Deer in the Headlights

[Philip Ulanowsky]

Hello, Vegas users. This post may be more generic to digital video in general, but it does pertain to Vegas in specific, as well.

I recently acquired SVS 12 Platinum Suite, having used a British product, Serif's Movie Plus, in various versions over about eight years, for occasional small projects. With my limited editing experience, I am familiar with timelines, envelopes, transitions, and effects, and some very basic audio editing. But I'm an older fellow from the days of film cameras and have not kept up with the digital world. Thus, now stepping into HD video for the 1st time from mini-DV, and into Vegas's far richer environment, I am, frankly, lost. I have a thread on the Vegas forum (Sony Creative Software - Forums - Vegas Movie Studio Messages), just trying to get a smooth preview of a 10-second SD clip (it stutters). It has thrown me into a number of new issues, from interlacing and rendering, to codecs, showing me how much I need to learn about the overall environment.

While Vegas's Help contents is very long, it is not really a systematic approach for teaching the aspects of variables I need to learn. As I said above, perhaps my need is Digital Video 101 or something like that. I have looked around for tutorials, but, again, they are piecemeal.

Would anyone care to recommend up-to-date books, or web-sources, in the realm of the prosumer HD? I haven't come across anything based on the Vegas Studio 12 yet, which would be most useful.

[Edward Troxel]

There is an actual manual. You have to download it from Sony's website. That might be better for you to read than the help file.

[Seth Bloombaum]

There are all sorts of tutorials out there on youtube & similar; unfortunately many of them are really poor and it's difficult for a beginner to tell the difference!

Sony has "Articles", "Webinars" and "Free Training Videos" on their support site at sonycreativesoftware.com, some of which are basic and some cover advanced features.

I highly recommend downloading all of Edward Troxel's exellent newsletters, read them all! Although written for various versions of Vegas, most of the info there applies to all versions. Be aware though, if you start liking the idea of scripting, you'll need to upgrade to Pro to get it!

[Philip Ulanowsky]

Thank you both. I have read the Quickstart manual more than once. The issues I am confused about are generally referred to online help. I will read Ed's newsletters and am downloading a webinar from the Sony site; thanks for the lead.

I'll continue looking for some more info on the various considerations. To use an analogy from film photography, learning about reversal and negative film characteristics, ASA speeds (i.e., ISO, but this also now refers to a digital file type) as related to grain, sharpness, color saturation, and "output" to "print media" was one level; processing and chemistry variations (push-pull, temperature, specific developer, etc.), color emulsion cross-over characteristics, S&D curves, and so forth, another level. That I came to understand over years.As I look at Vegas now, and the considerations on various digital video forums, it seems that just getting to the basic competence I expect of myself requires considerably more knowledge of the electronics and software considerations. I'm sure it will narrow itself down as I get a handle on it and know what factors I need to concern myself with for the work I'm doing. But, while I'm primarily aesthetics-oriented, I like having control of my variables. I'm not using a professional camera yet; I expect to have a Vixia HF S200 soon, to go with the HF200 I recently picked up.

Onward!

[Jorma Nippala]

You might check Steve Grisetti's Muvipix.com Guide to Sony Movie Studio Platinum 12.
Preview on Amazon