If you look around the eyes and mouth it's obvious where the mask is. There's a dark line surrounding the two masked areas.

In order to make the skin white I cranked up the brightness and contrast. I'm thinking if I have the actors face already white with make up, then prerender the entire clip BEFORE I add it to the project (with contrast cranked), I will not need to use brightness/contrast with the mask and hopefully won't see the offending lines.

It's almost as though the line comes from the original image before contrast is applied. Because when I add feather it gets worse like the original image is creeping out from the edges (or into the center if I feather IN) It feels like a bug to me. should be fixed. Does this make sense to anyone?

If you have Photoshop, there is a "defringe" (white/black) tool/option that may be helpful.

Not sure if this applies here:
In the Video FX window, look in the bottom left. Click those little triangles for pre/post toggle. They set the order in which filters and masking are rendering. The default is typically not what you want.

glennchan, you hit the nail on the head. That did the trick. Thanks.

Nice!


Not knowing about those little triangles drove me nuts... it would be nice if they changed the default to pre.

This is example #2512 of what a good manual could cover, for a lot of benefit to the user and to Sony for getting good Word Of Mouth.

Maybe in Vegas 8.

:O)

This is getting a little bit off-topic, but although the Vegas manual can be better, it's pretty good compared to other program's manual. It's pretty straight-forward and easy to understand.

I think it's more that the program is sometimes not designed in an intuitive way. Some of the features are really difficult to discover, like s for split edit and this example of pre/post toggle.

Maybe it would be nice if Vegas could highlight the little triangle if there is panning or cropping in effect. Like the triangle would blink green, and stay grey if there is no pan/crop/mask. That may not be the best solution. Maybe a placeholder pan/crop event FX should pop up at the top of the video FX window, so you immediately "get" the order of filters. And arrows indicate which way the signal flows?
The simple solution is just to change the default to pre instead of post, since I don't think you ever really need to apply filters after pan/crop/mask. The part in the manual about bezier masking should mention pre/post toggle.

Hey, Jim H ---

Could you post a clip showing how effectively this tip cleaned up your project?

...the Vegas manual can be better, ... it's pretty straight-forward and easy to understand.

No disagreement on that. What is there is exactly as you describe.

It 's finding things that is the #1 problem, according to many many in this forum.

The people who are asking for features that are already in the program (because they can't find them in the manual); or the pros who are used to different terminology and now have to guess what the Vegas terminology might be for what they are looking for; or the people who are trying to accomplish a common NLE task, but find that the manual is focused on describing features rather than on how to do things from the user's perspective.

Certainly there are many other product manuals with the same problem, but in this case it would seem to be in Sony's interest to make a small investment. There would be savings from less customer support, and gains from higher customer satisfaction and more good word-of-mouth.

Here's another test clip with filters running before and after pan/crop/mask. The final implementation of this effect will include individual tracks and masks for each eye and mouth along with the actor having white face makeup. Note the mouth on the second clip has a darker fringe because I have some feather applied to the mask:

http://www.wakelydam.com/Video/facetest.wmv

BTW, why don't my addresses show up as hyperlinks like other posters? How do you do that?