A way to selectively paste event attributes more selectively?

[Aivis Zons]

There is a way to be more selective, but not sure if it will be right for your case.

After the “Selectively Paste Event Attributes” window opens, you can select which attributes you want pasted. To be even more selective you need to click on the 3 dots on the left, which I’ve circled in the attached image. One thing to look out for is that “Delete existing FX on target event”. Basically the caveat here is that there isn’t an option to directly “replace/update” just one effect if you have multiple on there already. You can append, or remove all and append your selected effects (by default it removes all and adds what you copied).

If you need to sharpen all clips for the same amount, you can add that effect to the track(s) instead. If you don’t have the button for Track FX visible, you can select it from the list you get when clicking on the three dots at the top left corner of a video track.

[Johnny Chevy]

That’s amazing. I should’ve seen that. Thanks!

[Brie Clayton]

Thank you for solving this, Aivis!

[Johnny Chevy]

Actually, just getting to this now, my program doesn’t have the three dots. I’m using vegas 17.

[Aivis Zons]

Hmm… that’s a shame. I’m using Vegas 20, not sure at which version this feature was introduced.

In this case I’d say you have to go with an alternative approach. Assuming you need to increase sharpen by the same amount or maybe two or three different amounts you can use Track FX. If you haven’t used Track FX before – basically this allows you to add effects to a whole track; works essentially the same as Event FX with some minor caveats.

So the setup would be you have your main track with your footage with no sharpen and then one, two or however many additional tracks with varying levels of sharpness (if necessary). And then you’d simply move footage up or down, depending on if they need sharpening or not. Won’t be perfect for cases where you also have crossfades/transitions and only one clip needs the sharpen though, but should still be quicker than adding the effects one by one.

As I described previously: seeing that you don’t have the button for Track FX visible, you can select it from the list you get when clicking on the three dots (in your case 3 lines) at the top left corner of a video track. If you click on “Edit visible button set” you can enable the button for Track FX.

Your setup with this approach should roughly look like the attached image. I’ve highlighted where you can find the Track FX button.

Another way that came to mind if separating your footage in multiple tracks like this isn’t an option is you can create sharpen presets (or use existing), highlight all the clips you want to apply it to and then double click the preset from the Video FX tab. This will add sharpen to each clip, but be careful as if you want to change the effect properties further on – you’ll have to do it one clip at a time.

[Johnny Chevy]

Thanks. I took care of the sharpness, but now I have to do the color correction on most of the project. It’s mostly black and white so most of the clips are the same, I just have to bring down the gamma (or offset) a bit.

[Johnny Chevy]

I guess there’s nothing i can do then?

[Aivis Zons]

Color correction is a rather manual process as the results are often subjective, not much automation there. Or rather you can probably find some plugins that would give you a good LUT or automatic levels based on source, but I feel like that would be over-complicating what’s otherwise a simple task, plus I’d likely want to tweak the look afterwards anyway, which somewhat defeats the purpose.

What I can suggest is that you take the same approach for color correction as for sharpening. Create a separate track for the black and white footage and add a color correction to the whole track instead of individual clips. You could also stack effects if necessary – one major correction for all and if one or two clips slightly differ you can add an extra effect on those separately.

If you’re looking for a suggestion as to which effect to use – I’d go with Levels or Color Corrector.

[Johnny Chevy]

Thanks.