Sony Vegas Video 5 for video editing - by Mark Shapiro

Have you been to Vegas lately? I’m not talking about Las Vegas, Nevada but Sony’s new Vegas Video 5 for video and audio editing. It’s not much of a gamble; you won’t lose your shirt but all the flashy new features and capabilities that Sony has added to the classic Vegas Video program will impress you.

Actually this is two programs. You can get Vegas Video 5 Editing Suite and Vegas Video 5 - DVD-Architect 2 program combined into one package called Vegas + DVD Production Suite for $999. By itself, the the Vegas Video 5 video editing program carries a list price of 699. If you are already are a Vegas user, you can upgrade to Vegas 5 for just $199 and to the new Vegas + DVD Production suite for $249. (You can find these programs online at places like B&H Photo Video for a few hundred dollars less).

to get a special deal on Vegas Video (under $500)

  to get a great deal on Vegas Video Production Suite - $699

With these price ranges, and with Vegas’s level of power and performance, this is obviously not a program for video neophytes and hobbyists. Vegas is an extremely powerful and feature-laden solution targeted to video professionals who have the need for sophisticated video and audio editing capabilities.  Vegas compares nicely to the Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut, Ulead MediaStudio, and other high level applications.

As with most high-level programs, mastering it is not simple. The package includes a 352-page Adobe Acrobat user manual and that’s just for the Vegas Video 5 editing software. The DVD Architect program manual is another 108 pages.

Luckily, Sony offers lots of help. In addition to the manuals, you also have very detailed help files in the program as well as online help at the Sony web site. If you check the “what’s this” button in the menu bar, it will provide pop-up descriptions of the menus, buttons and dialog boxes.

So what is Vegas Video?

Vegas Video 5 is a complete solution for digital and audio production, audio recording, editing and mixing, streaming video creation and surround sound production. You’ll notice the emphasis on audio – of all the top of the line video editing solutions on the market, Vegas offers some of the best and most powerful tools for audio. The video stuff is great but the audio is awesome.

The DVD Architect module comprises a complete set of professional DVD and authoring tools for creating dynamic menu based DVDs, movies, slideshows and audio compilations.

Vegas requires a powerful Windows computer running either Win XP or Win 2000 with a minimum 500 MHz processor and 128 MB of RAM. The program takes up about 60 MB on your hard drive. Obviously, these specs are a bare minimum – if you are a pro video producer, you already know you need a lot more than that for any video program, not just Vegas.

Vegas offers multi-track video and audio editing capabilities with an endless number of available tracks, primary & secondary color correction functions, as well as monitors to adjust almost any aspect of your video. You also get DV capture and print to tape, 3D motion and compositing, text animation and credit rolls, and real time playback of effects, processes and transitions to an external video monitor.

And for folks like me who do a lot of experimenting, unlimited levels of undo. In addition, you can input and output almost any audio and video format including AVI, QuickTime, RealVideo 9, Windows Video 9, and MPEG 1 and MPEG2. The audio editing capabilities include 5.1 surround sound mixing tools, pitch shifting, real time metering, film style 5.1 surround panning, and 32 assignable effects with 26 master and auxiliary outputs. You also get 30 DirectX sound effects and support for ACID loop properties.

The powerful titling application supports motion, graphics and a bevy of pro font styles, colors, filters and effects.

For those who want and desire perfect looking video, Vegas Video includes a small assortment of very useful applications for improving the look and quality of your captured and out video. This includes a series of video scopes to make sure your video meets technical specifications. These include a vectorscope that allows you to monitor the color value of your video signal by displaying the hue and saturation on a color wheel. This makes it easy to help match color between scenes shot at different times and locations, as well as with different cameras and lighting.

The Waveform monitor enables you to monitor to brightness of your scene, the histogram monitor displays color levels and contrast, and the RGB parade monitor displays the waveforms of the red, green and blue parts of your video. These are powerful tools, and once mastered, will enable you to create finished videos as professional looking as those on broadcast TV or on commercial DVDs.

Once you have edited and cleaned up the video, Vegas Video 5 enables you to output the final video in a cornucopia of formats, compression and quality levels. This ranges from low-resolution video clips suitable for emailing to high-resolution output suitable for recording onto videotape or burning to a DVD for commercial distribution.

So how does it work?

The first step is to get your video and audio clips onto your computer’s hard drive and into the Vegas Video editing bins. If you are sourcing from a DV camcorder, Vegas 5 will capture video the directly via your DV cable (Firewire, iLink, 1394, etc), and provides automatic scene detection, batch captures of selected clips and scenes and tape logging. Vegas will also capture analog video via other video conversion devices.

By using the import media command, you can use a Windows utility to search your hard drive and connected storage disks to find and import previously captured videos, audio and still images. You can also rip audio tracks from CDs. The “Get Media from the Web” tool launches Windows Explorer and takes you directly to a Sony web site for stock music and video.

One of the coolest things about Vegas 5 is the ability import and then mix and match video of various file formats and frame rates without having to convert them first. This gives you a lot of freedom regarding the types of video you can bring into a project.

After you have captured and/or located your various video and audio sources, the fun begins – editing it all together. The editing window has four main components. Along the top of the screen is timeline window and track list for putting your production together. On the far right bottom is a preview window. To the left of that you have an audio volume controller, and finally, on the bottom left is a media pool window that is used for a variety of purposes. Depending on what you are doing, these windows can be easily be re-sized and moved.

When you first open up the Vegas Video editing application, the bottom left window functions as your media pool and shows all the videos, audios and still images that you have available to work with.

The media pool window offers a lot of power and options and duplicates many of the commands you’ll find on the main menu including import, capture and preview of video and audio files. The media pool also enables you to organize your media files by creating new bins and then putting the footage where it belongs.

The tabs along the bottom of window also let you use the same workspace for searching your hard drive, accessing special effects, transitions and filters, as well as for trimming your video and audio clips.

The actual editing process is straightforward. You can simply drag and drop the clips from the media pool bins directly to the timeline and then trim them there or you can use the trim window to cut them to approximate length before moving them. It really depends on your editing style.

As mentioned earlier, you have an unlimited number of audio and video tracks that you can use to create your projects. The timeline windows really consists of two components – the timeline itself as well as the Track List on the far left side that is used to determine the order of your tracks as well as track compositing and mixing. It’s also used to control key frames, image and effects motion, blurring, video opacity and transparency, as well as mute and solo for editing and creating sound tracks. For audio, the Track List control allows you to set volume, pan from side to side, add audio effects, etc.

Like most good video editing programs, Vegas Video 5 has good audio scrub capabilities. On the far left, between the Track List and Media Pool windows, is the scrub controller. Scrub allows you to play the video on the timeline backwards or forwards, in slow motion or very fast, and enables you to hear the audio. This is essential if you are trying to cut on dialog. A pro editor is able to quickly use the scrub control to locate and edit on the pauses between syllables in a word of dialog. Scrub is essential for power editing.

Vegas Video 5 Elements for basic editing

You don’t have to be a professional to be using Vegas Video. (Maybe someone bought you this program for your birthday or you are planning to become a professional video producer.) The basics are easy to master and offer a good selection of simple editing options.

One of the most important aspects of video editing is trimming your clips to the right size and length. You can trim your clips when they are still in the media pool or once they are posted onto the timeline. You can use the Trim window or you can move the ends of the clip on the timeline to get the right edit in and out locations.

When trimming on the timeline, you can choose to just trim a specific clip, or by hitting Control – Alt, you can opt to trim two adjacent clips simultaneously. This can be very useful when cutting on action to get the right in and out points.

You can also trim by time range - choosing a certain range of time for a clip to play, and then removing the parts of the clip that fall outside that time frame.

As you might expect, Vegas Video has a variety of ripple controls for editors. Ripple is a term that is applied to how the rest of your project reacts when a interior clip, or a series of clips, are edited. Sometimes you want the rest of the project to fill in the empty space – sometimes you want the empty space to remain. If you are editing across multiple tracks of videos, sometimes you want all the video tracks to fill in and sometimes you want them to remain the same except for the one track you are working on. This kind of control is one of the big differences between entry level editing programs and pro editing solutions.

Adding effects, transitions and fades is easy. For example, lets assume you have two adjacent video tracks on the timeline with associated audio tracks. You simply grab the curser at the top corner at the end the first video track and drag it to the left until it meets the end of the overlay of the second track.  You do the same thing for the second video track – just drag the curser at the beginning of the clip to the right until it meets the end location of the top video track. When you hit play or preview, the first clip will dissolve into the second video clip.

If you want the associated audio tracks to cross fade as well, simply grab their cursers and move them to duplicate the video tracks. When you hit play, the clips will dissolve and the audio will cross fade.

If that is too complicated, you can simply assemble edit your videos onto a single video track. Once the clips on the track, just slide one track over the other and the program will automatically create a dissolve between the video clips and the associated audio clips.

By the way, Vegas Video works with a wide range of external edit shuttle controllers and editing keyboards.

This new version of Vegas Video, now Sony Vegas Video 5, is a very powerful and full featured (and somewhat expensive) program that is targeted to video professionals and broadcasters, but is simple enough to be used by neophytes and those just starting out in video editing. Vegas Video 5 is also a perfect solution for those who already have a good grasp of video editing basics and are ready to move up to the next step of control and power over their video productions. In addition, with its almost incredible offering of audio tools, this is an extraordinarily helpful editing solution for those who are concentrating on the audio and music aspects of their video productions.

to get a special deal on Vegas Video (under $500)

  to get a great deal on Vegas Video Production Suite - $699