[Andrew Lenczycki]

Mike,

So I could install Vegas on my work computer (that is now installed on my home computer), as long as I’m not using Vegas on both computers at the same time?

[Andrew Lenczycki]

Mike,

Will he have to “Deactivate” from his current computer to install on the new computer, or since he has Vegas Movie on the old computer and is installing Vegas Pro on the new computer, it won’t be a problem. Will the Vegas Pro be “looking” for a previous install to “qualify” for the upgrade?

[Andrew Lenczycki]

I’m not exactly sure what you’re asking (i.e. do you want all 1001 sound effects in your project), but I have the same Sony sound FX stored on a separate drive (labeled “Media”). When I want a sound FX, I simply navigate from within Vegas, using the Explore tab, to the Media \ Sony SFX folder and select one or more sound FX to bring into my project. You can select individual (non-contiguous) files by holding Ctrl while left-clicking on the files, (contiguous) groups of files by selecting the first file then holding down Shift while selecting the last file in a group, or a single file. Once selected, you can drag them to your timeline or double-click to have them deposited onto your timeline.

[Andrew Lenczycki]

Unless I’m misunderstanding your project, I think you could have the “garage door” as a 3D Alpha track, which would allow you to move it in 3D space, and then pivot the bottom of the door “up” with the top of the door (or some other spot) as the X axis you rotate on. The default will be to rotate on the x, y, or z axis, but you can move this axis, and also move it as time goes by by keyframing. I would then put the logo on a lower layer that would be “revealed” when the garage door goes up. You could also make the lower logo track a child of the upper garage door track (parent) and turn on Parent Motion so that as you pan in on the garage door as it opens, the logo will “move” in relation to the door. I’m at work (don’t have SVP installed on this computer) or I would give you a few screen shots from Vegas to show you what I’m talking about.
Below is a rough sketch of what I’m talking about.

[Andrew Lenczycki]

I’m not a professional, but I have made several vacation & high school sports videos, you can check out a few at YouTube.com and search hobie480, that have been well received. I happened upon Digital Juice products 6 or 7 years ago, when they were producing a number of FREE, short informational and instructional segments on various topics of video production and editing. Now these do promote their brand of products (understandably), but I learned a LOT from watching these segments, and they’re free to view online at anytime.

If you go to https://www.digitaljuice.com/djtv/default.aspx#sb=0&fl=2.332 on the Digital Juice website, you will see a listing for what they call DJTV (Digital Juice TeleVision). If you look on the left side of the page (Filter) and scroll down the page and look for the Host filter, I would recommend segments by Perry Jenkins, Eric D. Franks, Jeff Early, Chris ‘Ace’ Gates, and Chuck Peters. There are many other fine hosts, but most of them are doing segments on how to use a particular Digital Juice product or products to achieve a desired video effect. You can still get a lot of GREAT ideas from these segments as well.

[Andrew Lenczycki]

I’m assuming you are talking about Text events in the Media Generators tab. If so, setup your first text event with the color, spacing, kerning, etc. like you would like it to be in the succeeding text events. You can leave the default wording “Sample Text” for now. Next, copy the event and change the text of the copied events. You can do this as many times as required (or for as many text events as you need).

Another way to accomplish this is to create multiple “blank” text events. Go back to the first text event (actually it could be any of the events, but makes sense to do the first one) and change the text to your liking (i.e. color, spacing, kerning, etc.) then right-click on THAT text event and select COPY. Select the remaining text events, right-click and select the Paste Event Attributes option. This will paste the copied text attributes (you copied from the first text event) into the selected text events.

Another way to select the remaining events (if they are all on the same track) is to right-click on the first text event you want to copy the text attributes to and select the Select Events to End option. Then right-click one of those selected and select the Paste Event Attributes option again.

[Andrew Lenczycki]

Again, if you didn’t create the original clip, you won’t know the “exact recipe” for how they did the speed ramping, but I think you can come pretty close.

I would select the region of the event (clip) that you believe has been speed altered and set this to play in looping mode, selecting some video before the speed ramp and some video after the speed ramp that would be at “normal” speed. Now observe this section of the clip while it loops. You are trying to identify where you first observe any change in the speed of the video (up or down). After you identify the spot in the video where speed changes, add a point to the velocity envelope line (point #1), at that time. Identify the spot where the speed returns back to “normal” and put a velocity point on the velocity envelope there (point #2). Now you will need to determine if there is a “smooth” transition from normal to slow and back to normal again. If there is, then you would add a third point (roughly midway between the 1st and 2nd points). This would represent the maximum velocity change you are applying to the event (i.e. 200% which would “counter-act” the video speed being set to 50% by the original person. When you speed up the video running at 50% speed by 200% you would get 50% x 200% = 100%, or “normal” video playback). Here is a screenshot somewhat showing what I’m talking about:

Velocity Envelope #1 is the actual velocity envelope I set in Vegas. This would “correct” the event that starts to speed ramp down (slow down during playback) at 1 second on the timeline, with the maximum correction (150% playback speed) at 2 seconds, and smoothly transition back to “normal” speed at 3 seconds.

The video event may have been speed ramped more linearly in the transitions from normal to slow like in Velocity Envelope #2 (which I have hand drawn onto the screenshot). Here the video plays normal to about 1 second, then transitions linearly to it’s max at 1:15 and then maintains that speed for about 1 second (to 2:15 on the timeline), then linearly transitions back to “normal” speed at the 3:00 point on the timeline.

The video event may have been speed ramped more abruptly in the transitions from normal to slow like in Velocity Envelope #3 (which I have hand drawn onto the screenshot). Here the video plays normal to about 1:12 second, then instantly transitions to it’s max at 1:12 and then maintains that speed for a little over a second (to 2:17 on the timeline), then instantly transitions back to “normal” speed at the 2:17 point on the timeline.

All you can really do is to set some points on your velocity envelope line and play with them until you get the closest approximation of “normal” playback of your video event.

The third velocity envelope example I talked about is actually what I’d bet on first (if your video is patterned after a car commercial speed ramping), where the video plays normally until time X then instantly goes into slow motion for a few seconds to show you this nifty car detail, then snaps back into normal speed. The velocity value of the envelope is then set to “counteract” the slow motion they put on the event, so you will be increasing the velocity (to a number greater than 100%).

Keep in mind that changing the velocity up (increasing the playback speed) will shorten the length of your video event on your timeline. If you have a 10 second video and change its velocity to 200% it will play twice as fast (in 5 seconds rather than 10), and decreasing the velocity (decreasing the playback speed) will increase the length of your video event. If you take the same 10 second video event and slow down the playback to 50%, it will take twice as long to play, or 20 seconds. These large time changes would be affected by applying the velocity envelope for the entire video event. This change in “effective” video length could come into play if you have your video clip set to play for a specific amount of time or have it sandwiched between two other video events.

I hope the picture gives you some idea of what I’m describing, as the words by themselves are (I believe) quite confusing. As I stated at the beginning, unless you know the exact “recipe” they used, you won’t be able to completely counteract what they did, but in my experience, you can get close enough for most viewers.

[Andrew Lenczycki]

I don’t know of an easy, accurate method to do that, but if I was trying to do this, I would apply the velocity envelope to the clip, then you could probably fairly closely approximate it back to “normal rate” by putting in velocity points and reducing or increasing the play rate to look “normal”.

[Andrew Lenczycki]

Do you know that there is already some film effects already built into Vegas? Check out the Film Effects in the FX tab. You can control keyframe adjustable properties for frame jitter, dust, scratches, sepia, black & white, etc. I have used combinations of these to great effect.

[Andrew Lenczycki]

Sorry, I’m at work (where I don’t have a copy of Vegas), but what I believe you’re talking about is called “speed ramping”, where action on-camera is at normal rate until the selected event or time, when the camera appears to be put into slow motion (i.e. to highlight the new super-duper detail in a car commercial), then returns back to normal speed.

This can be done a couple of ways: 1) if you right click on a video segment and select the Properties menu item, a dialog box comes up with information about that clip. I believe it’s on the tab that automatically comes up (I think the dialog box has 3 or 4 tabs), towards the bottom. There is an adjustable field for Frame Rate or Play Rate, which is normally set to 1.000. You can push this number up to increase the play rate (i.e. the clip plays faster), or down to slow down the play rate. Setting the value to 0.500 would play the video back at “half speed” while setting the value to 2.000 would play the video at twice it’s normal speed. Changing this setting will make the entire clip selected play back at the rate you set here. To get a normal, slow motion, normal play of a clip, you would have to slice the clip into three segments on your timeline, leaving the first and third clip at their default (normal or 1.000 play rate), and changing the second (middle) clip to a value less than 1.00 to slow it down or greater than 1.00 to speed it up.

The second (more elegant) way to accomplish this is by adding a velocity envelope to your clip. Quoting from the Vegas 10 User manual, page 209, “You can use velocity envelopes to change the speed of a video event over time. To view a velocity envelope, right-click the event, choose Insert/Remove Envelope, and then choose Velocity from the submenu”. The velocity envelope appears on the event as a blue line. I believe if you hover over the line with your cursor, a little flag comes up telling you that the velocity is currently set at “100.0” or normal speed. Dragging the line up increases the velocity, while dragging it down decreases the velocity. The real feature here is that you can add velocity envelope points, so that you can increase and decrease the velocity of the clip over time, creating smooth transitions from the normal to fast or slow portions.

At any rate, the Vegas manual gives a pretty good explanation of how to do this. You can download the Vegas maunal (for free) from the https://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/download/manuals website, and it should be on the CD software disc you got with Vegas.