Well I'm not very close to you but you might want to take a look at my newsletters (link under my name). There are also DVD sets made by Douglas Spotted Eagle and Gary Kleiner that shows how to the basic tasks as well.

Good advice, but I would add one thing to that. In addition to your normal studio monitor set and a general consumer TV, I would find the cruddiest TV set you can get your hands on. This should be pretty easy (and cheap!), but it should help you a good bit. Your commercial is never going to look good on a cruddy TV, and you shouldn't waste time trying for that, but you'll want to at least make sure that you can get your point across on it. You'd be surprised how many really, really bad TV sets are still being watched.

Delete the clip on the right and expand to clip on the left to fill the hole.

Or use the "Unsplit Wizard" in Excalibur.

Blue triangles at cuts in timeline
 

Just out of curiosity, I've been obsessively zooming in, checking each cut for anything funky, and it dawned on me that I didn't know why, at some cuts, the very small triangles are sometimes dark blue and sometimes light blue. I thought at first that dark blue meant a straight cut, but there are a few light blue ones which are straight cuts as well.

This isn't keeping me up at nights. ;-) I was just wondering.

Marcia

One has a short fade on either side of the cut- the other doesn't.

You might want to install SP2? Perhaps this will fix your problems.
Might also be that some packet writing software is causing
troubles, otherwise I'm out of ideas...

I do appreciate your advice thus far.

I set the broadcast clamp on coinservative and the Magic Bullet on the filmy setting. So far so good. The audio sounds great and peaks and has a hard limiter at -6 dB.

I spoke with a Comcast rep. who is not aware of the standard procedure for the leader. All she said was to have 10 sec. of the color bar followed by a count down. Thats all whe knew. She said just use what is industry standard. (of course she didn't know what that is). So.....

Do the following leader sound reasonable:

10 second color bar with -12 dB or is that 1 mhz tone in Vegas

Countdown (is this really necessary)

10 seconds black

***30 sec. commercial****

30 second black.

Reminder- They will be transferring commercial from mini dv to beta.

Thanks again.

Al Rodgers

<<<-- Originally posted by Albert Rodgers :
Countdown (is this really necessary)

10 seconds black

***30 sec. commercial****

-->>>

Wouldn't the 10 seconds black defeat the purpose of having a countdown?

In all honesty, it is really totally up to the station. We have aired commercials on the local ABC station simply by printing to MiniDV, taking our camera there, and playing back from the camer into their equipment. They did not require tone, color bars, or countdowns. However, each station will be different in what they accept.

for progressive Pal
 

You might want to check this thread on the Sony Vegas forum...(I asked the same question...)

http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.co...ssageID=319532

Hope this helps!

Paul.

Dito. I contacted a cable station for a project that I am working on and all they wanted was five seconds of black at the head.
They accept mini DV or beta. They also said that the audio levels could be right to zero db. I did'nt feel comfortable with that so -3 or -6 db will be what I use.

They also said that they scope it and adjust levels for broadcast anyway.

Link to Spot's stuff: http://www.vasst.com
Link to Gary's stuff: http://www.vegastrainingandtools.com

Grouping
 

I need to put something new at the beginning of a project, how
can I get everything grouped together and move it all to the right? About 11 tracks.

This is how I do it but I'm sure there must be a better way.

I select the selection tool on the menu then I go down and minimize all the tracks and zoom out as much as I can then just use the select tool to select all.

Experts, correct me if I'm wrong, but if you only want to move all those tracks over, just use the select tool and select all but if you want to group them, that's a different thing as the audio track and video tracks will be synch when you group objects together so that when you expand on the video the audio track will also expand together with that.

Hey - thanks for the quick response - that did work.

Most appreciated!