Okay, I'm stumped. In the last few hours I've managed to figure out a boat load of stuff (noise reduction, normalization, channel conversions, and a mess of other very cool tools that work great), but opening a highlighted, very short clip from my Vegas timeline in Sound Forge, making permanent changes, then trying to return to Vegas, takes forEVER. Sound Forge apparently saves, then rebuilds peaks for, the whole entire hour long clip which the 10 seconds I'm using in my cut is taken from, ignoring that it's truncated. (The highlighted portion shows in Sound Forge, amid the rest of the hour.) So...

(and keep in mind I never got my system to "open as a copy" (as per another thread on this board so that's out as an option, if that would help)

...since I've locked picture (I cut 90 hours to two hours in 11 days), at least for this round, I'm wondering if I should maybe just export the entire timeline out of Vegas, and open my show in Sound Forge that way. Wouldn't that be faster, as opposed to going between the two clip by clip? (Dear god, I hope so.) But if that's the case, what format would work best? I was thinking maybe AC3 (since it's going out DVD at this stage, to the studio guys who wanna see it)? BUT, can I re-import it back into Vegas that way, without any sync hiccups or other hassles? I know DVD A does it seemlessly. But I have one week, and no time for screwing this up, so I thought I'd better ask. I'm more than a little paranoid at this point (barely surviving on coffee at that).

Marcia

Can't you just make a split where the audio issue is, load that into Forge, and then use the Take when you're done in Forge?
But yes, you can open the AVI directly in Forge. Just remember, that unless you set up Forge to be non-destructive, it will be a destructive edit of your audio.

Hmmm, I must not be doing something right. Or maybe I'm just so wiped that I'm explaining what I mean very badly. You say "make a split where the audio issue is," and then load it into Forge (which is what I was doing), but I get media waaaaay past that split in Forge. It opens the entire original/master file that the "split" media (now cut into my timeline) came from, only with the split media highlighted. So when I save, or save as, that's why it takes forever and a day. It's saving, rebuilding, etc. the entire original hour's length of media.

But how about this... do I lose any quality if, as a workflow, I:

a) open the split off cut, but when Forge opens the entire hour with my clip highlighted I hit cntl "T" to trim away, in Forge, everything but what I'm using in Vegas. Then,
b) I make what ever changes (normalize, noise reduction, whatever) I need, after which I
c) save it as an .aif with an appended name (instead of "marcia.avi it becomes marcia sf.aif) which I can easily find, then
d) import it into my veg, plop back into the timeline in Vegas, and go on my merry way.

Saving a zillion of these sound tweaked/corrected files as .aif takes up very little room on my drives, compared to created a whole new .avi file, which I was doing so that the original isn't touched. (Is there a better way to make sure it's "non-destructive?")

Would the above have any drawbacks though? Is .aif a lower quality? Would ac3 be better/higher quality?

Marcia

P.S. I discovered to my great irritation that whereas ac3 came with Vegas 4, aparently with 5 you have to buy it seperately. Grumble, grumble, grumble...

You could do exactly as you suggest, yes. In fact, you can split out regions in Sound Forge, and Vegas will remember them if you merely want to do that.
I'm still baffled by the lack of ability to "Open Copy." There has got to be something very odd going on there.
Do you have Messenger? Maybe I could do a remote session with you to find the problem.
You can save the files as wave or aif in Forge and then place them in Vegas, no doubt.
AC3 is not an editing format, it's a delivery format only for use to deliver audio on a DVD, nothing else. In fact, technically it's a violation of Dolby's license to edit AC3. I don't know that they really care, but mention it as an illustration of AC3 being a delivery format.