Thanks Everyone.

I took all the advice given and found a solution. Since there appear to be a problem with one of the virtual drives (I partition the Lace 250 GB Ext. HD) I reformatted that one. There wasn't anything very important on that drive anyway. After I re-formatted this drive, I tried to capture footage. This time I had the Lacie Ext. HD connected directly to the the built-in firewire port on my laptop. Then I connected my GL2 to a Firewire Card. I went to Vegas changed the disk management location to the Ext. HD and VIOLA I was able to capture live footage to my Ext. HD. I checked both partitioned drives on the Ext. HD and they both captured. Yes!! Don't you love success stories?

Thanks again.

Al

PS Now I have to test my PD 170. I'm sure I shouldn't have any problems!??!

Issues with Editing Video with Multiple Audio Tracks
 

I'm looking for some suggestions for the best way to handle editing video (chopping it up like is typical) that has several, in my case, at least 6 synchronous audio tracks associated with it.

I've tried grouping but I find grouping to be fairly clunky and limiting. Often you want to use parts of a previous audio track with a different clip, particularly with rear or far shots.

I was looking for a way to just cut using the video takes and only one audio track, the dialogue track, and somehow have the software keep track of the other audio tracks temporally associated with that main audio track without me having to worry about it constantly. What I would really like to be able to do is treat all six audio tracks as one but, again, grouping doesn't seem to be the best way to do this.

So what would you guys suggest? Any help would be most appreciated.

Scott & Edward:

Thanks to you both. The fix to my above problem was clear once explained differently. I'll check out the Sony forum and have bookmarked Edwards.

:D

Why not do your splits with ripple on, and if you need to use portions of audio that get split out, disable ripple and drag those sections out as needed, inserting Xfades? I use grouping for most tasks...but it's not for everyone

Was glad to help too. I know Edward has been around for awhile and has some excellent tutorials. There's no doubt about it he has some great info over there. I think Spot has a film look tutoiral online and Billyboy does too. His web is wide open west or something to that effect. Do a google you'll find it.

Guy,

Thanks for the response. I fully admit this to be a request for greater convenience. Changing the properties of the footage once and a while is no issue; I just get a little tired of doing it in multiple projects with the regular addition of supplemental clips to the media pool. Despite my resistance to over automation, I really like Vegas 5.

Brad

how to fully control opacity of video event?
 

hi. i'm looking for a way to control the opacity of a video event throughout the shot.
i found how to control the opacity of a whole track, but i don't want to affect the track in it's entirety. i also found how to fade in and out an event by "pulling on the corners", but this only allows me to fade in, or fade out, but not freely control the opacity throughout the whole shot.

FOR EXAMPLE: i want to start a video event at 50% opacity, then make the opacity climb at a moderate pact to 100%, then go back down at once to 20%, then immediately back to 100%, and then finally decrease the opacity gradually down to 0%.

how do i do that?

Very easy.....right click on the video track and select "insert/remove envelope" and then select "composite level". Just add points to coicide the amount of opacity you want and your done....

got it. thanks for the quick reply!! that's as close as you can get to online support!

Great info - thanks Edward.

The MPEG2 result will not be lossless, am I right? I'm a newbie to HD, and was just expected to be able to render out to an HD 720p avi file.

...I need to go to college for this sort of thing?!

Thanks Douglas but that's not exactly what I mean.

Let me rephrase the problem. Let's say I have a video track (with multiple takes, etc.) and each one has 6 audio tracks associated with it from room mics. Let's also say I want to edit the video randomly just like I would a movie and all I want to worry about is dialogue for now.

Once the video and dialogue tracks are all arranged nicely, I'd like there to be a way to just throw in all the other associated audio tracks and auto-magically have them line up with the dialogue audio.

So is there any way to do this or am I just dreaming? Particularly, I am wondering, how would it be done if I Were editing video with Vegas and then mixing the 5.1 soundtrack in a different program all together?

Someone told me it could be done with SMTPE timecoding, but as best I can tell Vegas supports no such feature.

So any other ideas, Douglas or anyone else? Thanks a ton.

You can pretty much bank on Edward knowing the answer right off the bat and without guessing and conversation.

how do i copy and paste from one project to another?
 

i need to copy and paste events from one vegas project to another. i tried, but it didn't work. any ideas why?
thanks.

Open Vegas, Open one of the projects. Open Vegas again, Open the other project. Select the items to be copied and press CTRL-C. Go to the other instance of Vegas, position the cursor correctly, and press CTRL-V.

i see. i tried to do it on the same application of vegas and not two seperate ones. i guess that is what i did wrong.

thank you.