Digital cameras give you several options when it comes to saving your images and for high-quality (as well as a growing number of lower-range) cameras, those formats include Raw image file formats. Raw image files preserve the image from the camera's image sensor very closely to—if not exactly as—the sensor sees it. When you save in a raw format, these cameras do little or no processing to the image. You'll sometimes hear these files referred to as digital negatives because much like the negatives created by a film camera, raw files contain maximum data but in an unprocessed form that makes them unusable without further processing.

You can think of the difference between a raw file and a JPEG image (which is another common format that most cameras can save to) in much the same way as the difference between an uncompressed .avi video file and an MPEG-2 file. You know that the MPEG-2 file can't possibly contain the same quality as the uncompressed .avi since the image has been compressed and information has been removed in order to create a smaller file. The same thing is true with a JPEG file as opposed to a raw file. As a result of saving your files on the camera as JPEG or even TIFF files, you force the camera to process the raw image—a process over which you have little, if any, control—and thus remove yourself one generation from the original raw data. This naturally limits your final quality options. For the optimal quality results, you'll want to save your images as raw files and bring them directly into your Vegas Pro timeline.

However, by and large, different camera manufacturers have developed their own flavor of raw image format. This lack of standardization obviously makes it difficult for any software to support all raw files directly out of the box. This, along with the fact that raw files are typically anywhere from 2 to 6 times as large as JPEG files, is probably the biggest challenge involved with using raw files.

Therefore, in order to use your camera's raw files in your Vegas Pro projects, you'll have to first install a codec onto your computer that can recognize the specific raw file you're dealing with. Luckily, that process isn't as scary as it might seem. A codec is simply a small piece of software (although there are also hardware codecs) that can encode and decode a digital data stream. If you think of your still image as being locked inside a raw file, the codec is the key to unlocking that raw file so you can use the image.

You can typically download the codec you need from your camera manufacturer's website. For instance, if you use a Sony camera and want to add the raw files it shoots to your Vegas Pro timeline, download and install the Sony RAW Driver. You may need to reboot your computer after installation.

Once you've installed the codec, start Vegas Pro software. You'll add the raw files just like you add any other file, but you might have to help the software a little bit as it tries to find the files you want to use. Assuming you've transferred your raw files to you computer drive, use the Vegas Explorer window to navigate to the folder that contains them. You might not see them immediately in the Explorer window if Vegas Pro software doesn't recognize your camera's raw file extension. To find the files, click the Explorer window's View drop-down list and select All Files from the list as shown in Figure 2. This refreshes the Explorer window and you can now see your raw files. Now go ahead and add them to your project just like you would any other media file.