The Idiots Guide to Vegas

[Ladymercury]

Welcome to the Idiots Guide to Vegas, a small tutorial, updated by section, on how to use Vegas Video since a lot of people here I notice seem to have problems with it.

[Kariudo: Seems like it would be a good idea to go through and create an index...so I did]
Index:

• Section I: The Basics to Vegas
• Section II: Making Things Complicated, Yet, Easy....
• Section III: Velocity
• Section IV: God damn subtitles!!
• Section V: Adding Text
• Section VI: Different Ways to Transition
  • Section VII: Bringing It All Together part 1
  • Section VII: Bringing It All Together part 2
  • Section VII: Bringing It All Together Part 2 b
• Section VIII: READ
• Section IX: Double The Footage = Double the Fun

Section 1 - The Basics to Vegas

So you want to know how to use Vegas? For this tutorial I will be using Vegas Video 6, though from what I've noticed there has not been a drastic change since Version 2, except the interface is prettier... and the loading time is longer since it loads up a media manager that I still have no fucking clue on what's it for (much like Adobe's VersionCue for its CS products) besides eating RAM.

Anyway:

1. First you open up Vegas. Vegas BEFORE version 5 will be in a folder called SONIC FOUNDRY, Vegas AFTER 4 will be in a folder called SONY.



2. Then the magical title load whatever screen appears with nice info to remind you about stuff you don't care about


3. Here is an explination of the Vegas interface

(Click on the image for an enlarged version)

Master Volume - DO NOT MESS WITH THAT UNLESS YOU NEED TO. Nuff said, just. don't touch it.

The preview box is adjustable. It can go as wide as you can make it would interferring with the track window. So bigger the resolution, bigger the preview window. Don't mess with it though, keep it at the standard NTSC Multimedia resolution.

4. Now, after Vegas has loaded and you're familuar with the window, its time to get some music.

Go to File > Import > Media and browse for some music. Acceptable types of music are wav and mp3, I don't mess with any other types besides that. I have not tried m4a or any other types.

5. Now the thing with Vegas that is a down side from Premiere is that it has to load the audio peaks, and that takes a while depending on how long the song file is. Usually, with a fast processor and enough memory, should take a minute or so.. but if your computer is slow and crappy, this can take a while.



6. The moment the audio is in your media box, click and drag it to the track window. It should appear just like that, if not, I dunno what you did. Its not that hard.



7. Same thing with the video



8. Click and drag



9. If you want to make the clip longer (as in, repeating the clip over and over again) you just click at the edge of the clip (a little square-ish cursor should appear) and you drag it across the track window like so:



To bring it back to its original length, just do the same thing but backwards until it "snaps" into place.

THIS DOES NOT EXTEND THE LENGTH OF YOUR CLIP. IT JUST REPEATS IT OVER AND OVER AGAIN. Extending the length of the clip will be explained in the next section.

Now you may be saying, why does that clip look so small? I can't do anything with that! Well, here's what you do to fix that.

10. You see the scrollbars on the bottom and right of the track window? See the plus and minus buttons? You click on those.



Clicking on the plus button on the bottom scroll bar will extend the track as such. This does not affect clip length, just the size of your track window.



Clicking on the plus button on the verticle bar will extend it vertically.



To return the bar back to its original look, double click on the verticle bar and adjust the horizontal slider to its regular size (to do this, the cursor will turn into a horizontal arrow and you move it as so).

11. Now you want to start clipping and slicing some clips? To do this, simply highlight the clip and press the "S" key



The clip is now split !

12. To delete a clip you don't want, simply highlight the clip you don't want



And press the delete key



And viola, the clip is gone.


In the next section I will teach you what some of the pluses for these tools are for (such as the window adjustment) and how to slow or speed up your clips.

- Ladymercury

[DeinReich]

Not too bad of a start, really. Images always help in tutorials IMO.

[Ladymercury]

Section II: Making Things Complicated, Yet, Easy....

So now, you wanna kick things up a notch BAM, okay, heh, bad joke. Here are somethings you may find useful when it comes to doing some basic editing with basic, but kinda cool, stuff.

1. The levels. Next to your thumbails in your track window is the track numbers, and it has all these buttons and stuff next to it. Well, there's two you really wanna focus on right now.

For the video, you don't have to focus on it but for some dumb cliche effects, you use this. The LEVELS slidbar adjusts the opacity of your clip.



So when you adjust it, it looks like this. Dark, plain, boring. Now, to make it appear within another clip for a more mystic whatever look you place it ontop of another clip as so:



Ooo, Kamiyama is thinking or talking or whatever. Yay. So now we have double Kamiyamas. Now moving on:

2. Deleting and adding tracks

Deleting and adding tracks are easy. To add a track, you right click the track number area and select add a track, either its Add Audio Track or Add Video Track. To delete



Right click the track and select delete. Or highlight and press delete.

3. Volume!



Remember how I told you not to mess with the master volume, this is one of the reasons why. On your audio tracks you have a volume slidebar. This adjusts the volume FOR THAT TRACK ONLY. Negative is lower and positive is higher. To keep the audio leveled, please keep it at 0.0db, anything over will have it bleeding over (depending on how high the levels are) or distorted. Only time you need to mess with this is if you're doing mad audio editing or if a clip comes in too low at 0.0dbs.

4. Transitioning

Transitioning in Vegas is easy. Click and drag the track into the previous track and you have a standard fade in transition.



There are other forms of transitions but that will be discussed later.

5. Remember the import technique in section one?

Well, you don't have to use that all the time. Vegas has a built in explorer in which you can search for media files that way and click and drag them into the track window.



Its really helpful when working with a lot of music files or whatever.

6. To speed and decrease the length

To speed up your clip or decrease it you mess with the playback settings. Right click your clip and select properties:



Then to make the clip faster, you raise the play back level to however fast you want it to go, it just depends and honestly, its all about personal taste.




The higher, the faster, and the shorter the clip.




As you can see, the clip is extended out to show you the squiggly lines. Those lines indicate, when condenced, teh clip is sped up.



To slow down a clip, you do the same thing, except lower the numbers by click the down button on playback:



When you do that, the clip is slowed down and is indicated by the extended squiggly lines. The clip is also longer and you must extend it outward.

7. Well, what's the extending and all that for with the track window?

The plus to this is when you want to do sync ups with your music or lip syncing, you can see the audio levels perfectly. This is a big help when syncing up.



As you can see, if there was loud explosions in this song and you want to sync up this with some clips, the rise in the waves indicates an explosion



Its also good for indicated frames, so when you lip sync, you can see the frames and cut the clip smaller without having to worry about something not falling together or syncing up or whatever. Play around with it, you'll understand.

In the next section, more goodies like transitions and velocity and all that jazz.

- Ladymercury

[Ladymercury]

Not too bad of a start, really. Images always help in tutorials IMO.

Thanks

[Ladymercury]

Section III: Velocity

This will be the easiest section in this tutorial. So you guys sit there and stare at your screen and go " How do I make them run backwards or jump backwards or just reverse the clip? "

This is the easiest thing EVER.



Right click the clip, go to Insert/Remove Envelope and click on Velocity.

A green bar appears on the clip. Click on that bar and DRAG IT DOWN. -100% is a complete reverse.



That's all there is to it. Now this will not REVERSE the clip, no, that's a track motion option and will be discussed later, but this will just reverse the motion of the clip.

[Ladymercury]

Section IV: God damn subtitles!!

Now you know how to add a clip, add the music, cut the clip, bring it together, learned how to use the opactiy levels and vol levels for seperate tracks and now you're gonna learn how to get rid of subtitles using Vegas... Ladymercury's way.

There is already a tutorial on removing subtitles on the org already, you can find that here: http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/ ... efault.htm

That is an excellent guide, but for those who do not have Photoshop or Premiere, this is the method which works best.

1. So, I have this footage and it has annoying subtitles. Those subtitles are not hot at all, they're nasty and disgusting and takes away from my video.



2. This is where I use the PAN/CROP feature. The Pan/Crop feature is loacted on the clip itself. It is a box on the upper right hand corner of the clip, click on that.



3. A window pops up, this is your pan/crop window. This is also the masking window as well in Vegas 5 and 6. But for now we'll just focus on Panning and cropping.



Panning - To widden or shorten a video
Cropping - To cut off from a video.

4. There are three ways to go about this. Vegas has auto-presets that you can use to crop the video. These are the ratios (4:3, 16:1, etc)... these are what 'letterboxes' the video as such:



But when you look, you see that it doesn't cover all the subtitles, the presets. This can be worked around. You can either select another preset or crop the video yourself. To do this, you just select the top and drag it down and the bottom and you drag it up until the peferrated lines are above and below the subtitles.



You must turn off the Keep Aspect Ratio and Size About Center settings.

The third way is to pan the video, extend it, make it wider. This is great if you do not like the letter box look, only problem is keeping the video's ratio even without making look too wide or too long.



To do this you must click on the top left corner and bottom right corner dots and bring them in until your preview screen shows the subtitles completely hidden. This takes a while to get used to and depending on your clip may become a hassle.

So that's it for subtitles, next section will be on adding text to your video.

[Ladymercury]

Section V: Adding Text

Text adding is simple.

1. Right click the video track, along side the clip (not ontop of the clip) and select " Insert Text Media "



2. A window appears, it says " SAMPLE TEXT ", just highlight over that and type over it.



Press "x" button on the upper right hand corner

4. Your text appears. Other methods of using text will be explained in future sections, that's if I ever get to that or bother with it.

[CHAMELEON_D_H]

Good job!! I vote this one for a sticky and\or into the guide section.

[Deathscythe_Animated]

I'm just starting out in Vegas, I can already see this guide is going to be a lifesaver.

[Ladymercury]

I'm just starting out in Vegas, I can already see this guide is going to be a lifesaver.

Oh, awesome them, my efforts are not in vain

Good job!! I vote this one for a sticky and\or into the guide section.

Thanks It'd be great if it was added to the guide section XD


--

The next section will be posted soon when I get some free time this week It will be on alternate forms of transitions.