Multiple Colors?

[Angelo Mike]

I would think that you’d have to copy the clip to multiple video tracks on top of each other, do a different mask of each one for each section of the flag, and choose the color for each clip.

http://www.scenethroughglass.com

[Andrew Lenczycki]

Sean,

This is relatively easy to do, all from within Vegas. I did a quick dummy to test my theory of how to accomplish. Based on what you wrote, I believe you’re trying to get the following:

I inserted my “video” (just a picture of mountains in this case) on a track, then I inserted three new tracks above the “video”. On each track I added a Solid Color from the Media Generator tab. One track the solid color was green, one track white, the last red (the colors of the Italian flag). At this point all three of these tracks/events are “stacked” on top of each other, with the top green event covering the other two solid colors (and the “video” below), so all you will see is a solid green screen (output).

Next, I went into the Pan/Crop for the green solid color event, and turning off the “Lock Aspect Ratio” and “Size About Center” buttons, changed the Position:Width from the default 720 (I am working in 720 x 480 4:3) to 240, which makes the green event 1/3 the width of the screen. I then close the Pan/Crop tool, click on the green event and right-click Copy. Move to the white event and right-click, “Paste Event Attributes”. Do this also for the red event. This pastes the “attribute” of the green generated media (at 1/3 width). Now you have all three color events still stacked on top of each other, but now 1/3 the width of the screen.

Now, on the track header (on left side of each track) for the green event, press the Track Motion button to bring up a dialog box. On the top left of the box, press the Source Alpha button and select 3D Source Alpha from the dropdown list. Still in this dialog box, click anywhere on the display, showing the location of the track in “3D space”. Now, while watching your output display, start pressing your keyboard left arrow key. You should see the green event starting to move to the left on the output screen. Keep pressing the left arrow key until the green event is on the left side of the output screen, stopping when the right edge of the green event is even with the left edge of the (now visible) white event on the next track down. Do the same with the red event track, except press the right arrow key to move that event to the right. You should now have an approximation of the Italian flag, which is completely “covering” the vide event below it.

Lastly, go the green event and moving toward the top edge of the event, you should see the cursor turn from an arrow into a hand with finger pointing. At that point, hold down the left mouse button while dragging the Opacity line. I pulled it down to 36% in my example. As you do this, you should see the “video” under (the green only) event starting to appear. Do the same for the white and red events and you should have the output like above. Below is a screen shot of my Vegas dummy project. Hopefully this gets you on the right track (pun intended).

This is just ONE way of getting what you want. There are other ways (i.e. you could create the green, white and red tracks and save the project as “Flag”, then drag the Flag project onto the timeline of your main project (on a track above your video), then play with the Opacity again. This would give you the entire flag on only one track. You could also just paste a complete Italian flag picture on an upper track and again, reduce the Opacity to let what’s below it show thru.