Navigating the Sony Vegas Opening Screen

Series Summary

Sony Vegas is an excellent non-linear, Windows based video editing program, that is only limited by the speed of your computer. This amazing software allows you to create your own professional looking home movies and burn them onto DVDs. Additionally, you can use Sony Vegas to add music to your movies and edit the sound and length of the tracks. If you would like to learn how to use Sony Vegas to create your own movies, you can learn for free, online from one of our experts.

In this free online video series, learn from Sony Vegas expert Mike Purdy, how to edit video using Sony Vegas. Mike will show you how to transfer video footage to Sony Vegas, how to increase audio levels in Sony Vegas, how to add fades and credit rolls, how to crop or extend video, how to fade sound, and how to adjust your preferences in Sony Vegas.

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Mike Purdy for Expert Village and today we are talking about editing video with Sony Vegas. As you can see this is the opening screen. When you bring up Sony Vegas this is what you get. Before I go any further, let me mention this. I would highly recommend dual monitors. If you don't use a dual monitor, you can get everything on one screen. But if you click right here, you can drag this over to another monitor and here is what it looks like. You get this screen on one monitor and you get this on the other. For purposes of illustration, we are usually going to put the video screen right in this, we'll pop it right back on there so that we will be able to see everything at once but I would recommend two monitors. On overview, you have file, open. These are for opening Sony video projects. Here is one right here. We'll open this up. That will open a project and we have edit. It is pretty much a standard window screen. View and you can view all of the different tools with Vegas. Insert audio envelopes, video envelopes. We will go over some of this stuff later. Tools, options and your help and this is pretty much self-explanatory. These are the most often used tools. this tool bar can be changed by the way. If you would like to select this, now frankly I only use one tool. I use the normal edit tool and that is the only one that I use. Now we have two different types of tracks you can see; audio tracks and video tracks. You can tell the audio tracks from the video tracks because they have the volume control here, the pan in the center. All of these are scalable. All of the windows are scalable and you can easily move them around so that it is presented the way that you like it. These are the audio tracks and on an audio track you will be able to see the wave form. Let me zoom in on wave form here for a second. This is what an audio wave form looks like. You can actually see the volume levels of the wave form. Once you get used to looking at the wave form for a while, you can pretty much tell what is going on with it. You can actually see the beats and it is actually pretty easy to work with. "