Thanks Bob. No, that's enough to get me going.

I was surprised at how dissimilar the methods for accomplishing a given task are in different NLE's. MSP has CG and Video Paint programs, and a lot of these special effects are done in them. So at times I'm completely lost when trying to accomplish a given task. Had no idea what cookie cutter is. I'll check it out.

Thanks again,

JOn

I'd just use masking within the pan crop tool.

Dave

Thanks Dave. I'll give that a try too. Will see if either of these methods give me the control that I'm used to.

Jon

Use an empty event
Apply a cookie cutter filter fx to this event
Set the border, color, position and size of circle in the cookie cutter fx
add a 'Clock Wipe' transitiion to the event


.

You can create the circle using Color Gradient media generator - start with the Elliptical Ring
Or you can use Text with the letter O or use one of the special symbol fonts like Wingding

Udi

Rosebud - so simple yet brilliant!

I often use the Cookie Cutter, but never that way, but I will now ... thanks.

Edit - looking further at this - the Arrowhead preset used in the same way is a very handy way of resizing and positioning a superimposed shape.

The AMAZING thing is that the number of outline Shapes available within Cookie Cutter as presets has not ALREADY been vastly expanded, so we have a built-in Shape tool.
Later this could be upgraded to a bezier based tool.

or - the current preset shapes in Cookie Cutter - could this variable be accessed via scripting?

Peter, what would be even better is if WE could add our own masks to the collection of shapes.

Jerry

The AMAZING thing is that the number of outline Shapes available within Cookie Cutter as presets has not ALREADY been vastly expanded, so we have a built-in Shape tool.

Add Gen Med Color Gradient Eliptical to TL. Change 1 and 3 to Alpha. Change 2 to your fav color. Position over media with Track Motion. use clock Wipe to make its appearance on screen. with a marker squeak for audio. John

For a different approach I've made lots of use of symbols and letters in Windows character map. Just copy, say, a circle, or a dash or an arrowhead into an open Text media Generator and you scale, move it rotate etc really easily. Tehy're True Type so they scale without jaggies. Very useful for circling points of interest or having an arrow indicate a particular feature. I do a lot of medical work and this has been really simple and effective. Don't forget to save your circle or whatever as a preset for next time.
David s
imaginACTION

Use an Adobe application like Elements or anything you like drawing with and capture on video on your screen as you draw it with Windows Media Encoder (free download from MS) and then bring it in on a separate video track in Vegas - resize and move to put it where you want it with pan / crop or track motion. WME will capture anything on your screen as video and make a WMV file from it. - you can set the resolution to whatever you want when capturing. I use 1920x1080 as it's my screen resolution.

Here's an example of output using this approach - don't make fun of my circle drawing folks!

Oh were those circles ??? :-) Actually, very good. You could also use a circle (or other shape) template with the pen on a Wacom tablet if you have one of those. Another thing you might want to check out is a program called "VisiSketchPro" created by Dave Fitzpatrick. There are lots of fun things you can do with that to animate drawing and sketching. Check it out at [url=http://www.visisketchpro.com/]
I have no connection with this program other than having done some beta testing for him in the past.

mikey

Thanks srode. That's exactly what I was looking for Vegas to be able to do.

But I already have a program that does that, was just hoping that I could do it within
Vegas. Looks like I finally came across something that my old NLE can do that Vegas can't (or at least not made for it). I guess Vegas can't be best in EVERYTHING. :)

Jon