Sony Vegas Expert Advice: Supercharging your edits with automation

You could say I started this discussion of automation last month when I talked about automating the parameters of certain audio effects. In this article, we'll expand that automation discussion and dig into some of the tools that you might not utilize as effectively as you could, even if you already know how to create automation. If you're completely new to automation, you might want to go back to last month's article, Discovering the Power of the Sound Forge™ Pro plug-In Chainer, and read the basic automation discussion toward the end of that article.

Assuming you're all now familiar with the basics of automation and how Sony Creative Software products use envelopes to create that automation, let's dig a little deeper and really explore the tools. Since Automation works basically the same way in all of our applications that support it, and since Vegas™ Pro features the most robust automation toolset, I'll use Vegas Pro in this discussion.

Whether you're working with event-level automation—like Velocity envelopes that enable you to create slow and fast motion on events—or track-level automation—like Volume envelopes that you use to change the volume of a track over time—the techniques for using automation are the same. Figure 1 shows a project that I'm currently working on that has both event- and track-level automation envelopes already applied. I'll assume that you're working on a similar project as we move through this discussion. read more...