I don't think of rendering as a kludge at all and it's a powerful and easy way to get new versions of tracks in Vegas.

I would think of dicking with busses to acheive that as a kludge, rather than the straightforward process of 'rendering' the three tracks to make one track, which is a fundamental function !

Also, can't you just render straight to a mono wav file 'track' in one action ?

geoff

Yes, there's no need for new busses to create the mono, rendered version.
Just use the "Render as..." option.

The reason that I want mono is that the audio is spread out over the 3 cameras. Some only on one channel, some on both, etc. So rather than have the audio jump from one channel to both, then back to one I just make it mono. The video is of an event in an auditorium with talking heads so mono is not an issue as it would be with music.
I thought that there was a quick way to combine the audio w/o rendering that I was missing. I guess that I will keep rendering to a new track which works very well. Thanks for the responses...

Regards,
Jerry

Faster way ?! Whatever your intended final format, you enevitably have to render it to that format at some stage !

You can have a car and 3 cans of paint. You can rearrange these can as much as you like to get an idea of the final chromatic result, but to get a painted car you need to paint it.

geoff

Well you can always right click on audio events and choose left/right/combine (mono)/stereo. This bypasses the render step.

I did not say I wanted a faster way, just to find out if Vegas can accomplish this w/o the audio render. To make it clear, I want the final audio output to be mono, and to be a mix of all 6 channels of the 3 cameras. These contian audio envelopes, FX, etc.
Vegas can do this. There is a button on the master mixer that is called Downmix Output. This makes the output audio mono.

Regards,
Jerry

Dude, a bunch of people took time to help you out, and you thank them with a snap-ish condesceding reply..................????

WTF?


-jb

gjesion "I did not say I wanted a faster way, just to find out if Vegas can accomplish this w/o the audio render"

Sure, you can easily preview it in mono with the master bus in mono, but you do want a savable result that incorporates the editing you have done (?).

And how exactly do you hope to save this without rendering it ? The result cannot be the same files as the source files, so you HAVE to render it at some stage. What you appear to want is beyond what is acheivable or rational in any application.

geoff