Duncan Wood
Always keen to help the next generation of music and video editors strive to succeed, Duncan has been excited to write the Beginners Guide for Sony Vegas Pro 11. His hands on experience combined with his years of experience presented in the Packt Publishing book format will make for an exciting read for those keen to conquer this powerful software. I would like to thank my wonderful wife Caroline Taylor-Knight for her support and encouragement in all I do, as well as Sienna Susan Wood, my 20 month old daughter (at the writing of this bio) for the amazing things that she has taught me about life, love, and family. I would also like to thank Leena Purkait and Wilson D'souza from Packt Publishing for their guidance and assistance throughout the process of writing this book. I also want to thank the artist Dane Sharp who appears in the footage for the Music Video tutorial and is the singer of the song One Way Ride.
Chapter 8, The Importance of Audio, discusses the importance of audio for vision and the tools used to create that experience. Chapter 9, Soundtrack of our Lives: Audio for Video, discusses creating great audio including the spoken word and microphones, as well as music copyright, ways to create original music for your projects, and the concepts of surround sound audio. Chapter 10, Can I put this on YouTube?: Rendering and Delivering the Final Project, helps the reader to negotiate the often scary path through video compression and codecs, video and audio formats, and confidently choosing the right formats for creating the final delivery method whether it be DVD, Blu-ray via DVD Architect, or the Internet.
In this chapter, we shall look at the many ways to animate or move all sorts of things within Sony Vegas Pro 11, such as: Pan/crop and zooming automa on Parameter automa on Applying an eect and anima ng it Track Mo on, Make Composi ng Child se ngs Mo on blur So let's get moving...
Zooming
Although the ac on of zooming is usually le to the camera operator, we can also create powerful camera moves in the edi ng stage. Here we will show you how:
1. 2.
As we have men oned and seen in previous chapters, each media clip has two icons on its right-hand side. The lower one is Event FX and the upper one is the one we want, Event Pan/Crop. Click on this icon. The Event Pan/Crop window will open, which we have seen before in our earlier chapters. This window contains the scene with a large F over the frame, and the bounding box has eight li le square handles around it available for adjustment. Along the bo om of the window you will no ce a me line with the word Posi on on the far le . The meline cursor also has a tab at the top. Grab the meline cursor tab and slide it to the le . You will no ce that the video updates itself as you move the cursor. Slide the cursor all the way to the right. See the yellow circled tab in the following screenshot:
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What this cursor does is tells the system that you are about to put a keyframe in that posi on. A keyframe is a piece of data that the system uses to set up the posi on of our Event Pan/Crop parameters, or any automa on data we chose to change throughout the whole system. At the beginning of the meline you will see that there is a small diamond on the posi on track circled as black in the previous screenshot. This is the keyframe that tells the program what posi on the Event Pan/Crop parameters are set to for this media clip. Every media clip will have a keyframe at its beginning. With our cursor s ll at the end of the meline in the Event Pan/Crop window, grab the top-right handle of the frame and drag it towards the centre of the scene by about a third. Click and hold anywhere inside the now smaller frame. A new cursor with arrows poin ng le , right, up, and down will appear. Slide it to center the frame closer to the singers face, making sure that the edges of the frame don't go outside the scene. See the following screenshot:
5. 6.
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You will also see that a new keyframe diamond has appeared beneath the Cursor tab. Grab the Cursor tab and slowly slide it to the le and watch the Preview Monitor. The scene will now zoom out.
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If you now play the video from just before our third clip, you will see that we have created a smooth camera zoom star ng in the normal posi on for the scene and nishing closer and centred on the singers face. The zoom con nues for the dura on of the media clip. We can now change the dura on of the zoom by simply moving the last keyframe diamond to the le . With your mouse, click and hold the last keyframe and move it to the le to about the 00:00:08:00 mark on the Event Pan/Crop window meline. Now play and watch the video. The zoom will happen a bit faster, then once it reaches the second keyframe, it will stay at that zoom. The keyframes are also editable en es; in that they can be copied, pasted, and deleted Let's click on the rst keyframe at 00:00:00:00 to copy and paste it at 00:00:12:00 and to create a zoom in and then out eect. Le -mouse click on the diamond keyframe at the beginning of the Posi on meline track of the Event Pan/Crop window to make it ac ve. Now right-mouse click and select Copy. Le -mouse click on the posi on track close to the 00:00:12:00 mark then right-click there and paste the keyframe. The cursor will jump here as well.
9. 10. 11.
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Once again play the clip and watch what the zoom does in the preview monitor. Let's remove the last keyframe as it makes it feel unnatural, and move the keyframe at 00:00:08:00 back to the end at 00:00:12:00. To delete the keyframe, right-click on it and select Delete from the drop-down menu. Another thing we can do is to swap the rst and last keyframe around to change the zoom in to a zoom out. Drag the rst keyframe and move it all the way to the end, then drag the second keyframe and drag it all the way to the beginning and play the clip. Let's swap the keyframes back again to keep the zoom in. If you use the Ctrl + Z keys it will undo the slides you did and return the keyframes. Click on Ctrl + Z the same number of mes as you made moves to bring it back to the way it was. Another useful func on is that we can copy these keyframes to another media clip. Select the rst keyframe diamond, then while holding the Shi key, select the second. A white dot will appear inside both diamonds. Right-click one of the keyframes and select copy. We now have these two keyframe se ngs in a clipboard. Select the Pan/Crop icon of the 8th media clip that starts at 00:00:40:00. In the Event Pan/Crop window right-click onto the keyframe at 00:00:00:00 and select Paste. We have now applied the zoom in from media clip 3 to this new clip. Play the video from just before the new clip and watch the result. Even though this clip is shorter in length than the third clip, the paste func on used in the previous step moves the right-hand keyframe to land right at the end of the media clip meline. You can apply this paste func on to any media clip that you would like to have the same zoom applied to it.
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1. 2. 3.
In the same way that we zoomed with the Event Pan/Crop window we can create a camera pan either from side-to-side or top-to-bo om. Let's create a pan on the long shot clip that starts at 00:00:35:19 by clicking on its Event Pan/Crop icon. Le -mouse click onto the keyframe at the very beginning of the Event Pan Crop meline to make it ac ve.
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4.
Now if we started to pan the frame in its current size, then the pan would move o the scene and start to show a black background, which isn't what we want. With this in mind we need to crop the star ng frame to be smaller so that it leaves room for the pan to happen. So grab the top-le handle of the frame, size the frame to about 75 percent its original size, and slide it to the le as a star ng point. See the following screenshot:
5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
As in the zoom, move the meline Cursor tab of the Event Pan/Crop window all the way to the right-hand side. Slide our smaller frame so it is just touching the right-hand edge of the scene. Play the video and watch the camera pan from le -to-right. Obviously a combina on of the pan and zoom would be very easy to do by making the end keyframe posi on even smaller thus making the scene both pan le -to-right and zoom in slightly. We can use this same method to slide graphics, text, or any image we desire to move around the screen. By having a sta c or even slightly moving colored background on a lower track, we can place some text or a s ll photo on a higher track and move the higher track image around the screen. We o en see this technique used in TV commercials or even 2D anima ons.
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One more parameter on the keyframe will also help to make our zoom and/or pan more camera like. By right-clicking on the end keyframe of our last pan, we will see a set of values in the drop-down menu star ng with Linear, Fast, Slow, Smooth, Sharp, and Hold. By selec ng one of these se ng, the keyframe will change slightly how it responds. Let's select Smooth and play back the clip again. You will no ce that the zoom is no longer Linear and travelling at the exact same speed from start-to-nish. Instead it starts a li le bit slower, speeds up ever so slightly, and then starts to slow down as it reaches the end of the pan. In eect doing what a camera operator would do naturally! Go ahead and try each of the selec ons and see how they aect the pan on our clip. Set it back to Smooth when you have nished experimen ng and save the project.
Parameter automation
In the same way that we have just automated or animated some movement in our Event Pan/Crop window, we can animate most parameters within an FX plugin. Here we are going to add an FX to the whole track and automate the parameters to turn on and o that FX at certain loca ons in the Video Timeline. This Parameter Anima on can be applied to both the Video Track FX and the Video Event FX windows.
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1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Click on the track 3 Track FX bu on and from the plug-in chooser double-click on the Sony Film Eects plug-in, and then hit the OK bu on. Posi on your cursor over the second media clip (which is the guitarist in studio close up) so you can see it in the Preview Monitor. In the Video Track FX window select Circa 1980 from the Preset drop-down menu. You can also make adjustments to the parameters, such as the amount of dust par cles, grain, and the nt. The scene will take on a bluish nge that is a hallmark of lm from around 1980. The only problem is that every media clip on the track 3 meline now has the plugin applied. At the bo om of the Video FX Track window click on the Animate bu on.
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Please note that there is a keyframe node at the beginning of the meline, which has set the Circa 1980 preset from the beginning. The rst frame on the main meline is a scene of the singer performing, which we don't want to have the lm eects on. Let's change the preset to Reset to None. This will keep the lm eects set to no eect at the beginning of the video so that we can now use a new keyframe to turn the Circa 1980 preset on when needed further along the meline. This next piece of informa on is very important so please read very carefully to avoid issues when using the anima on of any parameters.
8.
In the previous screenshot I have circled a bu on in yellow at the bo om of the Video Track FX window, which is the Sync Cursor bu on. It will lock the ming of the automa on cursor in the Video Track FX window with the main meline cursor. It makes sure that the meline cursor in the Video Track FX window moves to the exact same me posi on as the main edi ng me line cursor. If you click on the Sync Cursor bu on now, the cursor will jump forward on the lm eects meline to correspond with the cursor posi on of the main meline cursor.
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The main thing you need to do is not change any parameters of the plug-in un l you are 100 percent sure the cursor is in the right posi on, otherwise it will place a new keyframe in posi ons you don't want and it can get confusing as to which one's you want to have and which you don't. Place the cursor on the main meline about halfway through the transi on between the rst and second media clip. In the Film Eects window select Circa 1980 from the Preset window. You will no ce that the Circa 1980 look is now applied to our video and a new keyframe diamond appears on the Film Eects meline. But we aren't there yet. Play the video from the beginning and you will see that the Film Eects plug-in gradually turns on as it gets closer to the second media clip. This is not what we want. Right-click on the rst keyframe diamond and from the drop-down menu choose Hold. Do the same for the next keyframe diamond as well. The keyframes will turn red, as in the next image, to let you know that they have a se ng applied to them. Play the video from the beginning and watch how the eect now turns on at the appropriate posi on.
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You will also see that a couple of small keyframe diamonds have been placed on the main meline at the bo om of that track. See the yellow circles in the previous screenshot. Now place the main cursor at the very end on the second media clip and from the Film Eect's Preset select Reset to None again. The new keyframe will also be red as it is smart enough to realize the previous keyframe was set to Hold. Now play the video from the beginning and you will see that our Film Eects will turn on and o at the beginning and end of the second media clip. This method of applying keyframes and se ng each keyframe with a dierent parameter se ng applies to every plugin parameter available in the Vegas Pro 11 on both video and audio media clips.
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Time for action using Track Motion to move two tracks together
The Track Mo on tool is similar to the Pan/Crop tool except it is ideal for moving a grouped set of clips on dierent tracks together. Let's apply that technique now:
1.
Click the Track Mo on icon of our second track (see yellow circle in the following screenshot):
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The Track Mo on window will open. You will recall that we used this window in the previous chapter to add the drop shadow to the orange text bar. This window oers us a variety of parameters that allow us to change the orienta on and posi on of the media on that track.
3. 4.
The Track Mo on window is divided into six separate sec ons including Posi on, Orienta on, Rota on, Keyframe, Workspace, and Snap Se ngs. The Posi on, Rota on, and Workspace are iden cal to the same parameters in the Pan/Crop tool. If you manipulate the numbers while being able to see the Preview Monitor you can see how each parameter aects the orange text bar. The X and Y parameters under Posi on will move the media le -and-right or up-and-down. Rota on and Orienta on will change posi on in a circular mo on. You will no ce that the orange bar is moving but the actual text stays sta onary. This is because the text is on the rst track and doesn't see our movements.
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Now click on the Make Composi ng Child icon on track two and circled in yellow in the following screenhot:
6.
You will no ce that the header of track two is now indented and the arrow poin ng upwards next to the icon we just pushed is now highlighted. Also a new Track Mo on icon has appeared circled in red that is called Parent Mo on. In eect, we have made track two a child of track one. That means anything we do to the Parent Mo on parameters will change both tracks at the same me. So let's slide the orange bar and text in and out of the scene using the Parent Mo on parameters. Click on the red circled Parent Mo on icon. The Parent Track Mo on window will open, which looks iden cal to the standard Track Mo on window and containing the same set of parameters.
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Change the X parameter of the Posi on sec on by either typing the number into the parameter box or by clicking on the drop arrow beside the X parameter. Use the slide tool that appears to slide the orange text bar o to the le of the preview monitor so it can't be seen in the monitor. A value of around -1020 should do it.
9. 10.
Now using the anima on process we have used already in our project, let's turn on the sync cursor and place our main cursor on the meline about a quarter of the way along the orange bar media clip of track two at around 00:00:01:21. Change the X parameter back to read 0.00 and you will see that the orange text bar reappears on the Preview Monitor.
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Copy the keyframe diamond at 00:00:01:21 and paste it at 00:00:05:21 on the anima on meline of the Parent Track Mo on Window. See the yellow circle in the following screenshot:
Add one more keyframe at 00:00:08:05 and change the X parameter to +1,020.00. Turn o the sync cursor in the Parent Track Mo on window and play the project from the beginning. You will now see the orange text bar with the text slide in and slide out at our newly added keyframe points. Without the Make Composi ng Child func on and the Parent Track Mo on tools, we would have to apply the same parameter changes to each track individually. That can be tedious, especially if we had three or four tracks represen ng an object on the screen. The other beauty is that we can now add tracks to the parent track and they will respond to the changes automa cally.
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To show you what I mean, click on the Make Composi ng Child icon on track three and play the project from the start again. You will see that all the media will slide in and out. Once you have done this, turn o the Make Composi ng Child icon again for track three and save the project.
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1.
Use Ctrl + Shi + B and the Video Bus Track will appear under the last video track on the me line.
2.
Right mouse click in the middle of this track and select "Insert / Remove Envelope" and from the drop down menu choose Mo on Blur Amount.
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3. 4.
At the bo om of the Video Bus Track you will now see a pink Line which is the envelope to control the amount of Mo on Blur that will be applied to your project. You can click on this line and move it upwards to around the 00:00:00:06 mark
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5.
You can add edit points to make the envelope increase or decrease at various points on the line. For example, we only want the blur to be applied to the orange box and text sliding into and out of the picture. We can add edit points by double clicking on the pink line to raise or lower the envelope.
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6.
Remember this applies the blur eect to every track that goes through the Video Bus. If you don't want the blur to be applied to a par cular track, each track has a bypass mo on blur switch on its header, highlighted in the next picture in red. By turning this bypass on, that track won't have the Blur applied to it.
7.
Applying the Mo on Blur to animated objects really brings that anima on into the realm of reality, but it can also be applied to footage. For example, if the scene was shot from the passenger seat of a fast moving car, you can emphasize the speed of the car by applying Mo on Blur which will blur street signs and any objects passing by the windows of the car.
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Also the kind of Blur can be changed to suit the footage. If you go to the Project Proper es (Alt + Enter) you will see a drop down menu next to Mo on Blur Type.
9.
This drop-down list contains three blur types: Gaussian, Pyramid, and Box and the same three with the Asymmetric extension. Gaussian is the most used blur, but feel free to experiment with the other types to see how they apply to your anima ons or footage.
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Summary
We learned a lot in this chapter about using Automa on to Move and Animate the tools in Vegas Pro 11. Specically, we covered: Pan / Crop and Zooming Automa on to give your project that pro look Parameter Automa on, which allows for small or large eect changes real me Applying an eect and anima ng it. Bringing the most from the mo on Tools of eects Track Mo on, Make Composi ng Child se ngs. Unleashing the hidden poten al of Track Mo on Tools Adding reality to the movement of objects with Mo on Blur Once you are feeling condent with the principals we have covered in this chapter, let's move on to the world of audio in the next chapter.
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