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.

Yes, that option has been around for quite some time (several years at least). I do use it on occasion. It does have some quirks you need to watch out for, though. One example: If you are dragging a clip that had a dissolve onto another clip with a dissolve, sometimes these dissolves can be "added" so that the dissolve length is now doubled. So do verify the results afterwards.

ANOTHER reason to read the "readme" files from each release! :-)

As only a Vegas user, what is storyboard mode? Does it let you nest groups of clips and drag them as a unit?

Storyboard in Liquid is a user-selected mode that allows you to play around with your clips on a desktop. Each clip is represented by a pictogram. So your shots look like a pack of cards laid out on a card table. You can move them around just like cards on a table and you can select an image that represents the contents of the clip to make it easier to see what's what.
You can preview each clip by double clicking it. You can select small, medium and large options for each pictogram. You can choose to have the pictogram play back at the size you choose or, if you prefer, to have it open up in a preview window when you double click it.
So, if you are putting together a very visual sequence composed of many similar shots the storyboard mode allows you to select the best shots and put them together in the order that you like best. I find it a very visual and intuitive process and much better than trying to do the same thing on a timeline,
You can make the bad ones small and put them together in a pile so they don't get in the way. You can work with the ones that you like to construct a sequence. You do this by placing them, like cards, on the desktop, so that they overlap. If you double click the cards that are overlapped they will play back in sequence in a preview window.
When you have got the order of shots the way that you like you can send them all to the timeline and continue to work with them there.
I don't know how many other NLEs have a function like this. I find it invaluable for creative sequences.
Unfortunately Liquid is obsolete. Here's hoping that the NLE that replaces it has this function.

You realize you can do the same thing with "Windows Explorer" and then drag the relevant clips straight to the Vegas timeline...

Skip the manual (at first) and just watch some of the excellent tutorial videos. If you realy want to get the most out of Vegas and do it fasst (yes it is a pun) then check out Vasst (I have no affiliation with that company other than being a customer to the tune of several hundreds of dollars of training videos & software that I purchased from them).

Must admit the absence of a storyboard worried me a little when I was researching which NLE to use when I made the switch from Hi8 to VHS editing but its absence has never been a problem.

The tips given above all work well but I also use Batch Capture as well as the Trimmer. Batch Capture lets you capture the scenes relating to one aspect of the production (e.g. shots of the same place if you are making a travelogue) while the Trimmer can be used to select and size the parts you need in the order you want them by using the I and O and A/TAB A shortcut keys and using Ripple where you wish to insert the event between two others.

Sony Vegas is a fantastic editing programme - versatile and comprehensive - and I can't recommend it highly enough.

Richard

None of the links for the top 10 work for some reason....

Thanks for the clarification Ed - I am reading this as my trial of Vegas 9 is almost up, and wonderign what I missed. I have been just dragging them in through the Explorer tab, and am relieved to see I was on the right path. Once again, this Board is a treasure, and a wealth of information. Thank you all.

Hey Brian...
I loved the tips from the links you provided, especially a trick for making a quick, faux 3-D text effect. I saved the link in my favorites to go back to on demand, AND NOW THE PAGE IS GONE!!! wah!wah!wah! Any clue what that particular tip was or where the page went?
-Thanks!