Sony Vegas Video – Pan/Zoom using Parent Motion

[Brad Miller]

Here’s an FYI for anyone also experiencing the same problem as I

I received the following answer regarding the Vegas Video limitation from D. Eric Franks, creator of multiple Vegas Video tutorials for Videopia and Digital Juice…

“Oh, yes, I see. Because of the video signal flow from clip > track > parent track > project, you are stuck with whatever the lowest resolution is in the chain, which will never exceed the project resolution. We can, however, kick the project resolution all the way up to 4k (4096×2304) and insert a 4k res project into a lower res one, so (using Vimeo as an example):

(1) Create your master contact sheet at 4k and save the project.
Within this project, you can resize (via Track Motion) the individual clips down to native res without losing anything. Since this is going to Vimeo (and assuming HD source), I’d use the Track Motion on the individual clips and resize to 1280×720. You can sqeeze 3×3 or 9 clips this way. With a little cropping to 4:3, you could do a 4×3 grid for 12. It’s tight! To imitate the RevoStock template, you could go even smaller, since the clips never fill the frame, maybe to 810×456 (just made that up). Now you can do 16-20 clips or so, esp. if some are off the edge and never get the real focus.

(2) Insert the 4k project into your 720p HD Vimeo project.
OK, now the trick. The signal flow means that at the track level, we are still only working with 720p pixels. At the clip level, however, we still have our full 4k: Use the Event Pan/Crop tool. I’d play it by the numbers here too. Set up your keyframe zoom pattern and enter width x height numbers at 1280×720 for the moves.

Weaknesses: This will make Vegas very cranky. Also, Vegas won’t do Motion Blur on Event level moves, so you’ll need to add in the blur manually. Honestly, AE is better suited to this task. Granted, AE costs $400 more, stinks at editing video and is miserable for audio, so… right tool for the right job and all that. Actually, Andrew Kramer’s SureTarget plugin (FREE!) for AE is ideal for this project and that’s definitely how I’d tackle this project (using the Wiggler to generate a little random motion on the holds between moves):”

Here’s the thread: https://www.digitaljuice.com/community_forums/tm.asp?m=139255&mpage=1

[Bob Peterson]

My understanding of track motion is that it does not resize UNLESS you use it to resize. That’s how I interpreted what one of the more advanced people wrote.

What I’ve been doing is experimenting. I have a PNG image which is 2520 pixels by 960 pixels. It is used in a 720×480 project, so, while the vertical dimension can fit, the horizontal dimension cannot simultaneously do so. The image is too wide. The image is a map which allows me to look at it and see if resolution has been altered.

I initially applied pan/crop to this image. I found that I could get a full vertical image, and that I could pan to parts of the image that were on its left and right margins. Thus, pan/crop does not limit the image or convert it to project dimensions.

I have now applied track motion. I did not use track motion to resize the image. I did move the position of the image between two points in time. The full image was retained, as it had been in the first step, and there was no loss in resolution. Pan/crop is still active while track motion is moving the “clip”. Thus, I can still pan across the full horizontal dimension just as I did before.

As a last step, I used track motion to resize the image. Again, all aspects of the image were retained with full resolution.

I guess my next step is to set up a test using a video clip, but so far I am not seeing any limitation.