Best way to do this repetitive task?

Former user wrote on 10/15/2022, 4:17 AM

I use Vegas to produce an ongoing video netcast showcasing emerging electronic and experimental music. One aspect of the show is to have an album cover on the screen--as music plays--while on the side the album title materializes (in italics), artist/project/band name, label, and catalogue number and sometimes year of release if a retro album is being profiled. Right now, I position the album, use the drop down menu to select the specific font, each time, and then the color for all text. Then there is font size adjustments, depending on the cover art.

Each show has several album covers, so the task gets repetitive.

What is the best way to automate this workflow?

Comments

fr0sty wrote on 10/15/2022, 5:37 AM

Put all album covers on one track. Use track motion to position and scale them to where you want them to appear. For the titles, put them on their own track as well... add your first title, size it, select its font... then you can copy and paste that text event over and over for each new one, creating a new clip each time (not a reference to the original media), then go in and edit each text event to change what it says. It should retain the font, size, position, etc. of the first text item you copied, so all you have to do is edit the text for each new album and swap out the album cover on its respective track.

Usually the best way to automate doing one thing to a bunch of items on the timeline is to isolate them onto their own track, which lets you apply effects, motion/scaling, opacity, and compositing modes to all of the events on that track at the same time. It's also handy for keeping stuff organized.

fr0sty wrote on 10/15/2022, 5:43 AM

It's also possible to group tracks together, with a parent track and child tracks, and that opens more possibilities... for instance, you can apply track motion to several tracks at the same time, or apply an effect to multiple tracks at once, but not other tracks above or below that group.

Adjustment layers are another way to apply one thing to a group of tracks... any effect applied to an adjustment layer affects every track below it, but not above it. Need to apply noise reduction to 2 camera angles, but not the third? Put the clips from those 2 cameras on their own tracks, add an adjustment layer above those 2 tracks, apply noise reduction to that adjustment layer, then add the third camera above the adjustment layer, which prevents it from being affected by it.

fr0sty wrote on 10/15/2022, 5:50 AM

One other trick for affecting a bunch of things at once... media effects. Let's say I have one recording of a skype call, and it is grainy, it needs noise reduction. Problem is, I've cut that piece of media up into 100 little clips, and they are scattered about the timeline across various tracks... tracking them all down and applying noise reduction to them is going to be a pain... but they all come from that same media clip, the same video file... so, VEGAS lets you apply effects at the media level... right clicking on one of those 100 clips, and applying a media fx to it, then selecting noise reduction... every event on that timeline, no matter where it is, that came from that same video file, it now has noise reduction applied.

Then there's also the master video bus effect level, which is the fx button by the preview monitor... effects applied here apply to everything, no matter where it is on the timeline or what media it came from.

Event fx are just that, they only apply to that event on the timeline... so I can drop a clip on the timeline, cut it in half, select the right half, apply noise reduction... only the right half of the clip gets it applied, the left half does not. Individual items on the timeline, be it an entire media clip or just a snippet of one, are considered video events.

jetdv wrote on 10/15/2022, 9:07 AM

I would create a separate project for one album/titles. Then for each album, I would open that base project, change the image and the text, and save it under a different name. Then you can either render that out or use it as a nested project. But I would just keep them all in separate projects and pull them all from the same base that already has the text font and colors selected and then just modify the placement/size of the album using Track Motion.