Best approach for Multiple Screens?

GaryV wrote on 12/3/2007, 6:26 PM
Hello,
I'm working on my first project with Vegas Pro (v8) - thanks in advance for your patience!! I basically want to do the following ... Have a slideshow running fullscreen and occasionally drop 4 windows (in the four quadrants of the screen) overtop the fullscreen slide to have video or other slides running for a bit, and then I want to pop back to full screen mode for more slides.

What's the best approach to achieving this? Here's the way I'm currently thinking of doing this - is there a better way?

Basically I'll have 5 video tracks. The first 4 will be sized to the 4 quadrants. The fifth will be a full size track. I'll put my main slideshow on track 5 and whenever I want to have something running in the quadrants, I'll add slides/video to the other 4 tracks at the appropriate point in time. I assume that I can then drag the opacity line for the video event in track 5 to zero, and the opacity lines of the first 4 tracks to 100% for the required time on the timeline to see the other 4 tracks and then reverse the opacity sliders when I want the full screen track showing again.

Does this sound reasonable? Is there a better way to achieve similar results?

Thanks for any and all suggestions!!
Gary

Comments

farss wrote on 12/3/2007, 6:52 PM
Sounds good to me.
You don't need to drop the opacity of track 5, the upper tracks simply get composited over it, unless you want a complete fade to black. You can't use the sliders in the track headers to do this, you need to add opacity envelopes and this could get messy if you have 4 tracks being composited.

You might do better and be able to wokr faster if you edited the main program by itself and did the split screen overlays in their own project. Two reasons. Having more tracks with track pan/crop doing its thing can slow Vegas down even when those tracks are empty. Secondly trying to fade 4 tracks in/out in unison could become a drag. I'd do the 4 screen splits in their own projects and nest those back into the main project, then you can fade them in/out easily.

Bob.
maynard wrote on 12/5/2007, 1:14 PM
Sounds like a cool idea...show us a sample once you've got it figured out.