[Peter Friend]

The Defocus and Gaussian Blur etc effects (I’m not sure which one you’re going to use) all have timelines, so just apply them, set the start blur point as you like, and set the end point with all the settings set to minimum (or maximum), whichever turns the effect ‘off’.

For a quick camera shake effect, just use Pan and Crop and move the picture up or down a few pixels for a few frames.

[Peter Friend]

You say the ‘zooming’ changed, which makes me strongly suspect that either the image size or the pixel aspect ratio didn’t match between the two applications, therefore Vegas is now attempting to intelligently resize it when you reimport the resulting footage. When you now go into Crop and Zoom, does it show that not all the image is being displayed?

[Peter Friend]

Thanks, Theo, I’d wondered if there was an easy way to do a binocular effect in Vegas, I never knew the cookie cutter could ‘repeat’ mask shapes like that.

[Peter Friend]

Not sure whether it’s possible to do it by fiddling the import as you suggest, but Vegas can certainly change the playback speed of any clip easily, speeding or slowing it by up to 4 times.

Hold down Ctrl and drag the end of a clip. Or on a clip’s properties screen, enter the new speed in the Playback Rate field.

[Peter Friend]

I love https://www.incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/ – all legal and free, so long as you credit him, although donations are welcomed.

[Peter Friend]

Within Vegas itself, the only ‘counters’ I’m aware of are the Timecode video FXs, but they’re only designed as timers and so aren’t great as general purpose counters (although you can do some weird stuff with them by rendering some Timecode as a .avi file then changing its speed or reversing it etc).

Personally I’d use a 3rd party product like Particle Illusion, which does include a couple of counter generators. After Effects may well do something similar.

[Peter Friend]

I see there are several oscilliscope emitters, but I don’t see any seismograph-type emitters?

[Peter Friend]

spinning helicopter blades with a selectable viewing angle

bullet trails through water, leaving little trails of bubbles

a mushroom cloud atomic bomb explosion

clouds on a windy day, with selectable wind speed and cloud greyness

‘300’-style blood splatters

Apologies if any of these already exist or are just too hard to do 🙂

[Peter Friend]

I’m mystified – I use .png pics all the time and have never had any problems in either v8 or v9, I just drop them onto the timeline. I suspect some Preferences setting has somehow been set oddly? (Possibly even for just this particular project – it could be worth testing this by starting a new project and dropping a few .pngs into its timeline just to see how they look.

Does the transparency work correctly on the preview screen?

[Peter Friend]

If you right-click a keyframe, there are a number of choices for how the values will move in/out of the keyframe value – it’s not full animation control, but a lot better than nothing.