Track Motion buttons
 

A big Thank You to Douglas Spotted Eagle for pointing me in the right direction in finding the location of two button in the Track Motion dialog.

Thanks again Spot and best wishes for the Holidays. Nick

Ok i have some more info. When I render avi's i don't have any options for size, or quality. Only widescreen and for 2:3 etc. options. Additionally when playing back avi's from other people Windows Media Player tries to download codecs to play them, ending in an error...

So would this be a problem with the windows avi codecs?

p.s. If you have specific knowledge to this problem please post, if not. Well don't waste your time.

p.p.s.s sounds snotty, just low on patience. sorry.

Reversing a shot
 

Is there a way to reverse a shot in Vegas? When I say reverse I don't mean reverse play, I mean literally reversing the entire direction/composition of the shot (ie., if a character enters from the right, can the shot be reversed so that he enters from the left instead?) Thanks.

Open up "pan/crop" on the event, then right-click on the media area. There's an option to "flip horizontally".

Experimenting with effects in Vegas *clip attached*
 

With this piece I tried creating a black diffusion, and blown out highlights. I wanted a more gritty feel.

I got the idea when "Glenn Chan" (I believe) described something similar in another post. What I did is:

1) Duplicate the track
2) Added Color Channels and set it to "Distribute Red Channel"
3) With that track on top I changed the blend mode to "Darken"
4) I then tweaked the highlights and color saturation of the clip below (lowering the saturation and boosting the highlights via "Levels"

I was pretty happy with the look but didn't understand why I couldn't tone down the black diffusion by lowering the opacity. Anytime I tried to lower the opacity of the top track it would fade to black. As if there was no track underneath it. I'm sure it's related to the fact the top track has it's blend mode set to "darken". I'm assuming this is normal? Any ways around it?

Anyway here it is...

https://home.comcast.net/~g.elliott3/GroomCredits.wmv

It sounds like you're describing something similar to what I call alternative bleach bypass effect. From what you describe, you need to apply gaussian blur somewhere to achieve black diffusion.

I haven't quite yet figured out how to do black diffusion in Vegas. Magic Bullet Editors is likely the easiest.

2- As far as your problem goes, it seems that with certain compositing modes you will get your problem. If you use overlay instead (I forget which), you won't get that problem. Overlay will not be the same as darken however... read the manual a little. It's like screen and multiply combined, so it just increases contrast without overall brightening or darkening.

3- I played around the footage and my preference for this video is:

Add film grain (which looks entirely different than video noise) to make your footage look a little grittier. Chromacity 0, amount toned down to make the effect subtler.

Alternative bleach bypass effect:
Dupe the footage onto itself. Add Channel blend distribute red to the top track FX. Set the top track to "overlay" compositing mode.

The bottom track can be left alone. You could desaturate away the trees and everything else in the background if you like via the secondary color corrector.

Add a sepia tone to the bottom track. Apply the color corrector filter. Drag the shadow color wheel knob towards red/orange. The midtone know towards orange, with an amount more so than the shadows knob. Highlights doesn't really matter... drag it towards orange/yellow with a low amount. You can fiddle around with the settings or use curves instead. Color curves gives more control but takes more time... use the color corrector first to get an idea of which colors/color casts/tones you want.

It looks like there's diffusion of some sort in the original video. Leaving it in or out is artistic preference... I think I prefer no diffusion as that would be grittier. On the other hand, the diffusion gives it more style / the dream/surreal look.

Are you talking about reverseing the footage or the image? If you mean the way it plays in V5 right click and in the menu goto REVERSE or you can set a velocity envelope and set it to -100%.

Don B

<<<-- Originally posted by Don Bloom : Are you talking about reverseing the footage or the image? If you mean the way it plays in V5 right click and in the menu goto REVERSE or you can set a velocity envelope and set it to -100%.

Don B -->>>

The "flip horizontally" option works for me. Thanks.

Rotoscoping
 

I was wondering if it is possible to rotoscope an object to create a lightsaber effect with Vegas 5? Any help would be great.

Mitch

I know some people who added lightsabers to footage with Photoshop. Export a quicktime image sequence and manually edit each frame in Photoshop. Photoshop styles should let you create a lightsaber without that many clicks.

A real rotoscoping program may be faster than Photoshop.

But I do not have the ability to use or obtain Photoshop anytime soon. Is there any way to do something similar in Vegas? Thanks again.

Mitch

Try the Bezier masking in Pan/Crop. It will take a LOT of keyframes, though.

why not just use Alam DV???

What is Alam DV?

AlamDV: http://www.fxhome.com/

OK tool, at least in version 2. If version 3 (due Any Day Now) lives up to their previews, it will be a very good tool.