how to create an oval 'highlight' area?
 

I want to create an oval ‘highlight’ area around one football player running down the filed and scoring a touchdown -- where the rest of the screen slightly dims and the oval ‘highlight’ tracks with the player and stays the normal brightness.

What’s the best way to do this? I’ve searched the topic and I’m stuck!

The trackig I can do with keyframing -- the oval I can't figure out...

Any help would be appreciated – thanks

Just put event on two tracks and apply cookie cutter using an oval to upper track.
Then change the opacity of the upper track to make it transparent.

Thanks Jim --

I tried what you suggested, but I want the area inside the oval to stay at normal brightness and have the rest of the screen outside that area go slightly dim...

Seems with your method, I am 'adding' a color or 'highlight' on top of normal brightness -- which I do not want to do... if I'm wrong about that --sorry.

Any other ideas? anyone?

Lower the opacity of -- or darken -- the lower track instead of the upper track.

Thanks for the inspiration guys -- figured it out! (at least in a simple way that works for what I’m looking for)

Two tracks of same video…

Cookie cutter solid oval – applied to footage on upper track

Set upper track compositing mode to ‘darken’ -- then lower the level/opacity as desired...

Note –

If you want to fade back to the bottom layer (original) footage (making the oval highlight disappear)…

Set the top track video level to 100% -- then create a ‘composite level’ envelope starting at 0%, then increase to taste (about 38% in my project) – then back down to 0% to fade back to original footage…

Another option (which doesn’t involve duplicating the track) is to use a Generated Media Color Gradient as a mask. Here’s how:

1. Add a new video track as the top track.
2. Add a Color Gradient Generated Media to that track and select "Linear Black to White" (this is the default).
3. Change the Gradient Type to "Elliptical".
4. Set the Alpha for the white point (1) to 0 (transparent)
5. Set the Alpha for the black point (2) to about 100 (or whatever transparency you like).
6. Then just adjust points 1 & 2 to make any kind of oval shape you want.

Use the fade-in/out on the event to make them smoothly appear and disappear. Vegas Generated Media is really great for making all sorts of masks and garbage mattes.

~jr

John –

Thanks for the input – your method works great. However, I cannot use the ‘sync cursor’ option/button (as I can with the cookie cutter) for some reason – it’s grayed out. This makes it very hard to keyframe the oval (as a player as he runs down the field). Any idea why I can’t ‘sync cursor’ when using the color gradient media generator? Anyone?

Thanks for all of the great replies everyone --

Sync Cursor does not work on media generators.

That’s correct you can’t sync to cursor with Generated Media so you have to do the opposite. You have to scrub the cursor manually in the Generated Media dialog and watch your preview monitor. Then drop the keyframes from there. Scrubbing the small timeline in the Generated Media is the key to getting this to work. (no pun intended) ;-)

~jr

Thanks for the info guys...

Went with the idea above, but used the cookie cutter on solid black generated media -- I can now keyframe AND sync the cursor... sucess!

Thanks all...