[Theo Van laar]

‘Using pan and crop for this, I don’t seem to be able to zoom into a section of a video without keeping the video itself in the centre of the display.’

Just switch off the SIZE ABOUT CENTER button on the left side of the event pan/crop wondow (a kind of rectangle with a cross)

Theo

[Theo Van laar]

To duplicate a track. you should right-click on an empty part of the track, not on an event.

Theo

[Theo Van laar]

Are you using Vegasro 8c?

Theo

[Theo Van laar]

You can save a FX chain in the Plug-in Chooser window which opens when you add the Video Event FX. Do not save the preset but use the SAVE AS button on the right side of this window. The plug-in chain will save as a SFV file in the FX packages folder. To use the package on the same computer, you can reach the package from the Plug-in Chooser window.
To use it on a different computer, you can move the FX packages folder to this other computer. On my computer (Windows 7), this folder can be found in the folder C:\users\my name\AppData\Roaming\Sony\FX Packages\

Theo

[Theo Van laar]

First ungroup the audio and video tracks.
Next activate the ripple edit option.
Then press the Ctrl button and drag the video file to to required length.

Theo

[Theo Van laar]

OK, now I see. You have set the parent motion mode to multiply, not the track motion mode. The mode for the track motion can be found on the right side of the track header.

Theo

[Theo Van laar]

The method I described should give you exactly what you show in the CORRECT picture. But in your NOT WHAT I WANT picture it can be seen that you did not apply the multiply (mask) mode to the upper track…

Theo

[Theo Van laar]

That’s exactly what you get when you do what I mentioned earlier.
Look here for the pictures:

https://www.videomontagefaq.nl/index.php?action=artikel&cat=374226&id=413&artlang=nl

Theo

[Theo Van laar]

Create three video tracks
Place the background video/photo at the lower track
Place the content for the text at the middle track
Place the white text with a transparant background at the upper track
Make the middle track a child of the upper track
Set the composition mode of the upper track to multiply mask.

That’s all.

Theo

[Theo Van laar]

‘I had a look on the Magic Bullet site to work out which of there film look filters I was interested in. Both Mojo and Looks seem to be doing ‘Film Look’ but Mojo is a lot cheaper.

Or should I look elsewhere?’

Why not first look at the free version of Looks for Vegas, which is available from the Sony Creative website:

https://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/download/link?id=3008.1

Once you have this free version of Looks installed, you can purchase the Full Red Giant Looks for the update price…

Theo