That Home Video "Recording" look
 

hi all..

has anyone here seen that tacky frame that is used when deliberatly trying to show footage taken by an amateur??

you knwo the one where its got a small cut square within the safe areas, with a little red blinking "recording" lamp flashing in teh corner?

Im tryin to work out how i can get this and use it in a Vegas project...

Basically i have some footage i took, buti also have some footage which were tryin to make out as if its done by someone taking off with a camera... bit like the russian guys in 15minutes... where they document what theyre doing, and we WANT it to look amateurish...

Any ideas or templates, or gifs, greatly appreciated!!

Disclaimer- *I don't use Vegas*

With that said, if I were doing this in Premiere :), I would create at least two images in photoshop. One with just the safe boundries and whatever other stationary stuff, and another adding the red light. Fill the background with a solid color, and make an animation lasting several frames with the red light, several without.
Continue this for whatever length you need, and make an avi out of it. Then, take that avi, lay it over your footage, and key out the backgroung, revealing your real footage behind the camera stuff.

hmm... sounds easy..

I was thinking of using a title track and using a font with a
"Rec O " then have the "O" filled and blinking.. but that doesnt fix the frame conundrum...

thanx for the idea thou, i might give it a shot...

Sure there isn't something like that already in the program? FCP has one standard.

This may not be directly related to your question but Vegas has some good filters to age your video. I'm not talking making it sepia toned or anything- it actually has a filter that ages it to make it look like it was shot in the 80's. It's subtle, with a little noise, and slightly desaturated colors. Definitly looks like an old home video shot on VHS-C.

I like easy... cheap and easy is even better :)

You are trying to make it look like what is seen through the viewfinder while the shot is made, are you not? I wouldn't be surprised if you could do it all with the text generator. Look for a font with lines and curves. Build your safe area markers from that. Even the red lamp you could do that way. Just add a little light rays FX to it.

I'll agree with Keith.....Photo Shop is the easiest way to go this route in Vegas to get the effect you want.

Agreed -- two images -- 655 x 480, one with just frame, one with frame and Rec light. Use PSD or PNG format, with an alpha channel so the underlying frame shows through. Number them "frame1" and "frame2" and then bring them in as a still image sequence (File > Open dialog). Pick a really low framerate, like 2 fps. Stretch out the clip to the length you need, it will loop automatically. Then, right-click on the clip, go to "Switches" and set then disable resample, so it doesn't frame blend (unless you want the Rec light to fade in and out). Bring down the opacity on the clip or track so they are semi-transparent. There's also a filter in Vegas 4 that simulates bad TV, you might get some good results with that on your source clip.
///d@

While the Photoshop method will certainly work well, one should not underestimate the power and simplicity of Vegas' text generator - especially for creating things other than text.
Take a look at this little example, it's only about 73 kB.
(Not sure if I can insert a direct link in this forum, so copy and paste the address. If you'd rather download it, go to the folder and rightclick the file.)

http://home.hesbynett.no/saltor/_test/viewer.wmv

Everything except the video itself was made with the text generator in Vegas 4. Oh, and I tried with the TV filter too, but it was overkill, so I dumped it.

Information on setting URLs is given here.

This is a direct link to the WMV.

EDIT: the BB code page only offers one way of setting URLs, that is as [ url]www.vbulletin.com/forum/[ /url] (I've added spaces after the "[" so that it isn't rendered as a link). An alternative is [ url=http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/]this text will be the link[ /url]

Tor, that's brilliant. I forgot about the angle characters. Those work great.
///d@

They do. And instead of the rather silly AUTO text (I was in a hurry) you could do some green Is and with keyframes make them look like a sound level meter.

just to make a textimage with a R and put it on the vegas timeline in spots.

yeah i was thinking of that... and just get it to flash on and off....

we'll wait and see how it turns out...