Vegas for Final Cut Pro Users, Pg. 3

Effects vs. Event FX
In this situation, the terminology is very similar on these two, as is much of their behavior. You can drag effects directly from the effects window to your individual clips, or you can click on the puzzle piece icon located on the clip itself to open up a list of all your available plugin effects. One extra feature, which is very nice and is also a carry-over from Vegas' audio roots, is the ability to apply effects to an entire track. This means that if you know that you have a type of color correction you want applied to an entire film, you can just load it right into that track and it'll be applied to everything on the track. (You can also apply Event FX to media in the Project Media folder and these changes will repopulate throughout your timeline every place the effected media is used.)

Dragging Up vs. Dragging Down
For many of us, the easiest way to add a new video track in Final Cut Pro was to drag one of our video clips up a level beyond the highest level of video clips and, voila, there would be a brand new layer of video that we could work in. Because Vegas started as an audio program, it tends to work from top to bottom. Even though higher video clips are given precedence over lower video clips, it still has that top-down mentality. As such, you drag a video clip below the lowest track on the timeline to add a new track. (You can also press 'Cntrl + Shift + Q' for a shortcut command for adding a new video clip.)

Rendering vs. Selectively Pre-Rendering
In Final Cut Pro, in order to play tracks in true real-time (as opposed to the strobing Real Time view of effects-riddled, unrendered clips), you must render them before viewing them. The same is true with Vegas. However, it calls it 'Pre-Render' as opposed to 'Render'. You can find it in the 'Tools' menu under 'Selectively Pre-Render Video'. (Or you can press 'Shift + M' for it's non-connective shortcut.)

If you want a less permanent form of preview but need to be able to see it perfectly rendered, then you can press 'Cntrl + B' to do a Dynamic RAM Render. (Make sure you adjust the amount of RAM that can be used for this in your 'Options>Preferences>Video' menu, or you'll be frustrated to find that it only renders 1-2 seconds at a time!)

Export Quicktime vs. Render As...
Just as Final Cut Pro will export a timeline to its native Quicktime format, Vegas will export a timeline to its native .AVI format. (The advantage with Vegas is that its default will export a universally playable .AVI as opposed to Final Cut's default Quicktime, which is a proprietary file that is not universally playable. While both programs can convert and save to any installed codec, the defaults are the most convenient.) The big thing to realize is that Vegas refers to this process as 'Render As...', rather than 'Export'. This can be found in the 'File' menu.

While there are some other differences, these are the ones that trip most people up. As such, this should give you a good primer for trying out Vegas and seeing how you like it. If you give yourself some time to delve into it, you can easily find that it is a very powerful program.

Happy editing!

The programmer of Excalibur for Sony Vegas and the author of Vegas Tips, Tricks, & Scripts newsletter, Edward Troxel is an expert editor. You can read his newsletter and look at what new things he's got in the works at http://www.jetdv.com.

The director of two feature length films and half a dozen short films, Jeremy Hanke founded Microfilmmaker Magazine to help all no-budget filmmakers make better films. His first book on low-budget special effects techniques, GreenScreen Made Easy, (which he co-wrote with Michele Yamazaki) was released by MWP to very favorable reviews. He's curently working on the sci-fi film franchise, World of Depleted through Depleted: Day 419 and the feature film, Depleted.

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