Paint or draw function
 

Is there a paint or draw function in Vegas? I don't have Photoshop. Am wondering if there's a way to do it within Vegas 9. For example, if I wanted to draw a thought bubble around someone.

No, there is not.

You might be able to do it with the Prodad Heroglyph plug-in for vegas?

Are you looking to animate drawing the thought bubble, Brian, or do you want to create a static thought bubble you can overlay onto your footage?

Either way, there are thousands to be had at Google Images thought bubble - Google Images

You'll need to get rid of the white background, which you can do by dropping an instance of the Chroma Keyer onto the event and selecting white as the colour to key out (or whatever colour the background is on the image you use).

If you want to simulate it being drawn then you could do that with the careful use of a keyframed mask that reveals the bubble over time. You might even get away with a simple reveal using a wipe transition, depending on how sophisticated you want it to look.

Hope that helps.

Ian . . .

Thanks, seems like it'd be great feature to have, if you could just draw a crude arrow or question mark or something simple and track it with key frames.

You can find arrows and such in the Wingdings character sets. Since those are just text characters, they can be manipulated and animated in the same fashion as normal text characters.

-gb-

Brian, there is an excellent OpenSource programme called the GIMP (Graphic Image Manipulation Programme) which I use all the time. Using this, you can produce PNG images with Alpha channel which Vegas loves. (And it's free).

You can download it here:

I second the use of GIMP. It's free and really good. I've got CS3 now but I still go back to GIMP for some things which are easier to do than in Photoshop.