Cookie Cutter

JackHughs wrote on 4/23/2003, 9:52 AM

I'm a bit embarrassed to be asking this question, but I'm stumped. I want to use the Vegas 4.0 "Cookie Cutter" plugin to do a talking head picture-in-picture. The procedure is easy enough but I can't seem to find a vertical rectangle in the menu of available screens. I've got a horizontal rectangle, a square, a circle, a horizontal oval, and even a vertical oval. Alas, no vertical rectangle, what's a poor boy to do - short of making custom masks in PSP6 and importing them into Vegas?

Any help would be much appreciated.

JackHughs

Comments

SonyDennis wrote on 4/23/2003, 10:03 AM

Use the Pan/Crop feature to crop out just the vertical rectangle (turn off "stretch to fill frame", leave on "maintain aspect ratio"), then use Track Motion to position it where you want it in the frame.
///d@

Arnarkon wrote on 4/23/2003, 10:24 AM

I can´t find the ´stretch to fill frame´ am I blind?

Paul_Holmes wrote on 4/23/2003, 11:30 AM

Temporarily blind, maybe. It could be you don't have the pan/crop dialog box tall enough or you've hidden the options on the left. On the left side of the dialog make sure that the little clapperboard icon just under the word preset is pressed in. This lets you see the options on the left. At the bottom of the options you'll see a heading "Source." Under that you'll see checkboxes for "maintain aspect ratio" and "stretch to fill frame."

JackHughs wrote on 4/23/2003, 12:03 PM

Dennis,

Thanks for the help. I'll try this this technique as soon as I get back to my editing computer.

JackHughs

JackHughs wrote on 4/24/2003, 10:09 AM

To any who may be interested.....

I did as Dennis suggested and it worked, with one caveat. Pan-crop does in fact allow me to set the picture-in-picture window to any size I choose. However, pan-crop lacks the frames and feather capabilities of the Cookie Cutter plug-in. So, here's my modest request for a future update to Vegas. Please add a function to the Cookie Cutter that provides for more user control over the size of the window(s).

I also observed a peculiar phenomenon when I used pan-crop and track motion together. I'm working with a simple 3 minute clip of a person sitting in a chair and talking - one video track and one audio track grouped together. Using pan-crop, I isolated the speaker's head and torso and using track motion, I moved the cropped image to the left side of the frame. When I applied track motion, the audio track lost synchronization with the video track in the Preview window.

"Oh darn", I said to myself. Well, after about an hour of investigation, I believe I found the problem. I had the Preview set to "best" quality. When I reset the Preview to any lower quality, the video and audio were back in synch. I guess this apparant out of synch condition was largely due to my admittedly marginal computer - a 450 P3.

Thanks for listening

JackHughs

jetdv wrote on 4/24/2003, 10:47 AM

It probably just "appeared" out of sync because the computer couldn't generate a fast enough frame rate.

You can add a border control to feather the edges. This is usually best done in Track Motion.

vitalforce2 wrote on 4/24/2003, 12:16 PM

Just a semi-irrelevant comment to those on this string: I found that cookie cutter can also be used to make black bands at the top & bottom of the picture and thus to crop it down to 16:9 aspect ratio, without stretching or squeezing the picture.