You could manually duplicate tracks and use a motion blur or gaussian blur on the background one- search for online tutorials for this.

Newer versions of Vegas also have "Black Bar Fill" Fx that makes this very easy. Overview .

 

Gr8, that did a quick job. Thanks, Liked and subscribed 2 your channel

Not my channel, but another generous forum user named Josh. Check out his many Vegas tutorials.

@RogerS I had to do this a short while ago, i couldn't see it in Vegas, didn't think it would be there, so i used BCC Reframer, there's a few extra buttons but what a faff it is, on initial loading of the fx nothing seems to happen, you have to go in Pan/Crop, un-tick Lock Aspect Ratio on the left & drag the sizes to more like 16:9, I had to go on Boris forum to get advice, This Vegas one is so much easier Thanks 👍

Track 1: add your image

Track 2: add your image, open Pan/Crop and right-click the image and choose "Match Output Aspect", add a blur effect

Done.

@jetdv yeah but that's the boring common sense option 😂👍

@Former user, what can I say... I use what's fast and easy unless I'm looking for something "special" - which is very rare. I use this most at church and have a single button I push, asks for the image file to use, it then automatically loads the image on both tracks, sets the Match Output Aspect on the bottom one, and adds blur to the bottom one. Done with a single click!