1st wedding with Sony Vegas...7hrs of footage!

Hi Mike,

If you have a decent computer why don't you edit as is?

I've always dropped the footage in the trimmer, trimmed and dropped on the timeline and went from there. Granted I renew my machine every year or so, so it can keep up. I shudder to think of the hassle of rendering all clips to an intermediate format.

Tell us something about your computer (specs). You should be able to edit just fine if, after applying color correction and whatever, disable the fx in the video preview window, and lower the preview quality. (don't use good or best.) Some i5 and most i7 machines can handle this.

Jeff

2-Xeon X5680 @ 3.33, EVGA SR-2 Mobo, 48GB DDR3, GTX 580 3072MB, 16TB Attached Storage, Win7, Vegas 11 x64

Mike,

You should break the project into several smaller projects. Before Wedding, ceremony, travel, reception, etc.

I wouldn't render each event one to be brought in later. I would only render once, when finished.

I would take 'snapshots' of my color correction, so I could maintain consistency in a given environment. (i.e. all the church shots match, the outdoor shots match, and reception shots match.) Save all your color correction fx chains so you can quickly add new events from the same camera/environment.

Plan your work well, so you can render overnight if need be. That processor will be sufficient as long as you don't expect highly treated events to preview at best quality.

Jeff

2-Xeon X5680 @ 3.33, EVGA SR-2 Mobo, 48GB DDR3, GTX 580 3072MB, 16TB Attached Storage, Win7, Vegas 11 x64

Mike,

At the top of the preview window is an icon of a floppy disk labeled 'save snapshot to file'. You can take pictures of a frame and compare it to your other work. It helps with consistency.

Drag it in over an event you are working on and use the mute or solo toggles in the track controls.

Jeff

2-Xeon X5680 @ 3.33, EVGA SR-2 Mobo, 48GB DDR3, GTX 580 3072MB, 16TB Attached Storage, Win7, Vegas 11 x64

Thanks Nigel

Great tips! I am going to use them all!
Now back to Vegas......

Mike

[Mike Clouse] "I have to go through all the 7-hrs of footage and see what is usable,but after that I know I cant just dump 7-hours of footage on the timeline and expect Vegas to handle it.....so would something like this work...render a clip or two at a time and save to a separate directory ,then back into Vegas for the final product."

Vegas will handle that much video just dandy... I have routinely dropped in 3-6 hours of raw video with no problems. I have a slightly faster PC than yours (AMD 1090T), but not dramatically different.

My usual workflow is to apply global effects to all video first. This is color correction and matching (you're only matching if you use multiple cameras; for a wedding, the definition of "white" is usually the bride's gown). I shot a wedding once that took place in a dimly lit nightclub; in that case, I added noise processing as well, to all clips. If you do this, and have the disc space, you can render out to Cineform ($), DNxHD, or high bitrate MXF/MPEG-2 as an intermediate form, which will also make your editing go faster than AVC. If you're using any of these (MPEG-2 at about 40-50Mb/s), you're not going to see any significant loss over the original video. You will need a good deal of spare disc for the project.

When I shoot a wedding, I typically devote a spare ATA drive for the project and all the assets. If, for some reason, I shot with just one camera, I hopefully have a deal with the happy couple for access to digital photos (I shot one in Florida once covered by three separate pro still photographers... there was at least one photographer in every one of my shots, but I had plenty of stills, which can animated,"Ken Burns" style, as useful B-roll cuts).

If you're having stability problems with Vegas (not uncommon these days) or just organizing things, it's certainly possible to break the video up into segments. I usually do this, whether then actual project is a single .veg file or multiple separate projects. For one, I strongly recommend not delivering a long wedding video, unless the customer has specifically asked for it. I prefer to break it up into segments on the disc itself: a montage (if you shot this), the main ceremony, the reception, etc. Even if they do want a single 3+ hr. video, knowing there's virtually no chance they'll ever watch that in one sitting, I use the magic of DVD to ensure the segments are separately available... or if really necessary, use it as an excuse for breaking it up into actually viewable segments (a 3hr single video needs a DVD9_R disc, which is sketchier about playing on the typical DVD player).

So you can have a top-level DVD menu with "Wedding", "Reception", "Play All", and "Extras" options. It's reasonable to create this as separate projects, since that's how the assets go into the BD/DVD authoring app anyway.

-Dave