Sony Vegas Video Editing Tips:

Color Isolation Tip

Text Tips

Tutorial Layout Trick

Advanced Vegas Video Tips

My Vegas Video story:

I started on Adobe Premiere, but a fellow videographer was using Vegas Video. I tried it out, and I liked it enough that I never turned back. There were 3 reasons I switched and still love vegas today. Transitions, audio wave-forms, and rendering.

     Back in that day, premiere had to render the most simple things to see it right, Vegas didn't have to. And there is something so beautifully simple about the way Vegas does transitions. You just push the video clips together and it automatically fades both audio and video. It is so intuitive and fast and cuts down on editing time. You can even dial in your snap distances to get it perfect. 

     Lastly, the audio gets drawn as a waveform. Premiere does this now, but I don't think it did back in the day. This is a huge help in visually looking for cues and roughly judging volume. I can often cut together simple event interviews without even listening and get it right on or very close. Also this is a huge help for putting together Canon T3i footage with my Zoom h1 audio. Pluraleyes integrates well with Vegas too, but I get impatient for it to process things and find myself lining it up manually faster than Pluraleyes can.

      I also tried Final Cut after using Vegas, but I felt that was worst of all. Waveform option was terribly slow and rebuilds every time you move the timeline. And both Premiere and FCP are cumbersome to do the fades. I know there are hotkeys, but a mouse flick on vegas is faster. And did I mention Vegas is cheaper than all of the above?

     Yes, and DVD architect is good. Does all the things you want in a DVD-Authoring program. Only Complaint: Subtitles need adjustable dark border thickness. And I had strange issues with audio being silent when multiple audio tracks are present and chapter is skipped ahead during playback. Very Strange.

    Did I mention I have used it on over 95% of what I have worked on in the past 8 years? (And all I do for work is video.) But if I have to get specific, Visa Dream (www.visadream.com) is the big project that has been seen by tens of thousands, and soon close to 1 million within a year. I used it for all of the above mentioned reasons. It feels like an extension of my body, there was no reason not to use it. It gets the work done.

    Vegas has a nice set of scopes. We had to do lots of curves/brightness-contrast/saturation adjustment to get everything legal. Big hassle, but it worked out.

    By the way, we had to edit the project to hit “average loudness” specs for American Public Television. Since I was still using Vegas 8.0 at the time, I had to use an orban loudness meter to get the right metering while I adjusted event volumes up and down on the vegas timeline. After seeing the VU meters on Vegas 10, I still think external metering will be needed to fits tv specs, but I will see if those new meters will still be helpful.

    People might say, “how do you integrate with production houses using vegas?” Well, on Visa Dream we had to print to HDCAM. The production house in San Diego that had the equipment to do this wanted Mac format ProRes422 HQ. So I used Vegas to export uncompressed HD and took that to a mac and re-encoded it to ProRes 422 HQ. Saved a bunch of money by delivering what they wanted, and a lot of time by editing on Vegas. I could have easily brought them the uncompressed file and skipped the mac part but they would have charged to re-encode on their end.

    Did I mention that the entire documentary cost about $900 to produce? Pretty good price when PBS documentaries often have close to a $500,000 budget. Many thanks to Vegas Video for that...

Meet STEVEN JAVITZ PRODUCER, EDITOR and CINEMATOGRAPHER 

Steven’s experience is long and “hands on”, his artistic craft is based on talent and experience. With more than a decade working on video productions, his input is vital. Working as a producer/cinematographer on countless productions, including TV commercials, Wedding/Event video, stage shows, training videos, corporate video, a cooking show that aired on Cox 6 San Diego “Catch the Spirit, cooking with California wines," as well as Travel videos to Mexico, China, Galapagos, Alaska, Canada, and Tahiti. 

Please check out my websites here:  www.javitzvideo.com    www.visadream.com    www.crossingsouth.com