Does Vegas have a story board option?
 

Does Vegas have a story board option like Movie maker or does everything have to be done on the time line?

Storyboard style is aimed at beginners. Vegas is aimed more at professionals or prosumers.

Hi Kevin,

Vegas has no story board option, but you can download Celtx witch is for writing screenplays and has a story board option. And it is free.
Do a search on Wikipedia.

Terry

I suppose that is true as I am a beginner, but storyboard mode makes it very easy to move scenes around as they are all the same size. It is so much faster to organize DVDs with a lot of scenes in storyboard mode with Pinnacle. I miss that simplicity when suffering through DVD architect.

Waaaay back when I was a beginner I saw it all that way. I looked at a time-line and was unsure if I could use such a thing.

Turns out that once I spent some time learning a time-line that the story board method is actually more difficult and lacks the flexibility that a time-line gives.

It takes more time to learn a time-line at least for some but once you get the hang of it you will not want to go back to the limitations of the story board method.

Danny Fye
VidMus Video - Music Productions

Gints thats my thought exactly. I have the trail version of Sony Vegas an to me its not easy to work with. The story board makes things a lot easier. ANy other programs out there that has a storyboard while give you you two tracks of audio and a separate track for narration?

Try Pinnacle12 it has storybook but is more cpu dependent then studio

I came to Vegas from a storyboard/timeline NLE, Newtek's SpeedEDIT. And honestly, I don't miss the storyboard at all. The compromises required to keep the duality of a storyboard and timeline working together were just too great.

As for moving events around on the Vegas timeline, don't forget that Vegas has a VERY powerful storyboard feature called "shuffle" that makes this very easy. Just right click on an event on the timeline and move it to where you want, release the mouse and you get the context menu "Move, Copy, Shuffle". Pick "Shuffle" and you have dropped it in that spot as easily and quickly as you could on a storyboard.

Thanks for the tip Eugene!!
I had no idea that feature existed.
I really do need to spend some time reading the manual one of these days :-)

Mike, I'm surprised at you! So many times you've bailed me out with Vegas and you didn't know this? ;) (Don't feel bad, neither did I.)

PowerDirector 7 is another good editor if you want to choose between storyboards and timeline modes. It's from Cyberlink and they offer a free 30 day trial.

Mike, I would like to request membership of the 'Well I'll Be Damned' club. This is the first time I have EVER read anything about Shuffle. How brilliant is that?!

Any other old hands like to fess up as well?!

"Shuffle" is one of my favorites.

Try using cut and paste on the timeline, too.
Try "Paste Insert" from the "Edit" menu.

Pretty slick.

Welcome to the club Ian :-)
The reason I never bothered looking for something like this is because, on the very rare occasion that I need to do this, I use a script called "Swap Events" that was written about 4 years ago by John Rofrano.
The embarrassing part of all of this is that this feature has existed since at least Vegas 5 :-(

I'm in your debt, Brian. Plus you saved me the membership fee for the 'Well I'll Be Damned Club' by showing that there are even more aspects of Vegas I was unaware of (there's a two function minimum for free entry). Love your website, btw. It's my paying customers that keep me from making punk documentary, damn them . . .

Mike, I was on board since the Sonic Foundry days of Vegas 3 and I still find new stuff - and new stuff that comes in useful, more to the point. And now I have my ShuttlePro (birthday present from the kids last week) and Edward's fantastic Excalibur (non-birthday present from me, c/o my wife's carelessly left lying around credit card) I am finding even more ways of doing stuff. Happy days.

Well, at the risk of breaking the sacred oath of exclusive membership... there's lots more tips at:

Top Ten Vegas Tips
Sony Vegas: Real World Tips
Ten More Vegas Tips and Tricks
Ten New Top Tips for Sony Vegas

Thanks for the comments on the website. One of your countrymen, Eric Idle, once said "You can have complete artistic freedom as long as you are willing to make no money at all." I have a day job that pays the bills and health insurance, so I'm free to pursue only the projects I like with my video work. It's a mixed blessing, though, 'cause of course the day job eats up time that could be used for video editing.