!!! Sony Vegas Pro Professional Level Video Editing Resources !!!

(I will be adding info to this page on an ongoing basic. The "Last Modified Date" in the bottom left corner
of the page will always auto update itself whenever content has changed. So keep checking back.)

Sony Vegas Pro Non-Linear Video Editor (NLE)

Be sure to also check out the consumer video editing page

Be sure to also check out the video editing media page

Fast, versitile, feature loaded professional level video editing program without huge overhead. Widely used by many top industry studios including the "Survivor Man" series as well as Jean-Jacques Mantello, Director of the acclaimed IMAX theatre films "Dolphins and Whales 3D", "Sharks 3D", and "Ocean Wonderland". Yes there are others such as: Avid Media Composer, Apple Final Cut Pro (FCP) or Adobe Premiere Pro, but they cost a lot more, are harder to use and in Adobe's case it requires an unreasonable amount of hard drive space with a bank roll to match. Be sure to check out the quality video tutorials I have saved to my "Sony Vegas Playlist" Channel at Captain Ken on YouTube.

The following are a few of my favorite top Sony Vegas specialists!

Although there are many other Vegas specialists out there that also contribute a lot, it seems that every time I was
searching for information, these three names were the most common to appear. Hence my favorites, and of course their work is top notch!

Sony Vegas Tips and Tricks

  • Tips and Tricks by John Rofrano
  • How to run scripts:

    It doesn't matter where the script file is as you simply choose: Tools, Scripting, Run Script and navigate to your desired script folder.

    However, the official Vegas script folder is:

    C:\Program Files\Sony\Vegas Pro 10.0\Script Menu
    (version number in path will be same as version you are using)
  • You can find most settings stored here: C:\Users\admin\AppData\Roaming\Sony\
  • Faster, higher quality renders, etc.
  • Ideas to spice up a montage or video
  • To enable dual-core support on the preview screen, click Ctrl+Shift while clicking to load the Vegas preferences panel. This will enable a secret undocumented tab called "Internal" where you can enable preview support for dual core CPUs to speed up things even more. You need to turn to TRUE the option that reads "Enable multi-core rendering for playback". Use this option with caution, as it might not be very stable. Don't use it if your CPU is not an actual dual-core one.
  • Go to Vegas' settings/preferences panel and on the Video tab tell it to use 4 threads. If you experience random crashes, go back to 2 threads. The fewer threads the more stability, but the more threads the more speed (for a hyperthreaded/multi-processing/multi-core CPU, that is).
  • If you are interested in saving only the media files you used in a project and nothing more (in order to save hard drive space), you can click "File", "Save as", and then check "Copy and trim media with project". This will create a new folder in your drive that will only save the parts of the M2T files and other media you used in the project and not unused media.
  • Be careful Vegas may have issues with files captured by HDVSplit. Consider alternative video capture programs such as VirtualDub or ScenalyzerLive.
  • If you plan on using nested projects, then do not use Windows 7 Movie Maker (WMM) to capture your DV footage. WMM uses DV-AVI files Type-1, which works fine with vegas accept if the footage is in a nested project, you will loose the audio. In type-1 , the audio & video are interleaved in the same stream , so some applications cannot access the audio. In type-2 the A/V data is stored split up and this causes fewer headaches. Vegas uses the VFW (video for windows) system so Type-2 would be more compatible. See this thread for details or missing nested projects AVI audio only at DVinfo.net
  • If your HDV tape capture stops all by itself, Vegas is probably stopping the capturing when you move your window/mouse focus to another application. To change that, click the "Prefs" button on the "Capture" tab and uncheck the "Stop device on loss of focus".
  • With a still, to insure there won't be any small bands along the sides of the picture due to format aspect ratio mismatches, right-click on the still, select Properties, click on the Pan/Crop tab, right-click on the picture, and select "Match Output Aspect."
  • To apply (Properties) Interlace Flicker to a group of events, rather then one at a time, select the ones you want modified, right-click one of them, go to switches, turn on Reduce Interlace Flicker.
  • Sony Vegas 8 (pro) will smart render HDV as well as AVid Liquid 7, Pinnacle studio 11, Ulead Video Studio 11, and Ulead dvd Movie factory
  • Vegas does what is known as "smart" rendering. If you do what you say and render back to m2t you will lose nothing. You will see in the preview window "No Recompression Required". Vegas will merely copy the unchanged frames from the timeline to the target file. Same for DV-AVI, MPEG-2 and some other formats *if* you use the same parameters as the source video.

Forums

Help / Tutorial Links

Besides the following resources, remember YouTube is your friend as there is a wealth of information, once you weed through some of the garbage that is published!

Newsletters

Scripting Links

Favorite Scripts

Vegas Vegies (Sample Project Files)

There is a wealth of free Vegas templates to be found on YouTube!

Reviews

Plugins

Ideas for the site or problems with the site. please let me know!