Story Board with Vegas
By Adam Noyes
Creativecow.net features a great forum of video editors and post production producers trade tips and tricks of the trade with various different popular NLE’s. On a thread that resurfaced recently, one user called attention to a great feature within Magix Vegas software, Story Boarding.
Check out the thread, below:
Back in the dark ages, I used Premiere 6.0 and it had a feature I learned to love. It was call Story Board I think. It allowed me to go through all my wedding footage and snip out good pieces and drag them into the story board. Once in the story board I could drag clips (actually sub clips) around into order and then output to the timeline for final editing. I’m wondering if there isn’t some sort of feature that would allow this kind of work flow?
Geoff Chandler
It allowed me to go through all my wedding footage and snip out good pieces
Paul Berk
The Vegas Timeline allows this too. You could create sub-clips of the “good parts” but it’s much better to learn to work with trimmed events. You can easily (and quickly) “drag” them around too.
Beyond this is to use the most powerful feature of Vegas, namely additional instances of Vegas open at the same time. You cannot edit everything all at once. Why anyone would want everything on one timeline is beyond me.
Editing is assembling pieces in a certain order. Mostly editing is used for time compression, to tell a longer story in a shorter period of time. Edit means cutting stuff out. Vegas has all the tools you’ll need to easily move things around and assemble individual events into sequences and then into sections and then into the final edit. It’s mostly a matter of learning how to select and move “events” within a timeline and between instances of Vegas. The “story telling” part of editing comes with your own creativity and experience. Vegas just gives you the tools to work with.
Here’s where I think Vegas excels. Let’s say you have story where the beginning is also the ending. So the story is told in flashback. So we have a single camera take that at the head end is our beginning and at the tail is our ending. It’s one piece of media, but it is two “events”. VEGAS WORKS WITH EVENTS. So you may have one timeline (veg file) for the “beginning” and another timeline (separate veg file) for the ending. Your assembly on each of these timelines includes this single piece of media, but they are different “events”. You could also have a timeline (separate veg) for “cutaways”, these being “events” that would help you bridge or time compress other scenes. For example, shots of the wedding guests listening to a wedding speech. When you are editing a wedding speech, you can have the “cutaways” all organized and open at the same time.
Am I making sense?