You could make the five tracks a "child" to a master track and then group the Master track to the 5 tracks. Grouped tracks can then be minimized to a single track and the opened back up as needed.

In this image, I've created a Master track and added the five individual tracks as a "child" to that track. That way you can position/pip each of the children as needed relative to each other and then you can use the "Master" track motion to move the entire group to the ending location. In short, your five tracks for each person could be identical and you could then move them to separate locations on the screen using the master tracks which should simplify your process.

You create a child by choosing "Create Compositing Child" from the Hamburger menu or adding the child icons to the track header through the hamburger menu. Next I select all of the tracks, right-clicked a track header and am choosing "Group Selected Tracks" from the menu.

Now all of the tracks will be in a group and you can see the group header in this image:

As you can see, you can even add a name to the group to help you remember which group belongs to which person. Finally you can close the group using the arrow beside the group name:

As you can see, when a group is closed, it takes up very little space.

In the past I've accidentally stumbled on a feature in Vegas 18 (which is what I'm using) that would put 2 video clips into a single track, albeit one on top of the other...I can't remember what it was called, but it had 2 inter-crossing arrows in the track. I can't recreate that scenario to see if that would have the option I need.

Right-click the track header and choose "Expand Track Layers". It's not really two tracks - it's still one track but shows you the crossfade between two events showing each event separately. That is not the option you need for this case.

You don't accidentally "Expand track layers". You most likely entered "Expanded Edit mode" (see the main FAQs #28). In VP 18 build 482 New features: "New [General] preference for event edge double click, disabling the toggle to Expanded Edit Mode by default".

Thank you so much for these answers, they are just what I needed! I went ahead and created a Master track (a new empty video track) and turned the 5 "player" tracks into Child tracks, then grouped them together. It's great and saves a lot of space on the timeline by crunching all the tracks into a collapsable track. As far as moving the "group" around; using the Master Track Motion option is a little bit cumbersome because it shows the complete timeline of the whole project (over 4 hours), so in order to add a little bit of movement to a single 1 minute clip is a little bit difficult. Is there a way to add a PiP to the short clips of the Master track? I have edited this poker night into 70 hands...each hand is a clip averaging 1-4 minutes (not a continuous huge clip of the whole 4 hours). Hope that makes sense.

Jack suggested a Nested timeline for each of the 5 tracks and then a PiP effect to the nest in the parent timeline...is that similar to what we did with the Child/Master group?

"Jack suggested a Nested timeline for each of the 5 tracks and then a PiP effect to the nest in the parent timeline...is that similar to what we did with the Child/Master group?"

Nesting creates separate standalone Vegas projects for each nested event. You can edit them in another instance of Vegas and the resulting edits will show up in the master project or, in later versions of Vegas, within the master project . It's another way of working.

Thank you. It's convenient to have the Child/Master arrangement, but because the "Master" track to the grouped Child tracks is an empty video track (there is no clip in it), I can't use the Pan/Crop tool to zoom and I can't use the PiP effect to quickly move the whole Group of Child tracks. Using the Master Track Motion seems to only show the complete timeline of the full project (in my case that's long)...and makes it hard to pinpoint small segments to reposition the Child Group.

I tried creating nested tracks for each of the player's 5 tracks. It gave me the warning that something could go wrong. It created a new Vegas project file and it was nice having a single video clip in the Master timeline that pointed to the 5 separate tracks...I can fade in and out, use PiP, etc. But after a few times of playing that timeline it messes up the master playback with glitchy behavior, like half the screen flickering, the nested tracks showing up in odd places on the screen, etc. Either the nested tracks aren't working for me for some reason, or I'm using too many elements in multiple nested tracks.

Technically, the "master" track is not needed. I just figured having a master track would make it easier to move all of the "children" at once to a specific location.

I also figured that, once set, each set of tracks would stay in the same location and not need to be moved. So you could have a set for location 1, a set for location 2, etc... and then just put events on the child tracks for the locations being used. I was not anticipating you needing to move them around.

So, my thoughts were, create a set of 5 tracks making all of the cards the right size in the correct position to each other. Then use Track Motion on the master track to create location #1.

Then you could duplicate those 6 tracks and use track motion on the second master to create location #2.

Continue for the number of locations you need. And then just use the locations needed for each hand and leave the other locations blank.

You need Vegas native "Create nested timeline"

Or more improved Vegasaur "Create Nested Project (from Selected Events) / (from Selected Tracks)". It can contain all the track FX, track motion, track envelopes, markers, regions, etc.

Personally, I would prefer the grouped tracks over nested events for this. Otherwise, you're constantly going to need to be opening a nested VEG just to update the cards. Nested VEG files do have their uses but I think in this case it would slow the workflow down too much. But, certainly, test both ways and see what works best for you!

Today I stumbled on the "Insert Empty Event" feature...I got all excited for a minute thinking I could add an empty event to the Parent track of the Grouped Child tracks. While I was able to add en empty event (and it looked just like a "clip", and even though I could use the Pan/Crop tool AND add the PiP effect to the empty event, the Pan/Crop and the PiP didn't control the Child tracks below.

I will need to watch those videos posted by Ian about the Nested Timelines. As much as it sounded like a good idea at the first, once I tried it with a single "player's" 5 tracks, it didn't work flawlessly...after a few scrubs forward and backward it messed up the master timeline and made things jitter and jump. And that's not to mention that I'd need individual Nested tracks for all players in the tournament, so imagine 12 Nested tracks pointing to 12 separate instances of Vegas running those Nested elements. Not sure how it would handle.

If you're interested, you can see how the first 5 hands of my tournament video are turning out so far. Even with the 40'ish tracks I'm running PiP effects on, sometimes Vegas crashes when I go too fast with all the tracks that are running different PiP movement. I'm pretty sure the crashes are due to just pushing so many PiP instances on a timeline at the same time (40-45). If you're interested in how I did this, let me know. If you have suggestions how I can do it better, or quicker (it's a time consuming process!) please lemme know!

Here's the video I just put up:

Best Regards

@Richard-Bril

"If you have suggestions how I can do it better,... please lemme know!"

Lower the exposure on this camera or match the output more closely to the look of the other cameras in post.

Put the light over the side table on a dimmer and lower the brightness until it doesn't "blow out" the wall picture and computer monitor and backlight the people.

Consider putting in some dimmable pot lights over the poker table to make the play the center of attention.

Heh, those are great suggestions...thanks...and obvious ones that I chose to overlook after the amount of time I spent on everything else. Color grading, lighting, or matching the exposure on the cameras was something I didn't put any time into after spending 95% of my time on this first video doing the animated card graphics. But you're right, it lowers the quality of the final result...especially if that's what your first impression was. I'll be sure to match the cameras on the subsequent "parts" of this video series. (I created each of the 52 cards in Photoshop, spent all that time figuring out how to group the player's tracks into Child groups, etc...and then figure out how to animate them using the master track option which is much harder than applying a PiP to a single clip.)

I thought about applying a color grade to the iPhone 12 camera (the washed out one) that would fix the whole track, but I remember previously having a hard time figuring out how to apply color grading (or any other effect) to a whole track. Not that I didn't figure it out in the end, but the steps to apply an effect to a whole track weren't very straight forward last time I tried. Maybe a simple 1-2-3 step explanation would help me.

Lastly, thought I'm sure WPT and WSOP (and others) prolly have their own proprietary software that does all the fancy card graphics and animations...probably with a dedicated computer(s) just doing that...if there is anyway I can get a little big closer to something like this using Vegas, I'd be happy to try.....

Thanks again!

Personally, I would prefer the grouped tracks over nested events for this. Otherwise, you're constantly going to need to be opening a nested VEG just to update the cards. Nested VEG files do have their uses but I think in this case it would slow the workflow down too much. But, certainly, test both ways and see what works best for you!

I spent some time today learning the nested timeline feature a little better. I believe I may have figured out the jittery behavior I had encountered the other day when trying to use the PiP on multiple nested clips in the master timeline at the same time (basically, it is a "cleaner" experience to not have any effects applied to the original clips in the master timeline that you intend to send to a Nested timeline, but rather apply all those effects in the nested timeline...otherwise it can be easy to double up on the same effect, once in each timeline).

That said, unless I'm missing something I haven't been able to figure out how to use a single nested timeline for each player that could span the 70 different hands played in this tournament. I'm currently using 6 clips/tracks in the nested timeline for each player and every new hand played has to change the 2 tracks that represent their cards. If I copy and paste the 6 tracks in the nested timeline (creating a new instance, not a reference) and change the 2 tracks/clips that represent the 2 cards, that new group (instance) of clips doesn't translate to the master timeline. So, unless that can be done, I would need to not only have a nested timeline for each player, but each player would need an nested timelines for each hand played (over 70).

Thank you

Is there a way to drop a new JPG file on to a video clip (that is also a JPG file) and thus keep the same length/Pan/Crop keyframes/fade in/out? The alternative that I've been doing is to drag a new JPG onto the timeline (for each new set of cards in this case), but then needing to manually adjust the pan/crop, add keyframes, etc (even after copying event attributes, there are still some things that need to be done to fix it up still). If there is a way to drop the new JPG onto the existing clip that is all set up already, it would save a lot of time. Thank you

Drag the clip to the timeline with the right mouse and when you release, you can ADD AS TAKE. I think it keeps the pan/crop but not sure.

Wow, it worked!--thank you so much!

• Right-click and drag a clip to the timeline and drop it on top of another clip that has the settings you want (length, FX, Pan/Crop, etc). When releasing the mouse button, select Video Only-->Add Video as Takes

What a time saver for certain projects!

Cheers