Miniturize in vegas
 

I've seen some commercials do it and I've done it in photoshop with pictures but how do you miniaturize someone in vegas using video? It's where the people look like toys almost. Anyone care to explain?

the ones ive seen seem to defocus the surrounding areas. So mask one track with a fair bit of fade and apply the defocus to the background.
Then i would play with the sample rates to get the motion looking right.

To do it right, you need to film the person in green screeen, then film the background separately and put the two on separate tracks in Vegas (person on the top track, and background on track below that. Next use chroma key on top track to key out greenscreen, then use event pan/crop to zoom out, making the person smaller. That should give you the effect you are looking for

It's not that they're green screened in the people look toyish and so do the surroundings building, trees, cars...etc. There is some blur used on the ends or maybe just top and bottom but there's something else to it. Like I said I've done photos in ps3 and I go though several steps but in vegas those steps are not available.

just found out it's called tilt shifting and here is an example. Hope it's okay to post a link on you tube. If not just remove my message. YouTube - Amazing tilt-shift photography video!

yeah, thats exactly what i was thinking of, we have an ad thats played here that is exactly like this. as I posted before, you could do something similar with defocus masks and sample rate.

And they explain it right there: They used a tilt-shift lens. And, clearly, they shot it at a lower frame rate than the display rate.

I suspect this was timelapse still photography rather than video.

The shot angle is very important to get the effect looking good (ie the camera should be positioned looking down on the scene for the best effect).

There are some third party Vegas plugins that will help with the tilt-shift part (from NewBlue and Magic Bullet).

The Rack Focus plugin in Video Essentials by NewBlue does this. It leave a small area of focus and blurs farther the farther from the clear band you get. I've seen some results that really do cause it to look like a miniature.

The techniques (in general, not Vegas specific) are also described in the Wikipedia Miniature Faking article.