Does anyone know of a plugin or method to timeline multiple video clips and then track motion them so they sequentially scroll right to left across the screen (back to back)?

I've wanted to do this effect for years and have never been able to time the track motion so that when each clip appears on the screen the audio is sequenced properly to what's happening in that clip. I want to create a music video where the speed of the horizontal scroll stays the same throughout the video, but each clip starts on the right side of the screen and scrolls off the screen on the left while the next clip is connected to it... like a series of train cars going by.

Any help is appreciated.

Patrick, would the Vegas Push transition do what you need I wonder?

tried that, and (in theory) it does the job, but the lining up of the transitions and the jerkiness of the transitions doesn't create a smooth, scrolling motion that i want. I'm planning to use long segments (:30 or more) of this moving clips and the push effect "stops" when it has completed the push and then it starts again versus the smooth continuous motion.

Right, I get it now, you want continuous motion. Does sound very cool.

I've done that by keyframing pan/crop on the clips. Takes some time but it works. Of course the amount of time it takes is determined by the length of the clip.
HTHs

Is the audio timing the major problem?

If you use a fixed track motion time - which is what I understood - the audio must use the same timing. Unfortunately It isn't usually the case that audio events fall on nice time boundaries.

I would think that editing for a music video would use a separate audio track, rather than one embedded in the video clips. I don't know if this is the case or not.

I do use a separate audio track, but (for example) say that the mouth of the vocalist starts singing a lyric in the midst of one clip that is on screen and another clip is coming on screen from the right... I'd want the mouth of the artist to be in sync on that clip... so the start and stop times of the track motion are very critical. For example, if the total movement from right to left is 4 seconds (from when the clip first emerges on the right until it disappears on the left) that sequence of time is hard to determine.

I'm just very perplexed on the formula for timing.

If clip 1 starts to emerge on the right, it will take "x" seconds to become completely centered and "x" more seconds to leave the stage (screen).

In the mean time, once clip 1 is centered, clip 2 is immediately loading on the right as clip 1 is exiting view. That whole timing issue is where I get lost in the track motion setting. I think that once I determine the scrolling SPEED (much like the vertical text credit speed can be adjusted) it would help me determine the clip length and track motion timing.

I'm obviously thinking out loud in this reply, because my initial hope was that a plug-in or script existed to do this auto-magically.

See if this Parent Motion (http://johnrofrano.com/tutorials/parentmotion.htm) tutorial will help you accomplish what you want.

From what I have just experimented with the PARENT MOTION concept:

1) I have to shrink the size of the child clips and align them side by side so they can scroll using the parent motion track. This (for some reason) does not allow for the quality of the video to remain HD since I then have to ZOOM into the video clips to get them back to letterbox/full screen as they scroll across the screen.

2) The PARENT MOTION track also is a 4:3 ratio or even perfectly square and doesn't allow me to maintain a true letterbox sizing of the child clips when scrolling.

Good potential answer, but it isn't producing the results I had anticipated. Plus, in order to have a bunch of clips lined back to back, they would have to be shrunk down to such a small size that the zoom wouldn't really be able to cover all of them for a long sequence because of the quality being compromised.

I think you're over complicating this.
First you stated the clips were 30 seconds long. Do they need to be that long? If not shorten them. 30 seconds is a long time to take to go from right to left.
Regardless if you use keyframes in Pan/Crop you can adjust the amount of time it takes to get to the center, stay centered and then move off to the left while the next clip moves in on the tail of the previous clip.
Read up on keyframes in Edwards newletters at www.jetdv.com. The newsletters are for older versions but the concepts and principals are the same regardless of what version of Vegas you're using.

Sorry. My comment about :30 sec was a general concept. My intention would be to do an entire 4 min video using this technique and the clip lengths, of course, would have to be "x" seconds long to progress across the screen. Another example is the TV commercials that show a person start walking on the left part of the screen and the person essentially stays centered the whole time while the background constantly changes (walking from room to room in a house or through changing seasons of weather). So I believe I know the concept of splitting the total time in half and aligning the layer clips to start when the previous layer's clip is half done and to make sure the length of each clip is the same throughout so the timing of the scrolling stays the same the entire video.

I'll just have to experiment with the keyframing (which I know how to do and have done for years) but I figured if someone had already created a plug-in or script or template that essentially just required my to drag and drop my clips into place... it was expedite the whole process instead of having to figure it out. The visual seems possible using keyframing, but the audio sync from clip to clip is what may be the tough part now. I suppose if I sync the audio for each clip, the track motion won't matter.

I'll experiment some more.

>>>>I do use a separate audio track, but (for example) say that the mouth of the vocalist starts singing a lyric in the midst of one clip that is on screen and another clip is coming on screen from the right... I'd want the mouth of the artist to be in sync on that clip... so the start and stop times of the track motion are very critical.

Don's right though, you're over thinking it a bit.

From what you mentioned - separate audio track, the fact that you'd like the incoming clip to be in sync visually, the most straight forward solution appears to be slipping the video into place. Assuming you have your transitions in place and clips set to the length you want them, you can synchronize the video in-place without moving it on the timeline. You use the slipping tool to slide the video within the clip boundaries so that it starts where you want it to.