I do this quite often by mistake: Inserting an effect at a single point (keyframe), rather than for the entire clip/track. If you look closely, you'll see two (or more) keyframes at the bottom of the window. The first one is probably at the start and will be set to "none"; the second one is later on and is probably the one you inserted. So Vegas is interpolating between the first (none) and the second (desired). The immediate solution is just to select the first one and delete it. The better solution is not to do it like this in the first place; check the manual again, I don't have it or Vegas handy to explain it for you.

This is true for all the effects, not just the color curves.

Just set your cursor to the FIRST FRAME of the event where you want the effect to take place and then do your effect settings. The effect will now go the length of the event from beginning to end.

You can stop this from happening if you turn off the "Sync Cursor" feature in the Video Event fX dialog. Open one of your fX and then, in the lower left corner of the dialog, look for an icon that looks like the "i-bar" cursor. If you hover over it, the pop-up will identify it as "Sync Cursor." Turn this off (the button is up when it's off.

When this feature is enabled, the Vegas preview screen will track the cursor location in the fX dialog. This is good. However, every time you make a change to one of the fX settings, when this feature is enabled, Vegas will automatically insert a new keyframe at the current cursor location. Once in awhile this is useful, but usually it creates confusion and is not what you want. I recommend you turn this off all the time. If you need the feature for some reason, turn it off after you are through with it. Just my personal preference. You should certainly turn it off for now and see if your problem goes away.

To get rid of any problems that are already created, you will have to manually look for any keyframes and, if you didn't want to alter the effect of the color curves over the duration of the event, delete all the keyframes except the one at the beginning of the event, and then re-do your color curve correction. If you find that you like the correction of one of the other keyframe points, you can delete all but that one, and then move that to the start of the event, and its value will continue, unchanged, for the duration of the event.

Maybe it's just me but I don't seem to recall this being such a drama in V4. From what I remember Sync Cursor was always off until you turned it on for each given event FX, in V5 it seems to enable it for all FXs once you turn it on for one.
No big drama once you know but hardly helps the old workflow.

Bob.

Ah yes, keyframes…. Like farss, I don’t remember this being much of an issue for me in V4. In V5 however, I’ve run into some challenges at times when keyframing fx; as when I inadvertently ended up with several keyframes stacked on top of each other. I had to scratch my head to try to figure out why the effect wasn’t doing what I intended. I’d keep tweaking the fx properties on the (visible) keyframe without realizing there was another keyframe underneath running interference on the effect.

JL

I'm still lost (normal condition). When I look at the event fx window, there is no synch cursor button. There is one in the pan crop window, but it's off. In my case, an event is one still.

Also, more than one key frame window? per event?

When I look at the event fx window, there is no synch cursor button

What version of Vegas are you using? I guarantee that it is there in Vegas 4 and Vegas 5 (I just checked in both of them).

Using Vegas 5.

Perhaps I'm flubbing the terminology. I'm looking at a still image on the video track. In the lower right corner of the image are icons for pan/crop and for event fx. I click on the event fx and choose an fx. I get a dialog window. I can find no synch cursor button in that window.

I looked in V4, no synch cursor button there either.

Click on this link to Spot's color correction tutorial:

Color Correction

(you may need to login, if you don't have an account -- It's a free registration).

The first pictures is a pic of the big arch in Arches National Monument. Scroll down to the next pic, which shows the Video Event fX for the Color Corrector dialog. The callout for the illustration starts: "Remove all color except the color to be passed with the Saturation slider." Directly above the word "except" is the "I-Beam" control for the Sync Cursor.

When I went to the tutorial mentioned by johnmeyer, there were the missing keyframe controls several of you mentioned. I went back and looked at my dialog boxes - no keyframe controls. Pulled the corner of the box down - no keyframe controls. Preliminary conclusion - I have a defective version of Vegas......

Accidently missed the corner when resizing the dialog box back to normal size and caught the thin line which I thought was a bevel and up slid the missing controls. Conclusion - gotta get new glasses.

Actually, the keyframing on fx is a great feature -and I probably will remember it now.

Thanks to all for your perserverence and hand holding in helping me get this.

Ralph,

Glad you got it figured out. I didn't remember that you could make the fX timeline disappear by moving that bar. I did, however, suspect that something was different, and that a picture would help.

Sony I am sure you have lots of other things on which to spend your time, but if you ever change the software that runs this forum (which you've talked about doing), PLEASE get software that lets us upload simple screenshots. It would let us solve problems like this much more quickly.