A few Vegas questions -managing Events, panning, size

newbie here - Trying editing (bungling my way) for the first time and even
some of the elementary 'basics' are beyond me - like making sense of the
manual :

1. I'm using a few still images faded or cross faded into one another,
and a soundtrack to make a 'moving slide show' - just to try and get a feel
and a handle on it all.
What is snagging me right now is that after moving 'events' left and/or
right over others, the covered ones are obscured and sometimes cant be
'seen' to make further adjustments to them (e.g. to reduce the length it
plays for or to access the crop/pan tool icon). By clicking about over the
'covering' event, the underlying one will appear in the preview windowbut it
still doesn't 'give' me access to the whole event to be be able to drag it
smaller or bigger. I can drag shots on either side to reveal the underlying
one, but it can be a hassle to reset them to their original position.

2. When I render the 2 minute piece as a quicktime or avi movie the size
is astronomical - how do I get it to a size that is able to be sent as an
attachment or even uploaded to a webpage for others to look at? What format
would I RenderAs & what else do I need to do (other than to shorten the
'film'

3. What determines the 'smoothness' of a pan (over a still image) the one i
tried starts a little jittery and ends smooth

thanks for your patience







I still don't know 90% of the tools and terms and am obviously missing the
obvious.

 

Responses inline.

Mike

You do have the full (10 Meg) manual, right? If not, it's a free download.
A good set of basic newsletters (pdf format) is at
http://thetroxels.com/tts/

Make sure "Auto Ripple" (toolbar item) is enabled.
Look up "ripple edit" in the manual for more info.

You'll need to play around with either Windows or Real Media settings
(options in the "save as type" dropdown box) to get things down to a
manageable size for emailing. I've never done any encoding so hopefully
someone else can make some recommendations. I just tried a quick test and a
2 min render was 425 MB in DV-AVI format and only 7 MB in Windows Media
format (512 Kbps) format.

Right-click a key frame (in the Event pan/crop) window and you should see
several options. Try "smooth" for a start.

 

Thanks for this help. I'll work on it. I know it's a pain to answer
questions that are so basic that you take the knowledge for granted.
Appreciated !