Video Edition & Sound Effects

In this post I want to talk about the edition of the animation in Sony Vegas Pro 11.


I have no real experience in video editing and from the beginning I was thinking of editing the video using Windows Movie Maker which is a program that I had used before for putting together videos of my surf trips with some of my friends.
However, Windows Movie Maker has a big weakness which is the sound. You are only allowed to use one audio track which was fine for my surf videos as I only added some music but for the animation I needed many different sounds for each element in the animation.


That is the reason of why I decided to use Sony Vegas Pro. Sony Vegas allows me to add as many audio tracks as I want in the animation which is very useful for some of the scenes in which I need to include up to four different sounds.
If you do not have in consideration the sound, for the rest of the edition Windows Movie Maker would have been enough as I simply split some of the clips to make them shorter and merged the end of some clips to the beginning of the next ones to be able to achieve a 30 seconds animation. What I want to say with this is that I have not really gotten into Sony Vegas Pro and only used its basic functions to complete the edition.


Here are some screen captures of the edition. As you can see the video clips go in the top track and the sounds go in the rest of the tracks.

So thanks to Sony Vegas I was able to add as many sound effects as I wanted to. All the sounds (except the imperial march of course) are loyalty-free sounds taken from http://soundjax.com/.


The list of sounds I used:


- Wind.
- Music.
- Antenna Moving.
- Antenna radio sound.
- X-Wing and TIE Fighters fly by sound (it's a jet sound)
- X-Wing and TIE Fighters engine sound (it's also a jet)
- TIE Shooting Sound (Original from the films)
- Lasers beam flying by.
- Atmosphere sound inside the X-Wing cockpit (a minor wind)
- Rocket Launcher shooting.
- Rocket woosh.
- Incoming alarm in X-Wing Cockpit.
- Explosion sound.


I really wanted to add all the necessary sound effects into the animation because even if sound is not part of the module, it makes the animations look much better and be more "alive".