Question for Douglas Spotted Eagle...or others...
 

Douglas:

In your book on Vegas 6 p303, there is a 'picture in picture' picture of a boy with a thought bubble.

I am doing a wedding video and want to do a 'picture in picture' slide show in a thought bubble. While the groom is waiting for the bride to come in, I want have a thought bubble by him with various flash back photos of his bride to be appearing - as though he is remembering her in various situations before she comes down the aisle to him.

I can manage the track motion - I think - but can't see how you get the ellipse effect.

Or...do all the photos need to be cropped to the ellipse shape before they are brought into Vegas?

And...how do you get the stream of thought bubbles out to the main one containing the thought?

And...can you get a blur on the inside as well as the outside, so the edge of the picture is blurred and not sharp?

Thanks in advance...

Place the pictures of the bride on track 1.
Place the groom on track 2.
Open the Pan/Crop window on bride image 1.
Adjust Pan/Crop to get an approximate position.
Click the Mask option and use the Bezier tool to draw your thought bubble.
Set "Feather Type" to "Both" and adjust the feathering (%) as desired.
Go back to the Pan/Crop and do the fine tuning.
Repeat as necessary.

The cookie FX may work as well for the circle of the bride but apply it on the track instead of the event. Whatever photos u place on the track will be subjected to the FX.

What you can do is create a mask in Photoshop for the thought bubble with a transparent background everywhere and black in the bubble's center.

Import the PSD file into Vegas.

Then you have the following.

Video track 1 Composting Parent Top PS mask set to "cut"
(you could track the mask just make the background around the bubble big enough to move around.)
Video track 2 Composting Child Video of groom
Video track 3 Pictures that show up in thought bubbles.

Here is something I did similar to this, except track 3 was an identical video track and B&W effects are on track 2. Technically there is text media on top, but you get the idea.

Thanks guys - I think I can manage now.

Only I'm not sure about how to get the string of little bubbles from the grooms head out to the main one with the pictures.

Generally speaking, you would use an image of the "bubble" you wanted (complete with the additional bubbles leading to the main bubble) with a transparent background. The you could have:

Track 1: Title (putting the text in the bubble)
Track 2: Bubble image (sized and positioned properly)
Track 3: underlying video

I'm stumped...
 

Re this 'thought bubble' trick: I'm stumped. I've been at it for several hours...

I made a 'thought bubble' in Illustrator with small bubbles, exported as PSD, made a mask layer, imported into Vegas and nothing works. :-(

I'm going to bed.

If the PSD has a transparent background, all should be fine. However, you *may* need to tell Vegas the background should be transparent. Right-click the PSD file on the timeline, go to Properties, and change it to the proper setting for the transparency.

Thanks for the attempted help guys but I can't get it to work.

I have made my thought bubbles in Illustrator as I've said, making the 5 small bubbles white and the big bubble white also, and all on the same layer.

Then on another layer a circle that fits in side the big bubble with a zero width line and filled black.

Then I export to PSD, change the CMYK to RGB as CMYK does not support transparency. Also I enlarge the canvas so I have space to move the image if I want to.

Then I bring it into track 1 in Vegas and set the track to cut, and get mi images showing as they should - more or less.

However by setting the track to cut, I lose my white circles - the whole image is cut out so the bottom photo which is showing through, shows through everything, small circles and all. I just want it coming through the black inside the large white circle.

I tried last night havng two images, bubbles in one, and the cut out in another, but that means I have to pan/crop or track motion two images so they stay together. If they could be locked together it could work but I don't know if that can be done.

Also...I would like to get some glow on the white circles to fuss them up a bit...

just passing through... forgive me if I'm off base.
I've pulled my hair out in similar battles before. One step that's solved my issues several times is to use chroma key on the uncooperative track's image that isn't otherwise acting as I wanted as far as transparent, keyhole areas. From chroma key, use the eyedropper selection tool in your balloon's intended text/image area. That should force that color into transparent mode, and allow your smaller white bubbles to remain available for a seperate glow effect in the effect chain.

thanks Sam - gave me an idea.

By having two images on separate tracks and using chromakey on one, I've got both my bubbles, and my keyhole for viewing the pictures through.

Now I would like to know a way of locking the pan/crop keyframes of both together...

...or maybe I'll just see if I can stop the groom waving around as he waits for his bride by keyframing him...

Sorry for late response...
those bubbles were created in PShop and at double frame size so I can move them around in frames. I have several saved/options, because a few years ago the "pop-up video" craze from VH1 was popular with a couple clients (thank heaven that fad is over).
As far as pix showing through, these were just masks with alpha channels.

Thanks Douglas...I finally got it all sorted yesterday.

I thought I had it all sorted...and then discovered that I needed to change the pixel ratio to widescreen in Photoshop which when the same was applied in Vegas to the Event, stretched the bubbles wider than I wanted. Thus I had to go back and make the bubbles narrower so that when the pixel ratio was altered, it ended up the width I wanted.

In the end I did two images:

One with all the bubbles with a green screen colour fill to the large one.

The other with same green for the mask and all the bubbles with their lines at zero width, so when they both were imported, they would superimpose exactly.

Then I took the green screen colour out of the Bubble pic with chromakey, and cut it from the other.

Hi Renton,

Sounds like a lot of work. I hope you were able to get the desired affect. Just wondering, would saving your picture with transparent background in Pshop as a png file have help any since this format saves transparency?
Also, can you post a pic from a frame of your finished product. I would like to see the finished product to see exactly what you were trying to accomplish.

Thank you and I hope all goes well because we all know video editing can be REWARDINGLY FRUSTRATING (oxymoron).

Sincerely,

Albert Rodgers

The 'work', as is the case with many things, is working out how to do it. Once that has been cracked, then it is simple and straightforward!

I've attached one instance of sort of what I was after. Just remember this has not been finally tweaked, nor any colour correction done...and the shot down the aisle was not from my camera. There is a story behind the tee-shirt message. The groom got it specially made in Nepal or India and wore it home to NZ so that when he came off the plane to be greeted by his fiancee, she would be proposed to in this way.

One technical bother is that my wife who was working the camera on the groom, forgot temporarily the nose room rule and so had the groom in the middle of the picture instead of to one side. This means I have had to pan/crop to open up space for my thought bubble - but it'll work ok I think.

I would still like to know if there is any way to lock the pan/crop of two events together to simplify moving the two in unison.

What about rendering just the graphics together into one, so that you can then manipulate the new single graphic track.
I've thought about that being a possible solution to placing video in a twisting frame. Rather than manipulating both the frame and the vid to match their 3D motions, instead rendering the vid and the frame together flat first, then I'd have only one object to manipulate in 3D.
Or, render the bubbles and the t-shirt together, then combine that new render with the groom vid using another chroma key to overlay it onto the groom's track.
Make the smaller bubbles either solid bubble color or pre-fill with brown to match the groom background, if that's one of the issues you're trying to address. Just some ideas. I may or may not have communicated them well!

I hadn't thought of rendering the two or three tracks together. It sounds like a great idea. I'll try it tonight. Thanks so much.

Not sure if the small bubbles should be solid or hollow...I had thought 'thought bubbles' were hollow...

Didn't work. :-( Lost transparency.

But also...the reason I had to have two separate images was to retain separate features in each. Combining them would remove those distinctions.

Thanks for the ideas however - pity they didn't work.

I'm imagining a single rendered clip with thought bubbles and a big bubble that now has the t-shirt clip embedded permanently in it. All else surrounding is a soild background color (anything different than what's in the t-shirt clip). Take that combo clip and perform a chroma key fx on the background color (again, using eyedropper) resulting in all background being transparent, allowing you to stack the bubble track on top of the groom track.

That's why I thought prefilling the smaller bubbles while it was still in Photoshop with the same brown that the wall is in the background (using eyedropper) would fool the casual viewer that's entranced by your awesome larger bubble that you were in fact seeing the wall through the small bubbles.

HOWEVER!, if you allow the aforementioned background color that is to be chroma keyed to also fill the small bubbles, then the groom clip actually should show through the small bubbles as well.

I wasn't ready to give up, sorry!

Thanks Sam,

I can't render the 'tee shirt' to the one image because I want that moving in the thought bubble. To do so I have to have separate events.

Hadn't thought of chromakeying the smaller bubbles. That would work for that effect but I have it pretty well how I want it now.

Because the groom moves around a bit and it looks odd if he moves but the thought bubble doesn't, I went through and pan/cropped the video clip so that he stays relatively stable. I got engrossed and then found it was 1-30am!

One thing I don't like is where I have a fade-in to the thought bubble - when the two picture colours combine it looks odd. Not sure how to overcome that except for making the fade short.