Color change and text placement in Vegas 12

Ethan Winer wrote on 6/22/2014, 1:13 PM

It's been a while since I posted, which is guess is a testament to Vegas. But I have two questions I hope have easy answers:

1. I video'd myself near a window, and forgot to close the blinds all the way. Here's a still that shows the problem on the left side of the frame:

http://www.ethanwiner.com/misc-content/vegas.jpg

I diddled with the Gamma and Contrast but couldn't darken the bright white / turquoise light leaking in. Isn't there a way to exchange a range of colors with another color? I looked at all the color tools but didn't see how to do this.

2. I'm not enjoying the new Text generator in Vegas 12. The help is no help because it shows the older style text control, and the PDF manual is incomplete. My current problem is figuring out how to scroll text manually. I click the clock "animate" icon next to Position which opens up a key frame window. But no matter what I do there the text doesn't move. Is there a tutorial that explains this new text generator?

As always, thanks for your help.

--Ethan

Comments

Arthur.S wrote on 6/22/2014, 1:43 PM

I think maybe you're' overthinking' it Ethan, the shot looks fine to me. I use the pan/crop tool to scroll text. Very easy.

john_dennis wrote on 6/22/2014, 2:17 PM

1. If the camera position is fixed, you might be able to create a transparent mask like the one in this project.

Using your still, I selected roughly the area that you find bothersome in Photoshop. I cut everything else out to a transparent background. I then de-saturated the cyan completely and de-saturated the blue just a little. In the Vegas project, I took the liberty of adjusting the levels to something close to legal.

larry-peter wrote on 6/22/2014, 4:24 PM

For 1. you should be able to make some improvement with Vegas' Secondary Color Corrector. I'm not at my workstation, so I might not have exact wording of the tools -
Use the eyedropper to select an area around the blinds that is brightly exposed and that has at least a hint of the blue spill color in it. You can use multiple instances of Secondary CC if you can't get the entire range you want to correct in one instance.

Check the "show mask" and make adjustments in your selection ranges for color and luminance until you have a feathered mask that covers the area you want to correct. Then you can alter the color, luminance and gamma of the selection.

NewBlue's Colorfast is perfect for this type of correction, for future reference. It's one of my most-used plugins.

Ethan Winer wrote on 6/23/2014, 12:42 PM

Thanks very much guys. I considered using a mask in the Pan/Crop window, but I move around as I talk and play the guitar. I figured out how to use the secondary color corrector color range, but I was unable to improve the shot enough without adversely affecting other parts of the frame. So in the end I'll agree with Arthur that's it's not really that terrible.

As for scrolling text, I had tried that using Pan/Crop without success. The text is about three screen-fulls, so I had to set the font to 3 points to fit it all. Then I used Pan/Crop to blow it back up and scroll it. That worked, but the text became very grainy. I recall that Pan/Crop is supposed to force the text control to recalculate the text, versus Track Motion that "destructively" scales text. But that doesn't happen here, and using Pan/Crop makes the text very fuzzy. So I just scanned the text from within Word to a PNG image file, and scrolled that. Problem solved. I'd still like to find a resource that explains the new text control fully.

Thanks again.

--Ethan

NormanPCN wrote on 6/23/2014, 1:42 PM

As for scrolling text, I had tried that using Pan/Crop without success. The text is about three screen-fulls, so I had to set the font to 3 points to fit it all.

You could experiment with this workflow.

Make the text media event 3 times the project size, then use pan/crop to scroll across this larger text event. Right click and select "match output aspect" to easily get a properly sized crop.

If 1920x1080, the you have 1920x3240. Vegas has a dimension limit of 4096 so there are limits to this workflow.

This should work in all three titlers in Vegas. Legacy, Titles and Text and Protype.

Ethan Winer wrote on 6/24/2014, 1:46 PM

^^^ Thanks, I'll try that.