Welcome Tollaksen!!

Great people here with caverns full of Vegas experience AND Video/Film in general.

I can only triple underline Chienworks comments.

Look forward to your postings!

Grazie

Welcome to the forum!

Extremely useful: helpful shortcuts in Vegas.
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/showmessage.asp?messageid=385252&replies=12&page=0

Hi Tollaksen,

1) I'd differ a bit from Chein on this one, certainly look online, but I'd consider buying training DVD's for Vegas w/o a lot of hesitation. Good training is worth its weight in gold in my opinion, especially when starting off, it just saves you so much time. There are several companies that produce training for Vegas, Sony does, VASST does, and at least a couple others too COD I think? Anyway - I may be somewhat partial since I do a lot of contract work with the guys at VASST, but I really can't recommend anyone else's training above theirs. If you're just getting started I'd look at the beginner bundle and add Volume 8. That seems to me to be the BEST solution for new beginners and they get you up and using Vegas very quickly.

2) Plug-ins aren't really developed too much for Vegas because of the way that it's designed. You're basically looking at Magic Bullet, New BlueFX, and Radiance (which I read was bought by Sony so they may be planning on using that in the future versions of Vegas), however the real power of Vegas is in it's scripting tools. Those tools automate tasks and do things for you in Vegas that are HUGE time savers... HUGE. There are a couple of major scripts out for Vegas that I'm aware of. One of those is Excalibur, and one is UltimateS Pro. Both are good scripting solutions, but I am a fan of Ultimate S Pro - though Excalibur has it's place, and really having both is not a bad idea. VASST has a few various free scripts that are on their site, for anyone who registers, plus a lot of free training articles, if you search their archives. VASST also has things like ReelPaks, and GrafPaks which are filter effects, lower thirds, etc... which are very reasonably priced, and are completely customizable.

3) These are the reason that I recommend training. You just hit a lot less of these when you've gone through proper training. But i'd say - when you are running with resizing pictures/graphics, you want to make sure to use BEST even though it will drag out the rendering time a bit, because it scales images much better, same if you're rendering from HD to SD or vice versa. Don't limit yourself to the built in presets, use that custom button if you it's useful, for rendering your stuff out to be used at various settings, there aren't a lot of presets, but you can set your render settings to just about anything you like.

4) All looks good, I have been known to use a Shuttle Pro USB extension, and also a bela Vegas KB. Both are very handy, and the bela KB has a the jog/shuttle, but also shows a great deal of KB shortcuts which I find very helpful if I'm not used to the application.

Let me finish by saying WELCOME! We are always happy to help new Vegas users, and we hope you enjoy the editing experience as much as many of us do.

Dave

Welcome Tollaksen (Where in the world do they have names like that - Fargo?)

It may not be the fashionable thing to do, but have you considered reading the manual? I does have a lot of information and it's free.

Make a note of the advise above, put it aside, and start using vegas. You'll easily find out how it works generally. Then you'll be able to make better selections when and if you go for the tutorial stuff.

And do get more disks - 10 000 rpm is not neccessary.
Tor

Hi Tollaksen and welocme to an extraordinarily helpful forum - I would also recommendj etdv.com which offers some very useful Newsletters and a lot of helpful advice as well.

When I started I found the first four VASST DVD's helpful beyond belief, covering everything from setting the right properties (and they're not reaslly very obvious for the novice) to Colour Correction and much else betweenl.

Good luck.

Richard

Thanks for the responces. I am total impressed not only with the program but with the community.

Vegas so far, seems to being more logical and intuitive than any thing that I have used (cheap cut and paste programs) Chienworks you are right. It seems as though, after reading all of your comments that I just need focus on how to set up my work space and to just jump in and make my mistakes read and watch the how toos (and bug you guys).

Few things at this point.

1. I think I am going to wait on the extras and plug-ins until I understand how to use the program effectivly.

2. I am leaning torward getting the keyboard only because if I am learning from scratch why not learn it with the keyboard. (This is a toss up but why not)

3. Help with setting up the work space. What do you guys recomend and why.

4. Is there a cheap or free place for some Video FX for some training? I search the forum but I am not sure what they are called.

5. DIY green screen, any recomendations? I have seerched this yet.

Thanks again and I can not express how welcome you guys have made me feel.

Go to digital juice and get there portable green/blue screen. Works well and they run it on sale routinely.

The community is worth far more than you pay for the software.

2. I am leaning torward getting the keyboard only because if I am learning from scratch why not learn it with the keyboard. (This is a toss up but why not)
IMO, I would skip the keyboard. A lot of the important shortcuts won't be found on the keyboard. Read the thread I linked to earlier... those are the handy shortcuts you need to know.

Also grab this PDF and print it out:
http://www.modernafilmer.se/se/vegas_keys.pdf
It shows all the keyboard shortcuts.

---
There's lots of free training and tutorials around... others have covered a lot of them. A lot of people who are involved in commercial training products will also have some free tips / tutorials / articles. I would be one of them and I have a crash course on color correction on my site:
http://www.glennchan.info/articles/vegas/color-correction/tutorial.htm

Somebody else mentioned jetdv.com... check out the newsletters on that site. (*I'm not affiliated with jetdv.com but they have some good stuff.)

Hope that helps.

I'm with Glenn on skipping the special keyboard in favor of the shortcut PDF, suggest you get it laminated at Kinko's.

Special NLE keyboards are good for one thing only imho: impressing customers.

If that's your primary need, get one, otherwise spend the money on training instead.

Agree about the keyboard. Once you know the shortcuts from the PDF, you won't look a the keyboard anyway.

vasst.com and jetdv.com have tons of resources. Glenn Chan is the Man wrt color correction. I have a few Vegas articles on eventdv.net

The best advice in this thread so far is that yes - this forum is worth much more than the price of the software. Huge signal to noise ratio here.

Wow guys, don't you ever get tired of giving. you buy the sofware and you get to take the instructers home for good...all of them. Vegas forever.

If you stick with the keyboard you may find the following list of shortcuts useful:-

http://www.jetdv.com/vegas/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3373&highlight=

Richard

Welcome Tollaksen

I’ve learned a lot from the knowledgeable folks here, even on threads that did not interest me I found a gem or two that improved my skills.

Viva Vegas Volke

Hey, wait a minute.
You're not employed by Sony are you???


(Just kidding. This community is really great. Feel free to ask anything about Vegas/DVDa or editing. The forum members are very patient and you'll always get helpful and prompt answers, coaching, tips, caveats, etc.)

No, I am not employed by Sony but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

I need to thank you guys again. Anyhoo, I am in the land of cheese (not Forgo, close) and Tollaksen is Norwegian "Skol"

After reading all of this stuff that you guys have provided and worrying about what I need to have, what need to do and what the best way to do it is, I just realized that I need to just start using the damn thing. Your knowledge is a great resource but without knowing what to do with it, it doesn't mean a thing (no offense, Please.)

So, The plan as of now is...

Mess around with home movies to learn the system and then start on the work related stuff.

What I eventually need to do is create web based videos for work.
Training & process Videos
advertisement website videos (nothing to fancy it's for a rubber company. But Professional looking)

If you're going to edit quite a bit, folks seem to be adamant about using the Contour Shuttle Pro -- seems to make editing much, much faster. Do a search on this forum and you won't find a single negative remark. I own one, but my editing time available has dropped to nothing & I haven't really used it much. I can say it's very well constructed, though. Website is: http://retail.contourdesign.com/shuttle/shuttleprov2/

The scripting programs Ultimate S or Excalibur will save you a ton of time, also. I have Ultimate S, and though I've only edited a couple small projects it was helpful.

The built-in HDV capture program in Vegas isn't all that wonderful. I've had much better luck with a freeware program called "HDVsplit". Search the forum for a good post on how to use it. Someone wrote a very detailed post about it (maybe by "Blink3times"?), but what has worked well for me is to use HDVsplit to capture the entire tape into one continuous file & then use HDVsplit again on the file to chop it up into the different time sequences. The built-in capture program always seemed to miss the clip divisions by a couple frames ... very strange.

Search this forum A LOT! There are tons & tons of great ideas & helpful hints on here. Try to ignore the grumps that seem to take everything personally. Get used to the inevitable SINE wave of emotion that happens two months before & after each major release

(i.e. "I wish the next version of Vegas had this ..."
followed by "Vegas hasn't improved substantially since version 4"
followed by "I heard a 256-bit version of Vegas is being released at NAB next week"
followed by "Vegas is a dead product"
followed by "The new release of Vegas is here & it gives you a back massage while you edit!"
followed by "The new release of Vegas has major bugs & should be cast into Hell."
followed by "Halleluia, the 'A' update to the new Vegas fixed my bug!"
followed by "... but not MY bug ...")

and then it loops all over again. Get used to it. Vegas is great; this forum is great; but they both have their limitations. Try to figure out which posters are wheat & which are chaff. Go ahead & put me in the chaff column ... I'm not a major player!

Welcome to Vegas! BTW, NAB is next week & I heard Vegas Pro 9 is going to be out & has subliminal messaging to make viewers believe ALL of your camera/editing work is masterful ...

Brian