The Beginner's Guide to Sony Vegas Pro 11 is a great education and revision tool for the users of this powerful video editing software package. By working through the tutorial projects, the reader will gain a strong understanding of how the software works and the processes for creating exciting video projects. For the experienced user, this book will help to revise their editing workflow as well as show alternate and possibly more efficient ways of achieving professional results.
Chapter 1, Getting Acquainted with your New Best Friend: Vegas Pro 11 Overview, covers system requirements to run the discussed software and the process of installing Sony Vegas Pro 11. This is followed by an introduction to the user interface and its associated windows plus an overview of the Tutorial Project we will be using with this book.
Chapter 2, Let the Magic Begin: Beginning the Project and Acquiring Media, explains some of the most important topics for getting started with Vegas Pro 11. They include, How to create a Project, Pixel Aspect Ratio, The Preview Monitor, Importing of Media, The Smart Tool, and Keyboard Shortcuts.
Chapter 3, Video Editing Concepts and Application, discusses the history of film making and editing as well as information on what makes a good edit. We look at the multi-camera tool which will be used in our tutorial, plus essential functions for editing, such as panning and cropping and slow and fast motion video.
Chapter 4, Essential Editing Tools, discusses the tools and their workflows as well as gives some insight into the software's 3D editing capabilities.
Chapter 5, Eye Catching Titles, Text, and Effects, discusses the tools that go a long way in helping the reader bring their video editing workflows into the professional league.
Chapter 6, Color Correction Techniques, shows the reader how to use the all important color correction tools to their best advantage.
Chapter 7, Look, I Made it Move!!—Automating Tools in Sony Vegas, dives into one of the biggest advantages of digital non-linear video editing, which is the ability to automate or animate most, if not all of the tools in Sony Vegas Pro 11.
Chapter 8, The Importance of Audio, discusses the importance of audio for vision and the tools used to create that experience.
Chapter 9, Soundtrack of our Lives: Audio for Video, discusses creating great audio including the spoken word and microphones, as well as music copyright, ways to create original music for your projects, and the concepts of surround sound audio.
Chapter 10, Can I put this on YouTube?: Rendering and Delivering the Final Project, helps the reader to negotiate the often scary path through video compression and codecs, video and audio formats, and confidently choosing the right formats for creating the final delivery method whether it be DVD, Blu-ray via DVD Architect, or the Internet.
To successfully use this book, the most current version of Sony Vegas Pro 11 is needed and installed onto your video editing computer system. Although there may be a few small interface differences, this book will also be useful for users of the latest version of Sony Vegas Pro 10. You will also need to download the video and audio files for the project that you will be working on during the tutorials in this book.
The Beginner's Guide to Sony Vegas Pro 11, although ideally suited to the video editing newcomer, will also appeal to both professional and intermediate users looking for helpful and insightful ways of carrying out tasks in their video editing workflow.
In this book you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "You can check if you have the latest version by selecting HELP MENU | Sony on the Web | Latest Updates".
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