By DAVID RUETHER

I hope this brief guide will help those who  feel "lost" as they begin video editing. While the basic concepts for the operations may seem simple to those familiar with editing, they can be daunting for beginners - and there are few sources for information that can get a complete beginner started and to the point where further experimenting with settings and playing with menu items becomes useful.

Even though these instructions are intended for use with the Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9 Platinum Edition and Vegas Pro video editing software programs using HD  HDV files, editing SD Mini-DV files in these programs is the same (with some program  settings changes, of course), and there are many similarities with other editing programs that use timeline editing (see my brief reviews of some others, here).

I suggest rather than reading through this guide and trying to learn it, or trying to use it immediately to edit a finished video, that you use a short piece of test footage (with maybe three or four scenes in it) to run through all the operations described below. While doing this, make notes about particulars of interest, and/or their locations in this guide (such as, "Adding Transitions, Section 5, parts A, B, and C").  read more...