Reuseable veggie as resizeable rectangular callout

[Ken Olson]

I do a lot of screen casts with Camtasia Recorder and then edit in Camtasia studio. However, Vegas Pro is my preferred platform. The main reason I use Camtasia to edit screencast is because of its' callouts. The most used callout is the animated sketch motion rectangle.

So I set out to figure out how to create a reusable re-sizable rectangle in Vegas. The obvious answer to me was to make a project of the rectangle and then insert as needed into various screencasts.

I'm using the Linear Wipe transition to animate the rectangle drawing by simply adjusting the Angle setting for each side of the rectangle. I then insert the rectangle project into the screencast and use event pan/crop to place and resize it.

Here are the issues I'm having:
1) The forth side (right side) is drawing from top down, rather than bottom up.
2) If I make the rectangle too small in the screencast I get some kind of line remnant a little bit under it.
3) There appears to be a physical limitation on how small I can make the rectangle in the screencast.
4) After the animation completes, it's a long process involving a snapshot and photoshop to control how long the rectangle in on screen.

I'm aware that I could use masking instead of the linear wipe, but I'd still be left with most of the same issues.

So I'm reaching out to all you Vegas experts as I have a feeling you'll have a lot cleaner, fast, easier and smoother method of achieving this goal and that the whole Vegas community could benefit from.

I've attached a video detailing the projects as well as the callout veggie.

Thank you.

Ken