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How do Video Landscape pan with Feature Indicator?
After 5 years of distracted Vegas Pro amateur use, today I bought Spots Vegas Pro 9 book and DVD to tackle a specific problem. I am jargon handicapped so a quick scan of the book failed to find exactly what I was looking for (answered a lot of other nagging questions though). If you could guide me directly or by way of the book/DVD I would appreciate it.
I have a video clip that pans over a city from a skyscraper. One of the tiny houses in the pan is a house of interest that I would like to indicate with say a yellow arrow in the pan. I suspect keyframes are involved, but get lost after that.
Thanks
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7 Replies
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The easiest way would be to ‘pan’ the arrow with a motion tracker (like e.g is present in the Vegas plugin Boris FX).
To do it manually, you can do it by using keyframes in the track motion window (which you can open with the button at the track header).
Theo
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Thanks. I think they distributed some form of Boris with Vegas 7.
I suspected pan & crop key frames were involved, so after a lot of hacking at it I used what some seem to call a “moving mask”. Some of the major stops on the learning curve were:
1) Did you have to Mask the target area (a house) at each frame or was it “smart” and could auto mask interim frames? (I think its smart) 2) The lower left hand “menu” Position/Mask and their functions and how to select. 3) Frame advance (Alt arrows) 4) How to move versus reshape the mask. 5) At four instances, define the beginning key frame and ending key frame (deleting the first and last unwanted key frame seems to work). I suspect I should be able to use the labeled key frames some how.
I still don’t know what the “tangent function” does in the mask menu. It would be helpful to know if I got any of this wrong.
Thanks.
RC -
Maybe I misunderstand you completely, but if you have a yellow arrow against a transparant background, you don’t need any moving mask. You just have to move the arrow (in x, y and z direction) together with your subject (the house).
Theo
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Perhaps as I was describing what the final effect would be.
To clarify, I have no yellow arrow. I did not know how to make a yellow arrow (against a transparent background) that could follow the moving house. I eliminated the arrow requirement because I could generate a solid red color on the track below and use a reverse mask to outline the house. ( The mask seemed “smart” and followed the house image)
If I understand what you say, I could have created a yellow arrow/transparent background/photo on one track while the house pan video is on another and manually move and key frame the yellow arrow. Is that correct? (A crisper solution I might add)
RC
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Insert a new video track on top of your existing one.
Drop a text event on the track.
Use Character Map (Start-Programs-Accessories-System Tools-Character Map) to find an appropriate arrow in the Wingdings font (there are several to choose from).
Copy/Paste it into the text generator.
It’s already on a transparent background so adjust size, colour and position as desired. -
Thank you both very much. I intend to try this before my deadline.
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I tried the WingDings text approach and it was very easy. As a long time Windows user, I didn’t know you could access text and symbols that way. That provides a rich array of “indicators” for such tasks
Thanks Again
RC
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