Best way to organize an hour + vegas project?
 

Hey all,

I'm new to Vegas but know enough of the basics on how to edit and my project is not that complex but it is long (probably about 90 minutes).

What is the convention on creating a long project -- is it everything in one project file, all on the same time line, or is it common for people to shoot short, complete clips and keep them as seperate vegas projects and just join them all together at the end?

My uneducated bias is to shoot everything in a modular fashion and then join them at the end, as this would seem to give me more flexibility and result in less time making corrections at the end, but is there some disadvantage to this I'm not seeing?

Thanks,

MC

There is no convention. Vegas can handle it either way, but it also depends on your computer. And most importantly on your personal preference. Do it whatever way feels best to you.

Just finished editing a 90-100 minute wedding, i found the best way to edit it was 'modular' as you put it. Also, i found loading up one time line with 60+ minutes of footage caused the program to occasionally crash. So for me, editing in 30-40 minute chunks works nicely, not sure how easy that is for your project however.

I know it escaped me when I first started using Vegas many years ago, but the Media Bins can be a great help in organizing the elements you're editing with during a long or complex project. It certainly helped me with speeding up the editing process once I started using them.
I agree that it depends on the project, your editing preference and your hardware. I think everyone uses a mixture of techniques.

Someone will throw nested veg files into the mix sooner or later so it might as well be me! I confess to not being a regular user of nested veg files but they may well work for your purposes. What is the nature of the project out of interest?

I use a single timeline and have had 1-hour+ projects with no problems using 9.0C. I too found the media bins to be extremely helpful. I make seperate bins for each scene and each camera, also bins for graphics, FX, music, stills, etc.

I think a lot would depend on the nature of the project, are you going to edit straight thru or will you be taking a 2 week break because of other work, how much RAW footage are you working with, are there natural breaks in the footage and your personal preferances. I've used a single TL, nested vegs, media bins and rendered (avi) sections stitched together depending on the job.
I don't think there's a right or wrong way mostly a personal choice as to what you think is easiest and appropriate for that particular project, also what you're used to doing.
Actually if I could teach my dog to edit I'd be happy but without thumbs well, you know, she just can't get the hang of the mouse.

In my narrative work, I like to break down the film into scenes, dedicating a project file to each one. Then in a master project, you can import the scene .veg files to time line to see how things are matching up..

Multiple timelines?
 

I saw mentioned twice here "I use a single timeline". Is there any way to have multiple timelines in Vegas (besides nested projects) ?

Have multiple copies of Vegas open and copy/paste as required.

Or, you could complete half, start a new timeline for the 2nd half and then cut and past just once at the end.
I would do this, or even smaller chunks, if you are having trouble with crashes or render isssues.

How many timelines would you like? I've used as many as 24 at one time but it was mutliple cameras, multiple time of shooting, graphics, etc etc and the only way to cut it in a coherent manner was multiple TLs.

You don't need to use nested vegs to use multi TLs although that is 1 way to do it. You don't need to have multiple instances of Vegas open although that is 1 way to do it.

If you want multiple TLs in one instance of Vegas simply open Vegas, drag the clips you want on TL 1 to it, then insert another TL below that name it 2 for example, drag the clips you want on it to it, reapeat as necessary.

Vegas has many ways to do the things and will take as many TLs as needed.

I am talking about Vegas Pro, the light edition is limited in the number of timelines you can use at one time.

Something else others haven't mentioned which may be an important consideration for a long project - is your computer up to it?

I recently edited a 35min project shot at 1080i/50 3 video tracks, 4 audio tracks nothing very fancy and no effects other than pan & crop a few transitions etc and all this on an Intel based PC using Quad core Q9770 extreme cpu with 8 gig of RAM - rendering crashed after 10-15mins!!!!!!!!!

Sony support could only suggest that I break the project up into smaller sections and join it all up after rendering each section.

OK, so I had made the mistake of installing the 32bit version of Vegas so I wasn't getting the true value of the 8gig of RAM - but, I wasn't out-putting to blu-ray just DVD

Thanks for your suggestions. But I was referring to time-lines, not tracks (layers). Adobe Premiere's call them sequences.
Mike's suggestion seems to be the closest I am looking for: multiple copies of Vegas open. I was hoping for something similar to sequences.

Timelines and tracks are the same thing just different names. Instances of Vegas, mutiple instances of Vegas open. I've had 6 different instances open at one time, CandP between them. Can get confusing sometimes.

Question
 

If I work 8 different veg. projects with all clips in the AVID DNxHD codec, and then write the edited segments to the same AVID codec, and bring all 8 new clips to 1 project, will I have lost quality even though it was written from uncompressed DNxHD to uncompressed DNxHD? Thanks for any help here!

edit: the film is for film festival submission, so I can't afford any quality lost if possible.

timelines != tracks
 

And to everyone else thinking and saying so, let me make a point.

A time line has certain characteristics - mainly: how you count the time. If you have two timelines, they can have different characteristics. For example, 1 timeline may count time as 88.2khz audio samples, the other as NTSC frames. So obviously tracks and timelines *are not the same*.

You can have multiple tracks that are arrange on one timeline. You cannot have two timelines simultaneously outputing to same device time unless you mix them via some other parent timeline/virtual device that does the conversion of the various child timeline measurements to the parents measure (Vegas does not do this AFAIK). You can have to tracks playing simultaneously one timeline.

This is English. Not anything specific to an application or hardware.

If you want to understand what I am talking about in Vegas, right click on your timeline. It should be up at the top where the markers get placed. Vegas can handle several time formats. You can also see this in the time display.

Sorry for being pedantic.

Walter, while I understand what you are saying in Vegas Pro timelines and tracks will give you the same information depending on how you set the 'ruler' up. You can only set up one ruler which of course has the frames, time, drop, non-drop etc. This is carried thruout the entire project regardless of whether you are using 1 track or 99. So again while I understand what you are saying in your previous post it's not necessarily true in Vegas. There is no master timeline as any track can be used as the master.

Well, I guess the guys who made Vegas don't speak English or use very strange terminology. When you look up timeline in Vegas help, what does it say?

From what I read they seem to use TRACK and TIMELINE interchangably. When I searched TIMELINE there were somewhere in the area of 30, 35 different things none of which defined a true meaning of what they consider to be a TIMELINE, so in truth, I think we might be saying the same thing simply using different terminology.
Vegas has TRACKS (both audio and video) that can be or are considered to be TIMELINES. Six of one, 1/2 dozen of another perhaps. I do know that if someone asks me or tells me about a TIMELINE or a TRACK I know what they mean so as long as I can bumble my way through I guess I could call it Chevrolet. ;-)

Good evening,


well, I have always felt it best to keep things simple. Kinda like, I'd rather play the chord than name the chord.

I always thought that the docking window that has the ruler and holds all the vid/audio tracks was the timeline.

I see using two timelines, one with beats in the ruler, and one with timecode.

I have used several other editing suites and none of them allow for that. So, in most suites you simply nest the projects.

If there is any other way of doing this I would be very interested in hearing about it!!!

In edius you would build them in "Sequences" then combine them. Really the same thing.