When I feather the bezier mask to blend with the background it makes the edge of the mask more obvious with a darkening "soap ring" effect. It make feather useless.
The cookie cutter mask (or other effects masks) do not do this.
Are you using the In, Out, or In/Out feather? That generally makes a significant difference. Additionally, perhaps a little more information on what you're cutting from and into might help figure out what's up?
It's the "little triangles of death". Well, probably anyways...
In the event FX window, there are little triangles in the bottom left corner to toggle pre/post. This controls the order in which FX and the bezier masking is applied. You generally want FX applied before/pre the bezier masking. So just click on the triangle to set this.
Pre/post toggle is not a very obvious element of the UI since it just looks like bullets or something.
I've tried IN and OUT and IN/OUT and the same result. The soapring appears in different places, out for out, etc.
I'm cutting one scene into the same exact scene at a later time with a missing object. e.g. a table cutout superimposed on the same set without the table. This should be a perfect place to have an invisible masking since the edges match very closely. But when I add feather it makes a dark fuzz around the edge making the mask bad. 0 feather makes a line -- not a clean anti alias.
I've tried several feather settings. When I put a black cutout on a grey backbround you can really see the effect. The cutout should blend smoothly into the background, but it does not. At the edge of the mask it gets darker!
Perhaps fixed?
I just tried again in a separate test with no FX and while I do see "banding", a slight repeating gradient on the feather seen in the video preview, the weird soapring is gone.
( Now I'll check my original project -- I didn't think I had any fx on.)
I'm reading this. I'm very interested. I've had the same under certain circumstances too. I didn't know it was called "soapring" - very descriptive. I've had this with GLOW Fx. Hmmmm....
So many easy solutions right under our nose.
Well IMO it's not that easy since pre/post is so *obscure*. The only way I found out about it was when I stumbled across it in the manual. Maybe the UI should be changed so that it better reflects filter = pan/crop order (i.e. have pan/crop show up as a quasi-effect).
The really simple solution is to change the default, so that FX always default before pan/crop. (I don't know how to do this in Vegas. Please submit a product suggestion.)