A free tutorial to Vegas
 

The Vegas 7 software comes bundled with the Sony V1E, so I'd like to give it a try. I must say it's not that intuitive as Adobe Premiere or Edius I've been using so far. Is there any free tutorial available? I'm aware of the great series from VASST, but unfortunately Douglas, I just cannot afford it right now:)

There are:
Approximately 1000 free tutorials on the VASST site
2 Freebies on the YouTube site (Search for VASST)
My Vegas books (3)
Edward's great tutorials/newsletters
Plus a host of others on the Sony website.

I think you'll actually find it more intuitive than either Premiere or Edius once you get the four main workspaces fixated.
Timeline
Dockable windows
Explorer (which is part of the Dockable windows)
Preview Window

Are the big three. There is no Source window in Vegas, the Preview window shares vis time as both preview and source view. That is probably the biggest hurdle.
In the Explorer, you can enable auto-preview, which will play any clip prior to you putting it on the timeline. Find a clip in the Explorer, click on it. It'll play if you've got AutoPreview enabled.
From there you can either drag to the timeline, or open in the trimmer, which converts the Preview Window to a Source window automatically.
In other words, when the Timeline has focus, the Preview window is always Preview.
when the Trimmer, Explorer, or Project Media windows have focus, the Preview window becomes a Source window.
Hopefully that little bit helps?

It sure does; thanks Douglas! You're right in saying that the lack of two playback windows is the main hurdle for somebody more used to Premiere or Edius. For instance, is there a way to compare the source and outcome picture when applying video filters? It's so easy in Edius - even though it lacks an external preview capability...

Edit:
Funny - sometimes it's enough to articulate your doubts to make them vanish! I've just discovered the Split Screen View button - just like in Edius:)

The Dynamic RAM Preview seems to have a limit of just 1024 MB allocated to it, with 512MB deafult; can it be increased?

Until you get a better grip on how the app works, leave your Dynamic Ram Preview where it is....or no higher than 128MB.
You don't want it higher, Vegas doesn't work like Edius does.
Glad you found the split screen

Douglas, by no means am I trying to get a free tutorial from you within this thread, but one more question if you will, please. What am I doing wrong, that when a large clip is opened in the trimmer, the app tends to hang or at least be very unresponsive when I try to move the cursor back and forth? In other, even very basic, applications like Ulead VideoStudio (not to mention Premiere or Edius), I can rewind and forward any clip in multiplies of realtime, but not in Vegas. Frankly, this has been my first impression that made me dislike Vegas from the very beginning.

My system is quite a fast one, with Core 2 Quadro (QX6700) and 4 GB RAM; it's so unresponsive under both 32 and 64bit Windows.

If I manage to make the app more responsive, I'll probably be much more motivated to learn it!

Coupla things...If you've already been playing with the RAM, you may have played with other things?
Are you attempting to open DV? HDV? Uncompressed SD? Uncompressed HD?

The Explorer and Trimmer are both unbuffered sources, so depending on system setup, that can be an issue. The timeline is of course, always buffered, so rewind/FF etc are fast and easy.

I'm opening HDV 1080/50i. Short clips (I've tried really short, like 30 secs) rev/ff normally. But a really huge file (like the full 1 hour m2t from capturing without scenes detection/file splitting) is just impossible to ff/rewind. The same 1 hour clip can be rewound or forwarded with just one mouse movement in Premiere!

I have found out that when you drag the cursor catching it lower that the top handle, you only scrub (is it the right word?) video (no audio), and it's very fast and efficient then. But this raises this question: can Vegas be configured to use audio acceleration - I mean, other NLEs have no problems scrubbing both.

And is it a known bug that Vegas doesn't remember the project properties beween sessions, even if you check the "Start all new projects with these settings"?

OK - so my mistake was trying to figure out Vegas intricacies with only referring to the Help system; only today did I try to actually read the pdf manual, and voila! I'm at home - it's a great NLE, no worse or more limited that Adobe or Edius I'm used to.