Thanks Keith,

The "track motion" worked exactly the way I was hoping it would. That was the first time I've used the "track motion." What other ways can the "track motion" be used, or what other effects is it used to create. I used it this time to bring into focus my picture in the center of the frame and then slide the picture flush left or right and hold it there for the remainder of the event.

Thanks again.
Joe

"What other ways can the "track motion" be used, or what other effects is it used to create."

Hoooo... ! Let me just say 3-D . .try learning the 3-D option. You'd have your Photos floating and intersecting each other in 3-D space! Fancy that?

Lots of help and ideas. For starters try the 3-D Tutes on http://vasst.com/

Look out for "Parent" TM control & use multiple Tracks. You are gonna be blown away!

Grazie

This thread caught my attention yesterday. This is exactly what I needed to do on a recent project. I ended up using pan/crop to accomplish this, but I'd never used track motion before so I thought I'd give it a shot. I'm a Vegas newbie, so I'm eager to learn. Track motion is pretty nifty! But let me ask a question:

Suppose I have a whole series of stills that you want to overlay onto a common background video one at a time (a picture in picture effect.) I want each still image to appear in the center of the frame, then gradually pan to the left or right before fading out, is this something you can use track motion for?

I tried it this morning and got it to work, but repositioning the target area in the track motion window back to the center, then back to the edges for each still seemed really time consuming. Does anyone have a .veg with an example of a better way to do this?

Thanks!
Rick <><

One note, that has been mentioned before: When doing any motion with still images, if these moves involve zooming in on the images, you should do this with the pan/crop tool rather than track motion. Pan/crop re-samples the actual still image, whereas track motion samples the resulting video resolution. Thus, if you have a still image that is 1600x1200 and you zoom in so it is 1/4 its original size, pan/crop will give you an image that is 800x600 whereas track motion will give you an image that is 360x240 (assuming you started with 720x480 NTSC DV video). If you start with video, then it doesn't make any difference, because the resolution of the original is, by definition, the same as the project video resolution.

Hi Rick,

The advantage of using Pan Crop for what you're after is it's easy repeatability to other events.

Assuming all events are laid out on the same track, once you've got the first Event doing what you want, Ctrl C to copy ... move to the next event and right click > Select Events to End - then right click > Paste Attributes. This will copy the same movement to all.

Peter, John? Question .. .

Now we have Nested Projects/Timelines, what would be the quality hit if we P/C in a series of underlying Projects and THEN brought them into a Track Motion project? Do you see a bonus, Workflow option here? Just a thought . . . What I'm thinking is to get the "quality" bit done in a sub-project and then assemble in a MAIN TM project using nested options . . .Any thoughts on this?

. .and yes: P/C for quality AND for copy paste attributes.

Grazie

In this instance, if the Pan/Crop project has the events already sliding across as mentioned in Project A, and this is nested in Project B, then it could get confusing using Track Motion to move something that's already moving,

BUT

This principle is a great way of compositing several video threads together for say an Opening sequence - it's really another way of doing Parent/Child compositing, but possible easier to keep tabs on the different layers, since each can be a separate project.