Vegas 4: Even Better

Vegas 4: Even Better
Page 3 of 4

Editing enhancements
Now we get to the meat-and potatoes of Vegas 4, and this represents by far the greatest improvement of all in this stellar editing software. The Vegas designers have made the software a cutter's dream. Starting out with a new capability called Shuffle Mode, you're able to right-drag a clip and then Vegas will insert it wherever you drop it, rippling all the other clips to the right. This is only part of the greatly enhanced Ripple mode in Vegas 4. The big news is that now you can fine-tune your edits with one hand literally tied behind your back. There are some great new shortcuts built in that I wonder why no one has thought of before. Look at the number pad on your computer and try to picture this: Hit the 7 and 9 number pad keys, and the cursor jumps between In and Out points (event start and end in Vegas-speak), 4 and 6 allows you to rough trim, 1 and 3 is trim by frame, and then 0 plays a loop of the edit where your cursor sits. Hit 5 and it takes you out of this brilliant trim routine. One-handed editing! Wow. This is great for long-form work. Of course, you can use mouse if you want, but with this kind of ease, plus the old Avid-originated JKL method with the maximum scrubbing speed now 20x, forget using the mouse with Vegas, at least for trimming. I can't imagine how trimming and refining edits could be any faster or easier than this. It's a major improvement.

Vegas 4 gives you a great new way to compare one shot to another using a split-screen feature.

Another new feature is the ability to hit Control/alt and then when you can see a split-screen (yes, on your external monitor, too) of the outgoing and incoming frames of a cut. There's more to this split-screen business, too, where you can select what's called "split screen bypass," where you can view a split screen that compares the clip either with or without effect you've applied (see graphic). Or, you can also use this to compare the color correction of a shot you're working with alongside a previous one, and this can show up on an external monitor, too. Not only can you do this with any clip, you can also tell Vegas to set up a split screen with any information you have on the Windows clipboard, so that lets you compare, for example, your video with a graphic from Photoshop. I also noticed a new ability for Vegas (Premiere has had this for years) where you're able to copy a clip's attributes to another clip. That's a real work-saver, too, that I find myself using a lot. Imagine using it to add one clip's color correction attributes to all the other shots in that sequence. It's perfect for white-balance problems, or if you want to add the same color-corrected look across all the shots in a sequence. While I'm talking about worksavers, I must mention one of my favorite features that's not new, but it's one that even though it seems trivial, makes a lot of difference to me. It's the mouse wheel implementation throughout Vegas. Even though you can use the scroll wheel almost everywhere within Vegas, in particular I have become quite accustomed to zooming in and out of my timeline using the scroll wheel, and wish all NLE software used this feature.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Audio overhaul
There's yet another area where Vegas excels: Audio. Sonic Foundry's audio roots really shine through, with an audio overhaul evident in this new version. New is DirectX plug-in automation, allowing you to keyframe your audio effects. Most impressive to me is the greatly improved audio time stretching. Before, it was of limited usefulness, because it sounded scratchy. Not any more. It's exceptionally clean now, with no rendering necessary. When before you'd need to take an audio segment out to a specialized audio package for sweetening, now, speed up or slow down the audio and it's, actually usable. I'd even venture to say that, at speeds of 25% faster, the effect is not detectable -- well, except for that sped-up voice. This can come in handy when, for instance, you have a 30-second spot to cut and your voice-over announcer just handed you his voice cut that's 35 seconds long. Beyond that neat trick, Vegas can now work in surround mode, letting you insert surround pan keyframes. It's just very sophisticated. Then, when you're done, render out your sound to a .wav file, to Windows Media surround or to any of a vast number of other audio formats. And, if you spring for the Vegas+DVD package which includes DVD Architect, you also get AC3 stereo and surround sound encoding.

Application scripting
Here's where Vegas gets really sophisticated. It uses the .Net framework from that evil empire, Microsoft, which lets Vegas do some uncanny things. There are already quite a few scripts written and provided with Vegas. What this does is, it takes any tedious or repetitive process you might be asked to do with Vegas (or any other Windows application, for that matter) and automates it. For example, you could launch a script that adds a time code window burn to all clips in media pool at the same time, and then launch a scriptable batch encoder. Another script removes that time code effect. Go ahead, put a button on that toolbar that can make a CMX 3600 EDL that will open in any Avid editor -- that's now included with Vegas. And even though these scripts are written in .Net framework, which is, for all intents and purposes, a programming language, they are user-editable. These aren't too complex, either. I took a look under the hood of one of these scripts in a text editor, and it's not that much more complicated than your everyday HTML (granted, I am quite familiar with HTML having been here at Digital Media Net for the past four years, but still, it's not all that complicated). More scripts are steadily becoming available on Sonic Foundry's Web site, too, so I think this is a potential growth area.

Prev 1 2 3 4 Next

Related sites: • Broadcast Newsroom • Creative Mac • Digital Post Production • Digital Producer • Digital Video Editing • DTV Professional • DV Format • IBC News
Related forums: •
[an error occurred while processing this directive]