Vegas Pro 8 Editing Workshop (DV Expert Series),   ISBN:9780240810461

Customer Rating: 

I will just echo the comments made by another reviewer, NDFILMER.
You can read his comment in Amazon's list of 13 reviewers. There are some errors that should have been spotted and corrected before publishing.Otherwise, the manual gives some useful instructions in editing .
Hoever, as NDFilmer states, I would like more careful editing of this work before it is released for publication.

Customer Rating: 

I had trouble finding a good reference guide for Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9. I am a rank beginner at video editing and picked this up hoping it would help since I could not find anything specifically for Vegas 9. Some information is applicable, but as a beginner's guide, it falls short. I ended up purchasing the video training published by VASST. Costs more, but worth it.

Customer Rating: 

I come from the Film Industry and Animation so I am familiar with Editing and the process of creating a movie or home video. Vegas studio 9 platnum pro is a sufficticated software that will enable you to do just about any trickery you can think up. So nothing is canned or predesigned for you. You must construct all your dissolves,cropping and word additions and effects using the graphic tools and building layers to an effect to make it more dense . If you get good at a simpler program with canned pre-designed effects then you could try this program. In Vegas you can create exactly what you want. You can make adjustments to color and speeds of motion and video effects. But what I didn't like was that you have to use the sister program - Architect- to finish and add a menu for your DVD or CD and from this program you do your burn. Nothing is done for you, if your looking for full control and know what you want to do with your project, this program is great.

Customer Rating: 

For some reason, this book is far harder to understand than most. As I work through it I also am working through C#.net and those books (Wrox)provide a much better reference and are much easier to understand.

Although the author is, I'm sure, an expert with Vegas, he seems to ramble a bit. One thing that is missing is enough subheaders to make it easy to understand his focus.

When one reads a book and finds a glaring error, then everything else in the book becomes suspect. I found such an error on page 363 where the author is talking about the Event Pan/Crop window but continually refers to it as the Track Motion Window. After spending a day and a half trying to find the buttons that the author was talking about I realized that he was referring to the wrong window.

I would not recommend this book. I guess it is better than nothing, but not up to the quality of the many, many computer related books I have on m shelf.

Customer Rating: 

Focal Press used to have high editorial standards. But you wouldn't know it from this book. It's pretty much impossible to follow any of the step-by-step instructions, because they have significant errors.

For example, using masks, page 394, looks easy enough. We add six video tracks, and fill some with generated media. Now we select the Parent/Child button in Track 7. There of course is no track 7, and since most exercises take the "wait until we're done and see why we did this" approach, it's hard to guess which track is meant.

In the same exercise, it tells us to select the Track Motion button and confirm our action by observing the position of the "F" in the preview window. Track Motion control doesn't have an F. The Pan/Crop does - so did he mean to use Pan/Crop? Another guess. Time to put aside the book and pull out the Sony manual which keeps looking better and better.

This isn't an isolated example. Almost all the exercises are like this, with multiple errors. Many important steps left out. Look for the button on the left, when it's really on the right and most likely called something different. Or apply an effect to "opening shot" when it really means closing shot. Sample project files can't find their associated video clips, because the path on the CD has changed. What does this tell you? Despite the technical editor's assurance that he pursued his "thankless task" diligently, it's clear nobody even bothered to try out the exercises before the book was released.

I think a lot of these errors arose from sloppy updating, where details that may have been correct from previous versions weren't carefully reviewed against newer versions of the program. For example, the missing file pathname includes "Vegas 6."

The samples are underwhelming. They could have been inspiring, like many of the illustrations in Focal Press's photography books. I could understand if they were simplified to make a point, but most of them are just poorly edited, really bad home movies. And most have bad photography: composition, focus, lighting. Far below the standard set by teens on Youtube.

Poorly organized, poorly written, no evidence of editing except for the editor's self-congratulatory note. Good info on audio. And ProType Titler coverage, though superficial, is mostly accurate.

One review here praised the book because it can be read without being near a computer. I suggest that's the only way to read it. Reading it with Vegas Pro 8 in front of you is just too frustrating.