Editing Big Projects
 

Hello,

I am using Vegas 5.0 to edit about 24 hours of video clips, down to about an hour or so. What's the most efficient way to do this, while not rendering anything more than once(trying to keep the quality high)?

I have all my video files on an external HD, and have tried creating a working Vegas file with all the clips added to the media bin. But it was just too big. I so far have not been able to find a way to edit in smaller chunks, and then put them together at the end of the editing process, without rendering the smaller sequences first.

Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

thanks,

Jeremy

I haven't done 24 hours worth of stuff, but my approach has generally been this:

* Open a file in the trimmer.
* Hit "m" to create markers around material of interest
* Drag the useful clips up to a timeline, possibly on a "junk track"
* Copy or move the useful bits to the "non-junk tracks"
* Use the region stripe to focus on the non-junk, leaving the junk to hang way out on the right hand side of the timeline.

I guess you could render the junk track before editing. The advantage is a cleaner hard drive. The disadvantage is another generation of encode/decode.

without knowing the type of project it is or if it's all from 1 camera (if multiple cameras of the job but different angles there is another way).
IF it's all 1 camera then how about breaking the project into smaller projects save the vegs and once you have the smaller vegs cut the way you want them you can render them to DV-AVI, stitch them together into another project and render either DV-AVI or MPEG andthere will be no loss of quality as you are merel;t rendering any effects and/or transitions. I routinely do this on all of my work including seminars that might be 2 or 3 days of shooting.

IF it's multiple cameras of the job but different angles you can use one of the programs made to help you do this either Excalibur or Ultimate S OR you can simply set each cameras work on a seperate timeline one on top of another and use the PAN/CROP feature to make the clips smaller and position them so you can see all of them and cut as you go. Once you hve it cut then set a MASTER TRACK and move the desired clips to that and RESTORE the PAN/CROP. If this is the case I suggest 2 things to make it easier. ONE-name each track camera 1,2, 3 whatever the number and when you cut make a region around the good clip you wish to use naming it with the camera number so you don't lose track of which clps you want to use when you move them to the MASTER TRACK.
Vegas has many ways to do just about everything and doing multicam is not as hard as it appears.
Again if it's 1 camera just take smaller bite sized chunks to make your workload easier.
HTHs
Don

Thanks for the quick replies and helpful advice, guys. All my footage at this point is from one camera. I was under the impression that any time a render is done, you lose some quality. But if rendering out as DV-AVI or MPEG doesn't degrade quality, then this sounds like my best option...editing smaller chunks at a time. Thanks!

Jeremy

NONONONONONONONO! :-)

Do not render to MPEG until you are ready to goto DVD.


Render to DV-AVI THEN stitch all the clips you're going to use THEN render to MPEG.

Of course if you are only making the project 1 hour then the bitrate will be 8 anyway so no big degradation of quality but keep the MPEG render for the last thing before you goto author the DVD.

Don

As Don said, stick to AVI until you're ready to render.
As long as you're doing straight cuts, you won't lose ANY quality.
It's only when you add any kind of FX that you have to render, thereby losing quality. Even then, the encoder in Vegas is recognized as being one of the best so quality loss on one pass is minimal.

Mike

Thanks for the clarification. After posting my reply, I realized what you meant. I did a test re-rendering the same clip 6 times over, both as an AVI and an MPEG. The first render and the last render of the AVI's looked and sounded the same. The first and the last render of the MPEG's were noticebly different, with the last one being quite degraded. Thanks for the help.

Jeremy

I open file in trimmer then select clip area to use then render as subclip and drag to media bin files I have created. Then I have all the clips I will be using organized and ready to begin assembly on time line. Not sure if all this is available in vegas 5 or not. It's very possible I'm not completely clear in my description...........render as subclip takes no time and I select my areas using the loop region.

Has anyone else noticed you can't have more than 40hours on the timeline? or perhaps it was just my crappy computer.

I've had 40 hours of HDV on the timeline, and it certainly choked the system down, but it *did* run.

In the last project I worked on I had to sift through about 24 hours of footage. But what I did was split the footage up into the segments/chapters that made the movie and simply cut and pasted each individual chapter (timeline) onto a "full" project therefore everything I didn't use was never loaded on the final piece.

For bigger projects I look for a logical way to split up the footage and create multiple vegs.
When it's time to render out I make a veg and drag all the little vegs in.

The nice thing about this is when I see something that i missed I just have to edit that smaller veg and the changes are carried through to the big veg. It beats having to drop a huge file on the time line to trim a couple of frames I missed earlier.