Blade Edge

I just completed my first project in Sony Vegas Pro 9, which I snagged a copy of several weeks ago. Up until then I was using Sony Vegas 6 and I was eager to delve into a more powerful suite of tools. I’ll actually be posting a full product review on GameDev.net in the coming month. For now though I just wanted to share the process I used to gather footage from all of Dizzle’s various media sources and select the pieces he wanted to include in his reel.

The complete project view

Footage Selection Process

This is the first step of creating any stunt reel: finding the footage that you want to include in it. It also can be the most time-consuming, depending on how much footage you have to go through. Dizzle had several hours, and so we both sat down and went through it all. In some cases he had video files on CD, in others I had to capture video off a VHS onto my computer. Because it was VHS and not some camcorder with transfer capability, the VHS tapes had to be captured in real time – which means a 2-hr long tape would take (you guessed it) 2-hrs to capture into MPEG format through my Hauppage capture card’s composite inputs.

In most cases Dizzle didn’t know exactly everything he had in his footage, so we simply sat and watched it all play through. As we watched, I had my finger on the “M” key, which is a hot-key for placing a marker down on the video time line that is assigned a number and can later be jumped to quickly simply by typing that number into the keyboard at anytime. Every time Dizzle saw something he liked, or thought he liked, I would drop a marker as the playback continued on. Once the video file was done, we would go back through all the markers and recheck them. If chosen, I would sub-clip out that footage and store it away for later.

The media bins window

This is where organization is key, and Vegas is perfectly setup for that through the use of Bins to manage project media. Creating a Video bin to hold all the project’s complete video files, I then created a Used bin in which to place files after they had been viewed and footage from them selected. I also created a Clips bin, into which I threw all the sub-clips created from the various main footage videos. That I further sub-divided into various bin categories to further organize the 59 total sub-clips that we ended up with.

This system of both clip selection and organization let us speed through this process of gathering material to use, and then made it easy for me to mix and match clips from various sub-bins to keep the visuals in the reel fresh.