Well, as I continue to learn more about Vegas and mess around a bit more, I found out what I was doing wrong... I kept changing the fade offset of the AUDIO portion, so what I meant was if you change the fade offset of the audio track, it does nothing. Now, my other question is, I have found out that GAIN and FADE OFFSET on the audio track is the same... what is gain exactly? I was dragging it around and noticed that it lowered the volume on as you kept dragging it to the right.

You know, I've been wrestling with how to *begin* the
the flashback (i.e. how to transission to it). Maybe a
crossfade. I also considered having the real time
running simultaneously, but just very faintly in the
background, but wonder if that may seem too
"busy".
I appreceiate your thoughts.

Actually it DOES do something. If fades in or out the audio. However, the volumes and length of fade may be such that you're simply not hearing the difference. Make a three or four second fade out on the audio and you should easily hear it. Also, you might want to try changing the fade type (right click it, choose fade type, and pick one of the other options.)

Fade offset will only affect the ends of the clip. Gain will affect the clip overall (the entire clip). You can also add a volume envelope that will let you make multiple adjustments over time.

You also have the track which will affect all clips on that one track.

Have you read my newsletters? http://www.jetdv.com/tts

I did... and thanks much. I'm using the Composite envelope without cuts method right now.

-Kevin

chapter points (or markers from the project/timeline) WILL work in this mode though..

Ok here is what I have tried doing

1. I un-installed an re-installed Vegas - No luck
2. I re-installed Windows media player - no luck
3. I tried playing the files on my laptop and it crashed media player on my laptop. - so there is definately something wrong with the files.

I did however capture a tape that was recorded in MY camera and everything works fine. So it seems as if there is something wrong with the tapes themselves.
The only thing I can think of that makes these tapes different was that my friend originally captured them using a SONY DSR40 deck. Since they were in that deck, they seem to be a little off for some reason.

Any ideas on why playing the tapes in a deck would effect them?

But like I said the files work fine in Vegas and I am able to render them, so it really isn't a big deal, but I would still like to know why this is happening.

Thanks

Don,

Thanks for the info! I certainly appreciate the time and length of your explanation.

That will certainly work. I'm more partial to the "Master Track" approach. (and now I'm more partial to using Excalibur - certainly speeds up the process)

<<<-- Originally posted by Peter Jefferson : chapter points (or markers from the project/timeline) WILL work in this mode though.. -->>>

Oh, absolutely! You just won't have menu options to directly jump to a specific chapter point (as there IS no menu)

How about locking tracks down? Is there a way to lock them down or timecode them after synching the audio with video?

Question about the preview window
 

I am not sure whether this is because of Vegas or solely on my computer's hardware/processing power. Whenever I apply the effects, transitions, text, etc, etc and then play it on the preview window, there seems to be a TINY lag. It gets worse if I enlarge the preview window. I have moderately average specs, P4 2.2GHz w/ 1GB PC2100 DDR RAM & 80GB 7200rpm HD, and it doesn't seem to slow down, it just is a bit choppy. It is noticably more choppy as I enlarge the preview window. Now, my friend says that this is normal because it's just previewing... my question is, will it be this choppy when I do the final product and export it back onto the camcorder's DV tape and then try to view it?

What do you think yourself is happening David? Why do you think
it is slowing down? The answer is really simple. You are adding
stuff to your footage that your computer must calculate / process.
Since you haven't written it out to a new file or did a preview to
RAM it needs to process EACH frame. Now you are probably already
understanding where this lag is coming from.

I'm not going to bother answering your second part of your
question. Why? Because you can fully check that out yourself.
Render the sequence to a new file and play that back. It will
answer your question on whether it will stay choppy. In the
future, please do some research yourself if you can answer the
question yourself (like the last part of this post). Thank you.

VOB Files in Vegas
 

Just want to know if anybody was aware that you can drag the .VOB files from a DVD directly onto the Vegas 4.0 timeline and edit as you would any other .avi etc file. This is great for archives etc. Only drawback is that this method doesn't import sound from the DVD (but I usually record it seperately and then synchronise). I'm sure most people know about this, but thougt I would add is just in case.

Yes you can but no audio will be available..

You can however extract the audio as wave by using an application called BeSweet

Also be aware that your editing as an MPEG... not AVI.. so you are working in a lossy format...

OpenDML .avi files
 

This is probably old news to most of you. However, as I was confused by it for some time I suspect there may be one or two others that are suffering the same misunderstanding.

When rendering to a .avi file, in the render as (video settings) dialogue there is a choice for saving as an OpenDML (avi v2) file.

If you plan to import the avi into another application for further work (in my case I tried it with PowerPoint, a demo of After Effects and Particle Illusion) it seems that you should always uncheck this box as some other apps do not understand OpenDML. I don't have an exhaustive list of compliant apps but if someone does, I guess that would be a useful document to post here.

The result is that you will have a file that displays as a window of coloured fuzz - probably not what you intended.

By unchecking the box, the file will display perfectly well.

The downside (according to DSE's excellent Vegas 4 Editing Workshop) is that you cannot render a file greater than 2Gb. It also appears that alpha channels are not saved in the file if the box is unchecked (but I assume this is only an issue if you want to edit the alpha channels later)..

Anyway, from my point of view, discovering this took a long time and caused me much time wasted and annoyance. Hope this tip saves you from the hassle!