Unsure of what to do?

[Lady_luma]

I've got a few basics down with Vegas, I've only obtained it today after a long wait. But I have some questions regarding tools and things that can be done within Sony Vegas 11.

First off, is I have seen in many AMV's where people are able to inject audio from the anime clips, over the music. Now I was only using WMM before, and I couldn't achieve this without balancing out the audio from both sources and then it would go the entire projects length. Is there a way to make it so that I can just inject audio from the show I'm using every once in a while or is there not? I'm not sure what specific wording I should use on this either.

Secondly, what's a roto-tool? Is that something that can help me achieve an effect of similar in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1uELoz_AJc&feature=plcp (The effect that is essentially as if you placed the character on a green screen and edited video inot behind it) ?

Just some things I'm trying to achieve, I don't need to learn the second one too soon, but learning the first asap (in the next week) would greatly help me out.

[NS]

First of all, welcome to the wonderful world of vegas. You'll learn to love it.

To answer your first question, yes you can use audio from your source very easily. I want to introduce you to the trimmer. You can right click any clip in your media bin (Keep in mind, I use vegas 7 so you may have to take some liberties with things if you're using a newer version, but I'm pretty sure stuff is mostly the same still). Anyway, you can right click any clip in your media bin and select "Open in Trimmer". When you open in this view, if the source has audio you should see the video on top and the audio waveform on bottom.

Here in the trimmer you can set "Markers" by hitting M on the keyboard. How I cut clips apart when I edit, is I just scrub through the footage and find section I want, then put a marker at the in and out point of what I want to use in my timeline, Then you can just double click within the region of the markers and it should highlight the area, make sure only the area you want to use is highlighted. Now you can either right click in the area and choose: "Select video only", "select audio only", or "select video AND audio"). choose whichever you want and then just drag the highlighted area up to your timeline. And there ya go. If you convert your clips following the guides for preparing footage for editing you can choose in DGIndex whether to keep the audio or not.


Second, A roto tool is a tool you can use to cut something out of a scene or make shapes. The most popular uses of heavy masking are probably in the technique beat videos and skittles. Character roto and colors and shapes and all kinds of crazy stuff. Roto is kind of a lot to explain and is one of those things that you kind of just need to practice to get an eye for. There are some intro guides to rotoing and using the pent tool also on this site I believe.

The one tip I could give you on roto, is be consistent, if you cut of part of a character in a shot, then be consistent the whole time, the last time you want is wobbly masks.

I hope any of this is helpful.