I'd like to know if there's a better way to make my video that involves 2 people talking, both shot in front of a green screen, with a different background for each person.

I have attached a video to show you how I have organized my subjects on the timeline. As you can see, I cannot simply put 2 seperate tracks of a background in and have it all come together, the top background track overshadows whatever is below it.

I am trying to avoid having to go in and manually conform individual background events to their parents' cuts. This means if I change anything down the road I have to mess around with shuffling events and making sure everything is in line and I'm not interested in doing that.

I would also prefer not to have to render each individual clip before hand and then putting the fused subject/background clips back onto the timeline.

Am I using the wrong method for this? Any suggestions on how to make this easier would be appreciated.

Couldn't you conform your backgrounds to your parents as you put it, and group them right after? That way you can move, lengthen, split or whatever and they would behave as one clip without the pre-render.

Did that answer your question?

I recently did a two camera shoot of one person speaking in front of a green screen. One camera was wider angle and one was zoomed.

I then did two background photos to match the degree of zoom of the cameras.

In Vegas 7, I then put these four items on video tracks of their own, backgrounds below the video.

I then used envelopes to select the video I wanted over its matching background. Quite time consuming but worked fine.

I now have Vegas 8 which has mulitcam facility, and have been thinking of how I would have done the project in v8. Haven't thought it all through yet. :-)

Couldn't you conform your backgrounds to your parents as you put it, and group them right after? That way you can move, lengthen, split or whatever and they would behave as one clip without the pre-render.

Did that answer your question?

Aha! I knew there was a simple way. This should work splendidly.

In Vegas 7, I then put these four items on video tracks of their own, backgrounds below the video.

I then used envelopes to select the video I wanted over its matching background. Quite time consuming but worked fine.

Which envelope? Mute doesn't seem to conform to the clip for me...but I am using Vegas 6 so maybe that has something to do with it. I'm interested in your method as well it just sounds like more work than the grouping technique at the moment.

Composite envelope.