I have recently started to use Vegas (coming from Premiere Pro) and need some help


I have two video tracks. The one on top is 30% size and is floating on top of the main track. Now I would like to mask off portions of floating/top track to create a "thought bubble". I tried using the Cookie Cutter effect and it works OK, but it doesn't give me the shape flexibility. I used the "pen tool" and it's fine, but I don't want to re-draw the "bubble" for every event.

What I would like is to create a standard image in photoshop and use that as a mask, but I'm doing something wrong. Vegas doesn't seem to recognize Alpha channel (transparent Background) that I create in Photoshop. Do i need to use a specific image format to achieve the effect? I'm basically looking to float a video track in a bubble over another track.

Any help is appreciated.

Use TGA or PNG as the matte type, then once on the timeline in Vegas, right click, select Properties, and in the Media tab at the bottom, select "Straight/unmatted" as the alpha.
Then click the small "floppy disk" icon in that same tab. This will tell Vegas to recognize this file type in this manner when it sees the same file type in the future.

Thank you, I'll try it tonight. I see my first mistake was using JPG for a mask.

JPG doesn't support alpha channels. PNG definitely works great for this.

I'm Still missing something. How should such a mask be made? A black bubble over transparent background or something else?


I Place Clip A on timeline. The I place clip B on top of it. Then Mask C on top of that. No matter how I create MAsk C, I can not make any part of clip B transparent... I'm sure I'm missing a step...

UPDATE: Found it. The composting mode on the mask needs to be set to cut. The mask I used was a black frame with an alfa channel oval in the middle.

I also had to fix all the pixel aspect ratios - the Video A, Photo B and Mask C all had different ones, resulting in the all tracks appearing to be different size (i.e 5the mask C was not fully covering the photo B and the photo was not fully covering the video A)

Is there a way to set pixel ratio to the whole project at once?

Set the par in your graphics software, in other words, make the image the same aspect as the media on your Vegas timeline.
Use one PAR for everything.

Thank you all for your help!

At this point, I can pretty much do everything in Vegas that I previously did in Premiere.

Very happy.