Top Ten Tips for Newby?

[Jim Browning]

After spending most of my life doing still work, I've taken the plunge into video. Given my techie nature, I of course had to go HD, and purchased a Canon HV-20. That naturally led to building a new quad-core computer to edit the footage. :-/ I chose Vegas Movie Studio Platinum as the NLE, editing .avi files captured using CineForm Neo HD. I have an Nvidia 8600GTS driving a 20" wide-screen monitor (via DVI), and also our 50" Panasonic plasma (via DVI>HDMI). I'm shooting mostly youth sports: volleyball and basketball. Tonight I start trying to edit for the first time... total newb, not only with Vegas but with video editing.

My question is, what are the "Top Ten Tips" for someone just getting started, who wants to climb the learning curve as quickly as possible and avoid as many mistakes along the way as he can?

TIA for any help!
--
Jim

[Harold Schreiber]

Hi Jim,

Q's: Where are you placing yourself when shooting these sports ?

Do you have access to AC, or must you be on battery power ?

Are you able to have and use a Monitor of some sort while doing the shooting ?

Do you need to output to HD, or will SD be sufficient ?

Would you like to have an extendable control handle for the T-Pod ?

Would you want to have your IF Remote set up to Fiberoptic cable to use for the Zooming function ?

I can show you how to do the last two.

Harold

[Jim Browning]

Originally Posted by Harold Schreiber

Q's: Where are you placing yourself when shooting these sports ?

I've found that being a bit off from centerline and a bit above net level works well for volleyball. I'm using the Canon wide angle adapter and that results in a good focal length. I like to get a combo of general game action and close-ups, so I tend to be closer and not as high as the videographers who are basically just recording the match without changing camera position, zoom, etc. I'm using the Canon hotshoe Mic right now, but may add a parabola to get the coach in the huddle and stuff like that.

Originally Posted by Harold Schreiber

Do you have access to AC, or must you be on battery power ?

Battery only; no external monitor.

Originally Posted by Harold Schreiber

Do you need to output to HD, or will SD be sufficient ?

Want to do both: HD for me and those who have it; SD for others.

Originally Posted by Harold Schreiber

Would you like to have an extendable control handle for the T-Pod ?

Maybe, but I'd have to know what it is first ;)

Originally Posted by Harold Schreiber

Would you want to have your IF Remote set up to Fiberoptic cable to use for the Zooming function ?

I've seen the posts on that trick, and bought the cable to do it.. just need to get it attached to my tripod in a way that works well :/ Of course the supplier gave me a "free upgrade" to a longer cable length (because of their stock situation), which means I have many feet of excess to coil up!

Thanks for the response... any editing/vegas specific tips? I don't want to stay too far off the forum topic! :)

[Don Bloom]

Are you looking for tips for editing or shooting? If editing here's a few thing to keep in mind.

1) PLAY PLAY PLAY with the footage. Save each version of the VEG file under a name like "boys volleyball 1, 2, 3 ETC this way you can always fgo back to the previous version. Since Vegas is by nature a non-destructive editor you can undo virtually anything you do to the footage.

2) NEVER use a computer monitor to judge color or exposure. They lie. since you have a big screen TV there set the color and brightness and contrast of the TV to color bars (should be in the Vegas generated media) and set it as close as possible to them. Use that TV for color and exposure.

3) Read up on Edward Troxels newsletters. There's a link to them under his signature in all of his posts. It's more specific to the full version of Vegas but an awful lot will also work for the Studio version you have.

4) Read as many threads here as you can and specifically search in the Vegas forum for the post about the Studio Edition.

Remember you can't hurt anything and it can be undone. Also remember to SAVE SAVE SAVE as you go thru and work the footage but save each time under a different name.

Have fun, don't get frustrated and ask lots of questions but search the forum first. I'll bet just about everything you could ask about Studio version has already been asked and answered-that'll save you some time.

Good luck and go forth and edit ;-)

Don

[Jim Browning]

Originally Posted by Don Bloom

Good luck and go forth and edit ;-)

I'll do that.. saving merrily all the way, with new filenames! I've started reading the JETDV newsletters, and will calibrate my TV for Vegas just as soon as I can get it and the Nvidia card to work together with no overscan... grrrr... Thanks for the valuable tips!

[Don Bloom]

you migh not be able to get rid of the overscan. As long as you know it's there and how much it is you could probably work around it. Perhaps you can set the action safe boundry to match the overscan.

Don

[Tony Spring]

vtc.com have some very good online video tutorials

[Randy Stewart]

Jim,

Here's a few tidbits that I've learned along the way:

1. When doing voice over, you arm the audio track with the little target on the left of the timeline (you'll see the levels indicators become active) and then you have to hit the little record button at the bottom of the timeline window to actually record. Not remembering to do that caused me a few hours of frustration trying to figure out why I couldn't record from an external mike.

2. Be careful with ripple edit, I usually work with it off until I want to insert or delete a clip on a full timeline. This is because sometimes you forget what ripple edit is affecting and it shows up after you have rendered the show.

3. Prepare photo's before you bring them into Vegas (assuming it's needed). Frame the subject (crop), fix mistakes (red eye, color, brightness, etc.), resize them (I use 1440x960), put them into numerical sequence (if you are doing a slide show) by renaming them with a 3 digit number (001, 002, etc.) in front of the name so you don't have to do it on the timeline. This will save you time and make doing slide shows a breeze in Vegas using the automated features without having to go back and edit each photo.

4. Group events and control drag. To get your pictures/video to the exact length of a song without having to edit each event, select the events, form a group (right click-group-create new), place the cursor on either end of the event group, hold the control key down, click and drag until it matches the song length, and release. This technique applies the sizing to the stretched or shortened event lengths equally (to include transitions). A big time saver.

5. To select multiple events on a timeline, right click the first event, pick select events to end from the drop down list. To select multiple events on all timelines from the cursor, the best thing to do is download a free script from one of the great resource sights that the Vegas community enjoys. The newsletters mentioned above are great. Another big source is: http://www.vasst.com/. They have free tutorials, scripts, and very reasonable training DVD's to aid in learning.

Okay, hope that helps get you started. Vegas is so powerful and flexible (you can do things several different ways) and the community help is the best I've ever experienced. Enjoy!

Randy

[Renton Maclachlan]

Re 3 in Randy's post: I used to prepare the size of photos in photoshop before bringing them into Vegas but I don't any more. I just pan/crop them in Vegas. I've found it is far easier - and you can put motion on them at the same time...

[Randy Stewart]

Renton/Jim,

Understand that workflow and agree for the most part. The main reason I do the prep is because I use Ultimate S 3 (from VASST) for slide shows which does the Ken Burns effect (and much more) movement for you. If my pictures are not already in the sequence I want them, in portrait format, or are extra large (like many of the digital pic's are now), the automation can be off so I end up fixing them individually on the timeline if I haven't prep'd them in Photoshop first. Once prep'd, I can do a slide show of literally hundreds of pictures in about 30 seconds complete with custom transitions, random movement, aspect ratio matched, events set to markers, and fit to my music selection with the US3 plugin. Another advantage of sizing the pic's is that Vegas doesn't slow way down with super large photo's on the timeline.

By the way, if you haven't discovered it yet, you can set Vegas up to establish a custom length and a set amount of overlap for each picture (default to crossfade transition) when it loads photos onto the timeline. Go to Options->preferences->editing tab->new still length image set to the number of seconds you want it to be->check the automatically overlap multiple events box->set cut to overlap conversion amount to the number of seconds/frames that you want. I normally use 5 seconds for a picture, and a 1 second overlap for transitions. That's a a big timesaver when you are doing slide shows.

Hope this is helping. Looking forward to seeing your creations. You can see some of mine here: http://www.cr-home-videos.com/samplevideos.html

Randy

[Jim Browning]

Wow.... thanks guys... a lot to digest!

But first I have to get CineForm working with my Nvidia card... sigh.

I'm reading and reading, and have a bunch of footage captured now; just have to solve the bug in my hardware setop.