I'm a firm believer in the concept of "learning by doing", investing time in exploring an application rather than spend money buying an "idiot's guide". This doesn't necesarily give the shallowest of learning curves, but it's always worked for me, gives a tremendous sense of satisfaction and a makes for a reliable review!

Essentially four distinct areas make up the "default" Vegas layout. The tabbed command window found at bottom provides easy access to media stored on your disks (and not just files imported into your project), transitions, effects and editing tools. Unlike other editing software, the audio editing tools are visible as default and located next to the monitor window found at the bottom right of the application space. Finally, the timeline occupies the uppermost space.

I've grown accustom to shifting various windows of an editing application around, and at first felt restricted by the imposed tabbed and regular interface. However, I soon re-arranged what Sony describes as the "docking area" (the bottom half of the screen) by clicking the line to the left of the box and dragging the window out to float. As the name suggest, You can then drop any window into another area, for example placing the audio mixer as a tabbed window with the explorer and trimmer functions. This method of arranging your editing space is really quite flexible and enables functions to be both hidden and easily accessible. Any changes are automatically saved for your next session. The only slight gripe would be the inability to swap the docking area with the timeline.

Capturing via Firewire and Analogue

Capturing video's my least favoured aspect of video editing. Analogue capture aside, it's merely a case of connecting your camcorder and pressing record, but I tend to take more of an active role in the capture process. The recent trend of scene detection capture (where a new clip is created where the application spots a change in scene) makes this process more passive, but not suited to saving hard drive space by not capturing footage you know you won't use! An alternative to the scene detection method is time based capture, where a series of in and out points are be entered and then the tape played through capturing only the required clips.

Firing up your DV camcorder in XP brings up the familiar XP dialogue offering Vegas as an option once installed:

What surprised me when opting for this method was that a new instance of Vegas Video was opened rather than the existing session. Annoying, but easily resolved by choosing File > Capture Video to bring up the following (you'll probably want to ensure you create a new project first by clicking File > New and selecting the appropriate settings:

A faily comprehensive list of options are available in Vegas capture, and the first task to label your tape (or ensure it's the correct tape if used in capture by Vegas before), then select to either capture the whole tape from the start, the current position of to capture later. If it's the first time capturing, it's probably best to chose the first option then go to Options > Preferences, and then to the capture tab. Here you can see that the scene detection is on as default, which, if used, you may want to combine with setting a maximum clip length. If using Analogue capture, you might also need to change the default framerate. I also had to manually set the correct pixel aspect ratio in the preview tab and change the destination disk in the Disk Management tab. Click OK once happy.

It's my personal opinion that the advanced capture mode is the best method, where you play the tape(s) through, marking all the in and out points of your footage you want to capture. You can do this for several tapes in one sitting, then press batch capture to physically record the footage whilst you do something a little less tedious! That way, you don't have to sit through hours of footage - but make sure you label and insert the correct tape!

Analogue capture is by its very nature not as straightforward as the more user friendly digital capture, but still the only option available for a large proportion of users. Analogue capture on my rig is handled by an Asus V9280 graphics card, which shows up as a "nVidia WDM Video Capture" in Vegas Video. To try out the video capture, I connected up my gamecube to the composite-in of the break-out box. As predicted, analogue capture isn't quite as straighforward, but once I'd manually selected the correct options, I was able to capture with no frameloss with a prefect picture. One thing that was rather annoying was that I could only find an option for uncompressed video - so a one minute, 640x480 clip at 25fps was 1GB!

Overall, I was impressed by the ease of capture and the options available. The captured clips are added to the media pool by default and the user has the option of being in complete control or taking minimal part in the capture.

Basic Video Editing Tasks

Once you've captured your video, more files may be added to the media pool by dragging and dropping files from the explorer tab (simply drop them onto the media pool tab). You can also extract audio from a CD from the file menu and even download stock footage from the Sony website. A nice touch. As is the ability to search your media pool/bins for clips - useful for those of us forever losing sight of all the imported clips.

If you haven't already captured clips, you'll want to start a new project to ensure the correct settings are selected. Click File > New to bring up the Project settings dialogue:

As is standard with higher end video editing suites, Vegas editing is done on a timeline basis where clips are dragged and droped to the timeline window. Simply choose your videos from your organised media pool (or explorer if you wish) and drag them to the timeline (and added clips will automatically be added to the media pool anyway). Clips in the timeline are show as thumbnailed as default, which makes for an easy and quick way of navigating through the scene. By default, overlapping clips on the timeline are cross faded, with the length of transition depending on the size of the overlap. This can easily be undone by dragging the clips apart, or the turning on the auto-ripple feature so that the same distance is always maintained between clips.

Clip in and out points can also be selected and dragged to the appropriate points to trim your video, or alternatively dragged to the trimmer tag. A region can then be selected and added to the timeline. Selected regions can also be cut and pasted using the usual windows short cuts or from the Edit menu, but to be honest, I was dissapointed at the lack of editing tools available directly from the timeline.

Zooming in and out of the timeline and trimmer window is facilitated by right clicking on the area above the timeline. You have the option of zooming to the selection or setting the selection to the view or entire project (you can select an area to zoom by clicking in the area above the timeline and dragging the cursor). You can also zoom in and out using the + and - buttons in the bottom right of the timeline.

Finally adding transitions between clips is just as easy as in the multitude of other video editing applications. Simply drag and drop your desired transition from transitions tab to between two clips on the timeline. The list of transitions available is exhaustive and you certainly won't be left wanting in this department! More importantly, you're not limited to just one "effects track", and adding transitions to any video track is fair game.

Advanced Features

Vegas easily copes with basic video editing tasks, but you'll expect something more far at this price range. The FX tab in the docking area fulfils even the most demanding of expectations, providing the ability to add a comprehensive range of preset effects including Chroma Keying, video control and colour correction. (The ubiquitous Picture in Picture can be found in the cookie cutter video effect!) When used in isolation or combination, the FX tab really does make for some impressive video effects. And if you've created a particular combination of effects, you can easily paste one clip's attributes to another.

You'll need to see the fruits of your video effects - and Vegas offers a split screen preview showing both "before and after" in the preview monitor. Useful for deciding whether those colour adjusments were worthwhile! But the "real" bonus is the Real Time effects and transitions. On my rig, Vegas easily handled good quality real time effects, but for slower systems, there's the option of lower quality settings (although there is a noticable drop in quality). All this with no decicated hardware support.

Right clicking on the video in the timeline and selecting insert/remove velocity envelope, provides a bar in the middle of the clip - simply move this up and down to increase/decrease the speed of your clip. Move it down far enough and you get a negative figure (i.e reverse). You can also adjust the opacity of a clip by draging down from the top of the clip.

I'm also told that the audio editing features of the application simply outclass the opposition. However, I'd have to be honest and admit that most of the options on the audio front baffled me. Perhaps a clear indication of the fact that Vegas offers so much more in terms of audio than any other video editing application.

Conclusion

Vegas 4 is a solid video editing package, providing genuine competition to Ulead Media Studio and Adobe Premiere. Before the release of Premiere Pro, I would have picked this application over Premiere 6.5. However, with the recent upgrades to Premiere enableing real-time previews and improved DVD creation support, theres nothing to choose between the two. Being a regular Premiere user, I'm slighly biased towards the Adobe application, but I'd have to agree that for someone in the market for a semi-pro NLE application, you shouldn't overlook Vegas - especially with the added bonus of the might of Sony behind the application.