[Gary Eickmeier]

geoff wrote:

Clumsy ?!!! You must be joking . The most straightforward and
intuitive workflow one could imagine. I guess unless already
accustomed to another particular app.

Well - it's kind of like the '56 Chevy that had the gas filler hidden
beneath the left tail light. If you knew where it was, no problem. If you
were renting the damned thing, you started pulling out your hair at the
first gas stop.

It took me about 3 hours to figure out how to do a fade in. In Premiere,
there are tools for the most frequently used effects such as fades,
dissolves, and cuts. In Vegas, there is no tool for a fade-in or fade-out. I
kept reading and reading, searching (gave me everything but what I was
looking for), and finally in an obscure paragraph it mentioned that for a
fade in or out effect, you hover the cursor over the upper left corner of a
clip and a symbol will appear for a tool that lets you drag the corner over
for a fade-in. For a cut in Premiere, there is a little scissors tool. In
Vegas I learned a while back about the "S" key, but it took an equally long
search and happenstance to find that clue.

Title creation - holy goat**** Batman! Premiere has templates with a large
selection of type styles and easy movement among the other options to
manipulate the titles. With Vegas - at least so far - I have to manually
create each title. I will probably learn which plug-in is the easiest and
best and how to make my own templates, but this initial go was NOT easy. I
learned how to copy a title so that I could make another one with the same
attributes, but other than that there isn't a clue how to make multiple
titles of the same style. In Premiere there was a button called "make
another title with the same attributes."

Rendering my first project out to disc was equally disturbing. I tried (like
a fool) to just go "burn disc" after which you can specify what kind of disc
etc, but it just didn't work. Then I learned about pre-rendering, and that
would go a few minutes and then hang. So into the troubleshooting section
and I learned about turning the GPU acceleration OFF before rendering, and
that seemed to permit me to finally do what I wanted to do.

Like you say, it is a hard slog for the first couple of videos, but then it
gets smoother as you learn and customize the thing for your style.

Gary Eickmeier