Drawing Simple Lines (not necessarily Horiz or Vert) in Vegas

HHumbert wrote on 1/11/2005, 6:03 PM

Hi All --

I know that there's probably a simple solution for this. I want to be able to draw lines in my project to illustrate swing planes and rotation in a golf swing.

My first approach at this was paste a copy of the video frame in the clipboard, bring it over to Photoshop, add the lines as a layer, export just the lines layer as a photoshop project, import it into Vegas as a vdeo track. This doesn't seem to work because the new annotation track completely overwrites the original swing track.

Is there a plugin to easily create geometric shapes in a track? Any clues as to how I might get my lines to work? I would be happy with the export/photoshop/import routine, if it would only display in the finished project.

Thanks!
-Mike

Comments

farss wrote on 1/11/2005, 7:14 PM

Doing it the way you're trying to do it should work just fine. Save the PS file as a .png and the alpha should work fine in Vegas.

Bob.

HHumbert wrote on 1/12/2005, 10:05 PM

Hi Bob --

That kind of worked. Thanks! What happened is that the cut image that I put into Photoshop, edited, and then pasted back became a different size in Vegas. I don't know how that happened. It's suppose to be 360x240 (what my photo camera takes for moving images) but when I do a paste into the MediaBin, the lines don't line back up. The key was to save it in a .PNG format from Photoshop.

That being said, do you know of a tool that will allow me to diagram directly onto a video image? That would be easiest.

Thanks again! And if you do have more info on other tools (maybe not Vegas) then that'd be great!

-Mike

rmack350 wrote on 1/12/2005, 10:22 PM

I don't think there's anything cheap, unless Wax can do it. I don't know.

I would copy the video frame to the clipboard, paste into PS, resize the image to square pixels, and draw the callout. Then hide all layers you don't want to see and save the PSD. You can drop the PSD into Vegas and it should work just fine. The advantage here is you can easily open the PSD again and adjust it.

Leaving it as a PSD allows you to use filled shapes, adjustment layers, layer styles, etc. This makes small adjustments really, really easy.

Photoshop CS has a tool to export each layer as an individual image. That's fairly handy but not really required.

Rob Mack

Spot|DSE wrote on 1/12/2005, 10:36 PM

Why not use Track Motion and Generated media, with Bezier masks to create this? I do this fairly regularly, making arrows, curved lines, straight lines, etc. Very easy, very fast.

PeterWright wrote on 1/13/2005, 1:46 AM

Although there are 'workaround' ways to do this in vegas, it's amazing that line drawing tools are not already in the Media generator.

EIGHT years ago I was using Premiere 4.2, and you could open the Titler and draw lines, arrows, rectangles, polygons etc.

Vegas ..... please!!!!!