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Sony Vegas 7

 

Multitrack Audio & Video Editing Software [Windows]

Reviews : Software: ALL

 

If your needs tend more towards looping and video editing than MIDI, Sony's distinctive multitrack recording package could be just what you're looking for.

Alan Tubbs

It has been a while since Sound On Sound reviewed Vegas. In fact, it was in the last millennium, when boutique-sized Sonic Foundry still owned the software. Since 1999, Vegas has grown from audio-only software to include video editing and Sonic Foundry have been bought by the anything-but-boutique Sony. With the release of Vegas 7, it is time to take a fresh look at this audio/video multitracker and its accompanying DVD Architect burning program.

Something that should be pointed out straight away is that Vegas doesn't include MIDI. This approach yields a clean and simple interface, yet is not as limiting as one would suppose — it is not too many years ago that Pro Tools was audio-only, and that didn't hinder its acceptance. Vegas was my first audio program that would record at over 16-bit or 48kHz, so even though I do mostly MIDI work, I would finish my MIDI composition in other programs and then dump those tracks as audio into Vegas. Upsampling to 24-bit didn't improve the sound quality of the synth tracks, but I could hear the benefits of recording acoustic tracks with the extra headroom, and though this was not the most elegant or flexible way of working, it was a natural progression from using tape and Vegas served as my digital replacement for analogue machines.

Vegas remains an elegant recording package for those who don't need MIDI, but it also handles loops very well, no doubt thanks to its shared origins with Sony's Acid. If I know I'm starting a project with loops instead of MIDI synths, I begin in Vegas instead of Sonar or Project 5, since the stretching implementation seems a tad better to my ear and is simpler for me to work with. Like Acid, though, it's Windows-only.

Viva Las Vegas

Vegas comes in the traditional box via the mail, or you can save a little money and download it. Once you've paid for either version, you get a serial number and then you have 30 days to go on-line and register the program. This process is painless and, unlike downloading the program, easily accomplished with an old-fashioned dial-up service.

When you open Vegas up the first time, there are some necessary housekeeping tasks to do before you get to the fun stuff. First stop is the Properties Page, under File in the traditional Windows drop-down menu. Here you can set your Video and Audio Properties, among other settings. As well as sample rate and bit depth, the latter include Resample and Stretch quality, which defaults to Good — change it to Best unless you like artifacts (this also applies to the video tab). You can also set a master Recorded Files folder for clips you don't put into their own folders, decide whether you want to work in stereo or 5.1 Master Buss modes, and set a number of stereo busses.

Next stop is View, where you can save and organise favourite layouts, so that once you learn the program you can personalise it: at a large studio, different engineers can have their favourite setups ready to go at the touch of a mouse. The third stop is the Options and the Preferences page. There are 12 sub-pages and a host of choices within them, but you will have to choose your Audio Device before you do any sound work. Setting your VST Effects folder now wouldn't hurt, either. Like Acid and Sound Forge, Vegas can use VST plug-ins as well as Direct X ones. The bad part is that Vegas seems to do a VST folder search every time it opens, which can be somewhat time-consuming. I haven't found a workaround for this yet.

If you are doing video, there are a similar number of little items to check off, but after that, you can actually start doing some work!

Vegas & Video Although Vegas doesn't do MIDI editing, it is an excellent video editor. Vegas treats video just like audio on the timeline. Still shots from the video are displayed on the timeline, while the final video output can be displayed in the Video Preview window. You can float this and make it as large as you want, throw it up on a TV or play it back in your video camera. While Peter Jackson might not ask you to do all the special effects for his next blockbuster at home, almost anything you've seen on TV lately can be done within Vegas. Just as you don't need Pro Tools to make a hit, you don't need Avid to cut your music video to go with it, and Vegas is the PC equivalent of Apple's Final Cut Pro. Transitions, effects and Media Generators are all available, and most of them work like equivalent features in audio editors, so it is very easy for audio engineers and musicians to get into a whole new area. I'm no video expert, but a music video I did got into the juried part of a large video festival. Not that my editing is so good, but the video pros who judged the event found Vegas's effects fine when applied en masse to '60s home movie clips. I've also done music videos that simply have shapes and words flying around in 3D, all generated from within Vegas. And, of course, plain old editing and conventional titling, three-camera moves, dissolves, compositing and green-screen replacement are all available in high definition. Try that in your DAW.

A Map Of Vegas

The entire Vegas main page is very easy to understand at a glance, and everything seems to be where it should be if you read up to down and right to left. If you've grappled with some other programs, this is a very charming aspect of Vegas. There are three main areas under the Windows toolbar: the Track List, the Timeline and the Window Docking Area (WDA), which you can see in the screen on the left. The WDA is a strip along the bottom consisting of a series of tabs for exploring, video editing, mixing and so on, each of which can be pulled out to become a floating window. The Track List lives on the left-hand side and contains all the track controls such as record arm, phase, FX, automation mode, mute and solo, plus horizontal faders for volume and pan. The pan fader also performs other functions, chosen from a drop-down menu, such as controlling auxiliary send levels. When you arm a track for recording, a level meter and input channel appear.

Insert effects on a track are accessed through the FX Chainer. By default, each track is loaded with a noise gate, EQ and compressor. Insert effects on a track are accessed through the FX Chainer. By default, each track is loaded with a noise gate, EQ and compressor.

Each track has a minimise/maximise button so you can open it to full height for editing, then squeeze it down again: when you minimise a track, you lose the name but keep the volume fader and the rest of the top-line buttons. This makes it easier to squeeze a lot of tracks into limited screen space and still have access to the most important controls for mixing. It would be nice to have something like Sonar's Track Inspector so that you could select any track and see all its parameters, but a workaround is just to maximise the track to its editing state. Right-clicking on any open area within the Track List allows you to carry out functions such as adding and deleting tracks, and to visit yet another Properties page. Channel-specific items such as file names, envelopes, switches, inputs and individual track colours are also called up here.

Clicking on a track's FX button opens an FX Chainer tab in the WDA, displaying all the plug-ins that are active on that track and allowing you to make changes and re-order them. This tab, of course, can also turn into a floating window (see screen, right). Since I have two monitors, I usually float this over the right-hand screen and the part of the Timeline that stretches across the left monitor. When I finish working on effects settings or want to work across the entire Timeline, I simply close the FX section by clicking the 'X' in the top right-hand corner. However, it is very easy to work with and doesn't feel too cramped even on a single-screen system.

A separate FX Chooser is used to add plug-ins to a track or channel. A separate FX Chooser is used to add plug-ins to a track or channel.

Directly above the Track List is a floatable, resizable Time Display showing the 'now' time, and a ruler that runs above the timeline. Right-clicking on either one of them brings up a drop-down menu that you can use to change their respective time formats. SMPTE is the default for video, but you can switch to MIDI Time Code, Samples, Measure and Beats, and so on, depending upon how you work. Under Options / Preferences / Sync, you can choose to generate MIDI Timecode and Clock messages, or have Vegas sync'd from an external device (using your MIDI interface); alternatively, you can use a video device for sync under Video Preview. Hitting 'M' inserts Markers in the Marker Bar area above the ruler. Markers are automatically numbered, and you can name them and delete or rename them by right-clicking.

Directly below the Track List and Timeline frame are the Scrub control and Transport bar. There's nothing too exciting about the transport, but the Scrub control is great. It works like a video deck scrub wheel, even though it is a bar: you can grab it and scrub forwards and backwards at a rate controlled by the bar, with a read-out to the left. The audio follows in lock-step. This provides a very tactile method of searching through the timeline. The Scroll bar (between the Timeline and Transport bar) also has a fun function, too, other than operating as a handle for moving along the timeline: grab one end and you can zoom in and out on the Timeline and Events, rather than using the incremental '+' and '—' buttons. Something I don't like about the ergonomics is the fact that the scroll button on the mouse doesn't move tracks up or down but zooms in and out. Sonar works the other way, and my fingers get confused between the programs. Using Ctrl with the mouse wheel will scroll the tracks up and down, but it always takes me a few mistakes before my fingers remember.

Sony Vegas Tips & Tricks: Encoding Video for Online Delivery

A Little Background
In my articles I try to get right to the steps involved in achieving whatever result we’re after, but before we get into the process, I’d like to address a few issues first. Ultimately, your viewer will be clicking a link somewhere on the web to view video. For several years, the consensus has been that Flash Video is the way to go. Adobe claims more than 98% market penetration with its Flash player, so why would you use anything else? MPEG-4 video is used in video iPods and other devices, but one thing you may not know is that the Adobe Flash player will play MPEG-4 video too. So you have much more of a choice than Adobe’s statistical claims would lead you to believe. Video that you produce using either codec can be played by the Flash player on web browsers worldwide.
In researching this article, my initial plan was to discuss traditional FLV files in Flash only, but using MPEG-4 may ultimately be a better choice for you. And to get this out of the way up front, MPEG-4 Part 10 is both the basis of, and the wrapper around, the H.264 codec. MOV, aka QuickTime, is another wrapper. For the purposes of this tutorial, I’ll refer to MPEG-4 Part 10 as H.264 video. So, to reiterate, in this installment we are going to talk about going from Vegas to traditional Flash video, and from Vegas to MPEG-4 video using the H.264 codec. Embedding the resultant file in a webpage is best left for a future article.
Download On2 Fliz for Flash
In recent years, the most common request Vegas users have made is to be able to export to the Flash Video (FLV) codec directly from the Vegas timeline. As of the release of Vegas Pro 9.0, you cannot do this. You have to use a third-party encoder. You can use Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash to do this of course, but you can also use Flix and Flix Pro from On2, the company that develops the VP6 codec for Adobe. Flix Standard sells for less than $40, so it’s not necessary for Vegas users to fork over big bucks for the Adobe suite to get into Flash encoding. I’ve used the Flix Pro product, and I prefer it for
doing a 2-pass render out to Flash. Just as in Vegas, rendering 2-pass results in higher quality with a lower file size. Flix Pro retails for about $250 and comes with players, skins, and batch encoding. It has a bunch of other goodies that make it worth the extra dough above Flix Standard, and it’s still cheaper than Adobe Flash.
I won’t go into the Vegas details for using Flix, because there aren’t many. You will want to render an NTSC DV file out of Vegas (Figure 1, below). Even if you start with an HD project, your render out of Vegas should be to DV. I could not get a native .m2t or .mpg file to load in Flix. So from the Vegas timeline, render as NTSC DV or NTSC DV Widescreen to an .avi file. I would follow Jan Ozer’s advice from the March 2009 Moving Picture column and render out of Vegas as Progressive.

Choose an Encoding Preset
On the File tab, click Browse and point to the file you rendered out of Vegas. This will give you an output file in the same directory, but you can change it. There are several presets to start with. By default, 512K Broadband is selected (Figure 2, below). This is average by today’s standards but adequate for embedding in a blog post, for example.

Keep in mind that the smaller the size and bandwidth, the smaller the overall file size, and the quicker and more stable the file will play for all users. It is a trade-off of size versus performance. You may also want to encode two different files, one for broadband viewers and one smaller one for viewers with dial-up internet connections.
Choose Settings in the Vid/Aud Tab
Click the Vid/Aud tab (Figure 3, below). On this tab you can choose to maintain aspect ratio and select frame rate and encoding settings. In our widescreen example, click No Constraints and alter the Width and Height to be 320x180. (This change is necessary for the 1.0 Pixel Aspect Ratio.) I like to use 2-pass variable bitrate (VBR) for anything longer than a few minutes because it provides a higher quality with a lower file size, which is important if you have lots of downloads or limited bandwidth/storage from your website host. But note that 2-pass encoding takes much longer to encode.

Other settings on this tab are Stereo, audio sampling bitrate (I would not go below the 22,050 default setting and might go higher, depending on program material). But remember—the more bits you use for the audio, the less you have for the video.
Back on the File tab, click Encode. When finished, you’ll have an FLV file ready for web distribution. In the case of our AVI sample, the filesize is 2.8MB with 2-pass, 512Kbps encoding.
MP4 is One Louder Than MP3Apple iPods and other portable video devices play back .mp4 video, which is H.264 video in an MPEG-4, Part 14 wrapper. The cool thing is, .mp4 files play in the Flash player (version 9 and above), and as I mentioned earlier, you can encode this right out of Vegas. With the exception of one little step, it doesn’t cost you any extra time.
I have to give huge props to Jerome Cloninger, one of the new EventDV 25 honorees this year. The recipe for .mp4 video playing in Adobe Flash detailed in the next section came from him, and as he has said, “I’ve tried many settings and spent hours to get this result.” His willingness to share his findings is one of the many reasons he’s on the EventDV 25 list (his outstanding work is another), and I do thank him for his contributions.
Back in Vegas, Render as MP4 (aka MPEG-4 AVC, aka H.264)In Vegas, choose File – Render As and select MainConcept AVC/AAC (*.mp4). We’re going to create a custom template.
To do so, follow these steps:
1. Click the Custom button. Choose Best for Video Rendering Quality (Figure 4, below).

2. Click the Video tab. In the Frame Size drop-down, choose Custom Frame Size. Since this is widescreen, enter the values we used earlier: 320 and 180.
3. Set Profile to Main. Set Field Order to None (progressive scan). Set Reference Frames at 5, and make sure Deblocking Filter is checked.
4. Check Variable Bit Rate and Two-Pass.
5. Increasing the Maximum and Average bps will increase the file size. For a 320 x 180 video image, stay with the default of 768,000 and 480,000. Click the Template text box at the top of the screen, enter a name for this new Template, and click the disk icon on the right to save this template (I’ve named mine MP-4 Small, as shown in Figure 5, below).

6. Click OK and click Save to render the Vegas timeline to an MP4 file. Using these settings, the resulting MP4 file is about 3.3 MB.
Cloninger routinely encodes full-screen internet video (860x488) using 10Mbps max and 2Mbps average. It’s advisable to create a different template for this—sounds like a good candidate for MPEG-4 Large.
Ya Gotta Have Some YAMBThere is one more step to this process, but it’s a quick one: We need to reverse the streaming bit information in the .mp4 file before it will properly play in the Flash player. Download the free utility YAMB at http://yamb.unite-video.com (or just Google “YAMB”). Install this program and accept all defaults.
1. Launch YAMB. Double click on the top option, “Click to create an MP4 file…” (Figure 6, below).

2. Click Add and select the .mp4 file you created earlier. Click Open (Figure 7, below).

3. The video and audio streams are shown in the list box. The output shows the same name by default; give it a different name if you don’t want to overwrite it.
4. Click Next. The YAMB process is very quick and painless (Figure 8, below). When the rendering and saving process is complete, you’re ready to deploy the .mp4 file to the web.

We’ve covered quite a bit of ground here. While it’s possible to use the Flix programs from On2 for standard Flash files, you can also encode H.264 files in an MPEG-4 wrapper direct from the Vegas timeline. Both approaches offer numerous options for quality and size, and the decision is up to you whether you want Flash or H.264. What you choose will depend on how you assess the quality comparison, what options are supported by your streaming host, and what your clients want and need. Both formats will run in recent versions of the Adobe Flash player (9 and higher).
If you want to see some gorgeous high-def web video encoded from Vegas, check out Jerome Cloninger’s website (www.jcdv.com). Again, I’d like to mention that I’m indebted to him for his contribution to this article.
David McKnight (david at mcknightvideo.com) is half of McKnight Video of Houston. He is vice president of the Houston Professional Videographers Association (HPVA), has Sony Vegas and HDV certification, is the technical editor of the forthcoming Vegas Pro 9 Editing Workshop (Focal Press), and is a contributor to TheFullHD Book (VASST). He and his wife, Christie, are winners of multiple HPVA awards.