Making Tinkerbell

[Garrett Low]

I will be editing a short where I need to make a small sparkling dot fly around on the screen. I was going to take a still of a dot and move it around on the screen basically with pan and zoom. But is there a way that Vegas will allow me to make it sparkle? And, is there an easier way to do it in Vegas?

Thanks,
Garrett

[Richard Hunter]

Hi Garrett. You could apply the Lens Flare filter, make it tiny and move it around as necessary. By keyframing some of the parameters you can probably make it sparkle (with variation) as well.

Richard

[Ian Stark]

Attached is a quick test I just made using only Vegas filters and generated media. May not be what you're looking for but it might give you some ideas.

Basically, this is a clip of generated solid media with a cookie cutter filter. It sits on the track above the live action clip. By varying the size (0.02 to 0.25), as well as the position of the cookie cutter keyframes you can achieve some sense of z depth. Using sharp keyframes helps with the jerky motion that all good fairies display (so I believe). I threw a couple of slow keyframes in as well, just to mix it up a bit.

To get a little sparkle I added a Light Rays filter and a Glow filter to the generated media. I changed the direction of the light rays every now and then to help with the sense of motion. It's not especially sparkly but I guess with a bit of tinkering (pun intended) you could get a nice flicker going.

I also got a nice organic feel to the moves by using the NewBlueFX Wiggle filter but that wasn't used for the clip attached here as I wanted to show the effect with just Vegas fx.

Other things you could do to improve the effect would be to change the colour of the generated solid media over time and maybe use the TV simulator filter to add a little more motion etc.

Good luck!

Ian . . .