Editing Wedding Video from SD card in Sony Vegas

[Matt Crowley]

There’s not much you can do to improve poor or small footage, but you might be able to work around the issue with some creative editing.

For example, you could have several small clips playing at the same time, spread around the screen (look at the help for “track motion”) so that you don’t have to stretch them.

You could also have a sort of montage with a background slideshow of still photos (read up on “ken burns effect”) and a few of the small video clips as picture-in-picture overlays (track motion again), and the lower quality won’t be so obvious because there is more to look at on screen at the same time.

[Penni Orlandini]

Matt – thank you very much for your thoughtful response. It is exactly the inspiration I was looking for – all of my creativity got locked up trying to fix an unfixable problem. I am very familiar with key framing & track motion and I excited about your suggestions. Much much appreciated.

[Penni Orlandini]

Hi Matt –

your solution to my SD card problem was so awesome and saved the wedding video. So,I thought I would pick your brain again. A new client wants to know if I can insert his head/body into an existing scene where someone is giving a speech. I know the basics of chroma keying and have a decent green screen but not sure how to deal with the existing footage and the person giving the speech? How do I make new mask fit the movement of old subject? Or can it be done?

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. And thanks again for the help on the (budget) wedding video.

[Matt Crowley]

I’m glad to hear that my idea is working for you. I needed to do the same kind of thing on a wedding video for which I had footage from several cameras, and some was noticeably lower quality than the rest.

I haven’t done any green-screen or masking/tracking work so can’t advise much on that, sorry. There are a few others here who know more about it though.