How do I overlay an arrow on a character in video?

The Big E wrote on 9/27/2008, 7:53 AM

I am editing a football video and want to highlight a certain player by overlaying a dot or arrow on him at the start of the play. I was able to do this in Pinnacle but can't find a way to do this in Vegas. Any suggestions?

Comments

TheHappyFriar wrote on 9/27/2008, 8:25 AM

many, many MANY MANY MANY ways.

1) make an arrow graphic in a graphic program, then move it via track motion.
2) take a solid white (or whatever color you want) generated media & use the curves in pan/crop to animate & make the arrow.
3) use a 3rd party app.
4) use protype & find a font with an arrow. display that arrow then use protype to animate.

i'm sure there more too.

Dan Sherman wrote on 9/27/2008, 9:26 AM

Another possibility is to use the "cookie" cutter FX on the track above. Let your player show through and adjust opacity to your liking on the rest of the image.
Follow the player in action using track motion.
This can be effective.

rmack350 wrote on 9/27/2008, 9:51 AM

All of this works but it'd be a great feature to have vector based shapes in Vegas. We've been doing instructional computer teardown videos for the last 10 years (in other NLEs) and it'd be very nice to be able draw arrows, boxes, circles, and custom shapes right in the NLE. I especially would like an easy method of bending arrows as well as adding perspective to them.

This is actually a feature that, if well implemented, would make Vegas attractive to our two editors who have barely looked at Vegas in the past.

Rob Mack

PeterWright wrote on 9/27/2008, 5:46 PM

Simplest way is use the good ole Text Generator, select a font such as wingdings, select your arrow, size it using font size, position it with the placement tab and rotate it if necessary with Pan/Crop.

p.s. Agree with Rob about the need for a shape drawing tool - Premiere's Titler did this 10 years ago!

TheHappyFriar wrote on 9/28/2008, 5:17 AM

p.s. Agree with Rob about the need for a shape drawing tool - Premiere's Titler did this 10 years ago!

but 10 years ago (what, even 3 or 4?) you wouldn't be able to animate in real time, you've have to move it, stop, check, etc.

what's wrong with using a button from DVDA? There's tons of arrows in DVDA!

farss wrote on 9/28/2008, 6:33 AM

"There's tons of arrows in DVDA! "

That raises a question. How do you extract those objects from the later DVDA theme files?

Bob.

TheHappyFriar wrote on 9/28/2008, 8:51 AM

That raises a question. How do you extract those objects from the later DVDA theme files?

After stretching the DVDA "Crop and Adjust" windows across two monitors, I found out!

C:\Documents and Settings\user_name\Application Data\Sony\DVD Architect Pro\4.5

they're either png or psd files.

rmack350 wrote on 9/28/2008, 9:56 AM

"what's wrong with using a button from DVDA? There's tons of arrows in DVDA! "

The main difference is that they aren't vector based, they're png and psd files. If you're used to using vector based shapes you wouldn't really want to go back.

I do arrows and callouts all day, every day, in photoshop and flash. Photoshop is extremely easy to use for this, the only thing it lacks (cs2) is a way to apply a stroke to a shape without applying a fill. You can trace a stroke onto a new layer but then it's raster art. You can't actually stroke a path.

Don't know how Premiere's titler did this 10 years ago but many programs used to use a dedicated graphics track that was tuned to just doing graphic objects. I'll bet it just worked in indexed color but it was fast enough to work with.

Rob