Vegas Video 3: Digital Video Editing Hits the Jackpot
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| Take a look at Vegas Video 3's interface. |
Let's take a tour through the software to give you a feel for what it's like to edit a project with it. First, you create a new project, where you can choose from a list of templates or you can make it match a previous project you've done -- it defaults to NTSC DV. As you click on the video capture icon, it asks you to pick your tape. It's easy enough to just capture your clips as you choose and view them, but the real fun starts when you auto scan the tape. Vegas captures it in one pass, without needing to pre-roll at all. It's quick and effective, although not as accurate as I've seen in autocapture routines by Matrox or Canopus. But it's good enough to do a respectable job, capturing all your footage into a neat bin, ready to begin editing. If you'd like more fine-tuned control, go ahead and log your ins and outs and have Vegas batch capture all the clips when you're done. [an error occurred while processing this directive]
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| (Click image for enlargement) Here's Vegas Video 3's Media Pool, where all the content on the timeline is stored. |
From there you start composing your sequence by dragging the clips to the timeline, or even faster, control-clicking clips in a sequence that will be placed in that order when you drag these clips to the timeline. If you overlap shots, the default is a dissolve, which Vegas calls an "auto crossfade." If you want to do three point style editing, mark your in and out in the clip in the trimmer, then mark where it goes on the timeline and then drop it in. Want to do an "L cut"? It's easy -- just drag across to select the clips, separate audio from video, drag audio ahead and it leads the video. There's also an "expand A-B mode" which looks like the familiar Premiere or Avid method of having an A and B track with the transition between them. It's exceptionally easy to slip and slide, too, by moving a window but leaving the video where it is.
Another nice touch: The extensive right-click contextual menus, where I learned to go when I was wondering how to do something in the interface -- it usually held the answer. Making things much easier as well is the great idea to make the timeline zoom and out using the mouse wheel. Why didn't anybody think of this before?
Source: Original Digital Media Net Content
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