About changing playback rates in Vegas

[Jim H]

I've recently been messing around with slow motion via 60P clips from my HMC150 in Vegas 8.0c.

Anyway, the first editor I used extensively was Premiere Pro CS3. One of the nice things about Premiere was the ability to simply change the speed of a clip by percentage, and then Premiere would automatically size the clip on the timeline to the new speed. That is, a 6 second clip at 50% speed would become a 12 second clip, and the same clip set to 200% would become a 3 second clip.

Vegas leaves the clip length alone, and just speeds up/slows down the footage inside it.

It's not enough to make me abandon Vegas (other than 60P AVCHD glitching a lot, and this, it's awesome), as I can manually alter the clip lengths to fit the new length, but it's an extra step I'd like a way around.

Basically, when you're working with action scenes which you undercrank 10-20%, and other shots which may be overcranked in the 100-200% range, and have dozens of edits per minute, having to constantly tweak clip lengths like this gets irritating.

Is there something I'm missing, or will I always have to do this manual clip resizing in Vegas?

 

[Efexone]

Gotta use a different logic when editing in vegas. I hate the auto-resizing of clips. Once you learn how to work fluidly in vegas's timeline, you will realize that auto-resizing is counter productive, especialy when changing velocity mid-sequence.

 

[El Director]

Here's how to do slowmo- hold "CTRL", move your mouse to the right edge of the clip. A wavy line should appear. CLICK and DRAG the clip to the right to slow it down, or to the left to speed it up. It's a visual percentage. Twice as long is twice as slow. DO NOT use the velocity envelopes unless you want a smooth speed change in the middle of a clip. If you want a sudden change, first split your clip with "S" then follow the above steps on the clip that is to be altered.

 

[Jim H]

Here's how to do slowmo- hold "CTRL", move your mouse to the right edge of the clip. A wavy line should appear. CLICK and DRAG the clip to the right to slow it down, or to the left to speed it up. It's a visual percentage. Twice as long is twice as slow. DO NOT use the velocity envelopes unless you want a smooth speed change in the middle of a clip. If you want a sudden change, first split your clip with "S" then follow the above steps on the clip that is to be altered.

I'm aware of this method (another note, I was altering the playback rate in properties to change speeds, not using velocity envelopes), it's just there are times where I have a number of clips and I want to alter the speed exactly the same way in each one. One example is 60P video in a 24P timeline, where I want to switch the playback to 40% speed, as that yields frame accurate slow motion of every frame.

Another example is an action scene I was speeding up, where I find keeping the percentages identical yields a more believable result.

I can do all this in Vegas, it just takes longer than in Premiere - particularly if I want to alter, say, 10 different clips in a row to a different percentage playback and then preview it, to attempt to find just the right speed. In Vegas, I'd have have to manually alter each clip length at each time speed, whereas in Premiere I just have to drag the clips around a bit to fix it.

I just wish Vegas could do it both ways. Maybe a check box for "alter clip length on timeline" or something would be good. Edit: Though on reflection, I can really just CTRL drag and then check the properties. That's almost as quick as the premiere method. Now if only something would popup and tell me the percentage change to playback while I'm draggin (to sync up multiple clips without a lot of trial and error) it'd be perfect.