[Christopher Griego]

It is generally advisable to not compress audio before an edit. This is because the rendering process will degrade the quality of the stream if you’re using a lossy format for encoding.

[Christopher Griego]

There is an alternative way to do this. Right click on the event and hover over “Insert/Remove Envelope” you should be able to select an option called Velocity. This will create a line that you can move up and down inside of the clip. Moving it up increases the speed that clip plays and moving it down decreases it. You can also add points to the line to make the velocity accelerate and decelerate.

Hope that helps!

[Christopher Griego]

The problem you are describing is just lossy compression.

If the files you are importing into Vegas are not encoded losslessly in the first place (i.e. straight, uncompressed BDrips), there is going to be a fair amount of quality loss during rendering. Whenever you edit something and want the final product to look as clean as possible, you must import the footage into whatever NLE you are using in a lossless codec. If the file is an .mp4 then it is not lossless (the mp4 container cannot hold lossless codecs AFAIK). The audio should be in either .wav or .flac (the former handles much better). The video should be in an uncompressed .avi container.

Now, Vegas has notoriously awful compression which is why the rendered product looks so grainy. If you want to avoid this then you will have to render losslessly as well. Do this by selecting the uncompressed AVI rendering format and clicking on NTSC DV. Click “Customize Template” and make sure that it’s rendering progressively and at the exact same frame rate as the footage. You’ll want the video format to be Uncompressed. Check off the “Do not letterbox” option before you hit the render button.

You’ll end up with a rather large video file that will look really good. This is your master copy.

Now you’ll have to re-encode your video into h.264 and your audio into 128 kbps AAC. This can be done using a free program called Handbrake that you can find on google. If you know what you’re doing, then I suggest using MeGUI and x264 to re-encode as that will give you much more control. After your re-encode you should have a video of much smaller file size but with superior quality than whatever Vegas would render it as using the default codecs.

[Christopher Griego]

There is an relatively simple way to do this without having to redo anything, but it requires a lot of precision and can be

You won’t need to worry about the compositing options for this as those can be tricky to get right if you aren’t experienced with using them.

Make 3 layers. The animation you will be using should be on the top and bottom layers. Make sure that they are source alpha. Since you are using Pro 12, you should have 3D track motion enabled. Set the middle layer to 3D source alpha to do this.

Now hide the top layer. Put the footage you want to overlay onto the screen into the 3D layer. MAKE ABSOLUTELY SURE THAT BOTH FILES ARE OF THE SAME NATIVE RESOLUTION AND FRAME RATE OR ELSE VEGAS WILL GARBLE THE RENDERING. Click on the track motion button on the layer panel (it’s the little button with two rectangles, one is purple and one has an x on it). This will open up the track motion window. From there, create a key frame where you want the even to begin and use the controls to manipulate the screen footage so it fits the dimensions of the screen. You’ll need to mess with it in three dimensions to achieve that, which is why we are using the 3D track layer. Once you have it the way you want it, apply any filters or effects you want and minimize that layer.

Now comes the tedious part. If you make the top layer visible you will notice that the footage you imported will be obscured the animation. Trim the event so that it’s only there for however long you need it to be, then open up the pan & crop window for the event.

See the row underneath the position timeline that says MASK? Enable it. Now you will need to use the pen tool to outline the part of the character’s hand that is on top of the screen. YOU WILL NEED TO REDO THIS FOR EVERY SINGLE FRAME. There is a bit of an art to doing this well and it takes a lot of experience to nail. Here is a link to a very thorough tutorial on how to do this well (yes, the editor is using My Little Pony as a source, but this video will tell you exactly what you need to do) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ba-JGIKnNM

So after you have it masked the way you want it, close the window and you should have the effect that you wanted to achieve.

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