I'm not at my Vegas machine right now but I'll take a stab at it anyway.
Place the still image on a new track over top of your video track.
Open the Pan/Crop window and adjust the size and position as desired.
Now click the Event FX icon for the still, apply the Border FX and adjust accordingly.
To get the FX to apply to the cropped image properly, you need to click the "Pre-Post" arrow.
Look in the lower left corner of the Event FX window where you see the word Border".
To the left of the word, you'll see an arrow.
Click it so that it's pointing opposite to the way it currently is.
This will apply the FX after (Post) the Pan/Crop setting.
For more help on Pan/Crop, check out Vol. 1 Issue #8 of jetdv's (free) newsletters.
Check out the other issues as well for more tips.

Mike

Don't resize with track motion. Only resize with pan/crop because pan/crop resizes the photos from their full resolution whereas track motion first changes the image to project resolution (e.g., 720x480) and THEN resizes, meaning you get a pixelated photo. When you are starting with video that is already the same as project resolution it doesn't matter, but when your source is higher resolution (stills, titles, higher-res video), it does.

It's always OK to create moves using track motion.

Many thanks guys - I wasnt aware of the Pre-post function in the border FX, I think that was causing my confusion. I'll try it and let you know. Thanks also for the link to the newsletters, very useful.

Cheers

Andy

Mike - I seem to be having problems. I added a JPEG image to the timeline activated the pan/crop tool on the event - I then cropped the image by dragging the squares on the box in on all sides. After this when I applied the border FX (changing the arrow in the bottom left as you mentioned) the border was not created evenly on all sides. If you get a chance can you try this, I'm sure I am doing something wrong at the cropping stage.

Also once I have homed in on a particular region of the image in the crop/tool I dont seem to be able to move the "cropped" zone around - my attempts to do this just seemed to move the zone itself around to another region of the image. I guess I need the image to be truely cropped in the photoshop sense and then to be able to move and resize it as an independent object (hope this makes sense!).

Maybe I am better off doing all this in photoshop anyway and then bringing the edited image back to vegas. Thats reasonable for a stills generated from a camera for eg, but for snapshots of frames from timeline it would be nice to do the cropping and border addition in Vegas itself to save time moving to another application.

Thanks again for helping.

Cheers

Andy

Vegas' Pan Crop is quite powerful and therefore can be confusing at first.

Right click the pan/crop window and select 'match output aspect' then you will be able to resize and move the image anywhere.

Andrew

Andy, if I understand correctly that you want to move a cropped image across the screen and then have a border appear around it - here is how I would approach it in Vegas:

1. Place the image on the timeline and use the pan/crop tool to crop the photo as you would have in Photoshop, but with the image filling the window on its (the photo's) widest side. So, for example, if you have a square crop in a 16:9 project, the top and bottom of the photo extend to the top and bottom of the window, the sides of the photo do not extend to the sides of the window (i.e., black bars on either side of the photo).

2. Now use the track motion position key frames to resize your photo to your desired size and starting position within the window, Then add another keyframe for the ending position, so that the photo animates across the screen.

3. To add a border to ALL such photos on the timeline at once, in the track motion dialog turn on Glow, set it to your border color, set blur to zero, and size to your specifications.

HTH,
Jerry

Andrew - thanks for the hint - unfortunately selecting "match output aspect" still resulted in the crop window moving around revealing different areas of the original image rather than allowing me to move the initial selected-cropped image around as an independent object.

Andy - thanks also for your suggestions, I dont actually want to do any animated movement - just crop an image down, resize the cropped image and move the resized cropped image to a separate area of the frame then add a white border around it (about 3pixels). This will then appear on the timeline (without movement) for say 12 seconds with text fading in on the side of it in the background (black) area. As I said this could be acheived (the cropping) in photoshop easily but just wondered how it could be done in Vegas as I could use the 2D editor in Avid Liquid to do all cropping steps.

After playing around for a while I can sort of get this to work by using the crop tool to first isolate the part of the image I need (Maintain aspect ratio and stretch to fill frame both "NO", - black bars dragged from each edge using selection box), then use the track motion effect to first resize the cropped image then move it to the desired part of the background, then using your suggestion of using the glow setting (with blur to zero) I can add a white solid border.

Unfortunately if I have 20 or so images to do with different positions etc I would need 20 tracks, not ideal. And as mentioned in an earlier reply, resizing a high res image with track motion may not be ideal also.

Is it possible to do this at the event level using ultimate S Pro or WAX?


Kind regards

Andy

Sorry Andy, didn't notice you wanted to crop too.

In that case you must use the event pan/crop to crop and track motion to move.

You don't have to use different tracks, just set a keyframe at the start of each image to hold

I sometimes wish Vegas had both crop and move for events too. Perhaps someone could create a crop FX filter.

Andrew

Andrew

Andy_AK, the more I play around with what you want to do, the more convinced I am that it would be easier to do your cropping (and add the border if you want to ) in Photoshop and then bring the image into Vegas for proper positioning.
I do this a fair bit for the grad videos I do and, due to the limitations in Vegas, find it easier to do the prep work in Photoshop.

Mike

Andrew - thanks for the information about keyframes, it does allow the use of one track like you say.

Mike - I tend to agree with your comments also, I guess I am just going through the process of translating my editing methods from Avid Liquid to Vegas.

I have downloaded WAX however, and will see what the 2D effects in that can offer for event based positioning and resizing.

Cheers

Andy