be addressed for Vegas 7: events should be draggable from the timeline into the Project Media. It's one of the things that really baffles my wife, because her workflow has been to drag all the clips to the timeline so she can easily see everything and go through it and chop, chop. But then she wants to drag clips to bins and name them. Ideally, a dialogue would pop-up when dragged to a bin asking for a name for the clip. Now, I realize this is why you added Nested projects, but they are less intuitive and more complicated for someone like her, who is used to Final Cut (originally). Even though she has now been using Vegas exclusively for a couple of years, some of this is still hard to get her head around. Also, I know you can create a sub-clip, but when you do it from the timeline (and this is a real drag) it doesn't ask for a name. And if you then go to the Project Media to rename it, it doesn't rename the clip on the timeline. So, what I would like to see is a way to drag from the timeline to a Bin in Project Media, have it pop-up a dialogue asking for a name, and voila. If you drag multiple selected clips, I would like it to "cook" them into a veg file. I know - wishful thinking. And what to do about effects and stuff? well, in cases like this - where you're just trying to organize footage, that doesn't come into play at all. This is just media organziation stuff.
OK, I digress. Sort of.
Other issues:
One big annoyance for my wife has been the ctrl-alt arrow command, which takes you to the next or previous edit. She finds herself constantly wanting to use this but will inadvertantly find that a different track is selected and that command will send her cursor back to the beginning of the project - or the end. Or somewhere she doesn't want to be. I understand her frustration. Unless you have a project with just one video track and one audio track, you could end up anywhere if you're working quickly. It would be nice if there were some way to "lock the view" to a particular track where you're working from extensively to avoid this problem.
All this having been said, I would love to hear suggestions on other workflow ideas for this stage in a film edit. At this point we've divided the project up into smaller projects with only 3-5 scenes in each. Then I was suggesting to her that we have a project per set of scenes that would act as a nested "bin edit" which would contain all the footage from those scenes strung together in order, with markers per scene, that we would then add to the trimmer. From there she could grab footage to assemble a working edit on the timeline. But the problem with that is that in the trimmer, you don't see the beginnings and endings of the clips, so you'd have to go through and mark them all...
so, I'd love to hear what people's workflow methods are in these cases, for organizing a lot of footage to edit.
Thanks in advance and I look forward to your responses.
Charles.