importing veg files

jamcas wrote on 11/9/2003, 9:03 PM
Hi,

I recently asked for some pointers on creating a sparkling tooth effect.
I had the funny picture we took at a party and the sprakle effect was perfect for it. Anyway i got some great advice from a few people on how to create it using light rays etc .. and I went ahead and did it and I got an effect that i was pleased with. (thanks to grazie, tors, johnmeyer who gave me some advice).

About a day later more replies came in and cheinworks posted a link to an example veg file. Obviously an expert cheinworks's effect was much better than mine so I thought I would try and create one the same. (cheinworks used trck motion for rotating the sparkle and faded the sparkle itself instead of the whole effect) Im not familiar with track motion and to rotate a picture i have been using the crop/pan thing and setting key frames etc .. anyway after 15 mins, i started to get frustrated because turning the picture with crop/pan meant the light ray sourced moved and lots of other difficulties.

I thought why reinvent the wheel when this has already been done and I want to just mod the color and length

So I started a second copy of vegas on my PC and opened the cheiworks sparkling tooth veg then selected the media light ray effect object on the track and used copy, then flipped to the other instance of vegas and did a paste. hey it works, but there was one problem, Vegas doesnt seem to let you copy the track motion settings for that effect, it only copies the media.

Im going to mess around a bit more with it but im wondering is there another way to import other small veg files into your project ?


Regards
JC





Comments

Grazie wrote on 11/10/2003, 2:22 AM
Not importing vegies BUT you can copy and paste from the t/l - very useful. I don't know how far you can push this function. I've done the copy paste thing with superb results. I'm also not too sure how far the EDL one can create within S-V can be used to "importing" into another session/instance? - Others will have some views on this, that I'm sure about ;-)

G
johnmeyer wrote on 11/10/2003, 10:30 AM
BUT you can copy and paste from the t/l

Grazie, how do you do this? I had a situation just yesterday where this would have saved a ton of time, but I couldn't find any way to do it. If you click on the track header, the Cut/Copy/Paste function in the Edit menu is grayed out. Pressing Ctrl-C then Ctrl-V doesn't do anything.

jetdv wrote on 11/10/2003, 10:45 AM
Open TWO copies of Vegas. Open both projects. Go to the project you wish to copy FROM. Select the events you wish to copy and press CTRL-C. Go to the other project and press CTRL-V
Grazie wrote on 11/10/2003, 10:50 AM
Ed! Yah beat me to the draw -again . . arrrgghhh . . .

G
johnmeyer wrote on 11/10/2003, 10:53 AM
jetdv,

Copying and pasting events works just great, but the original poster was already doing that. The problem he had -- and that I have -- is copying the Track properties from one track to the other. Here is what the original poster said in his first post:

Vegas doesnt seem to let you copy the track motion settings for that effect, it only copies the media.

Unfortunately, I think I already know what the answer to this is, which is that it cannot be done. I've run into this a number of times, trying to use effects from the VEG files downloaded from Sundance. You end up having to re-do much of the track settings in the new project yourself, although once you have a track fX loaded, you can select all keyframes from the original instance and copy them to the new instance. This gets old real fast, however, if you have a dozen tracks (which many of the VEG files at Sundance do).
jetdv wrote on 11/10/2003, 11:23 AM
Actually, you CAN copy the Track Motion settings:

Go to the copy from project, open the Track Motion dialog, highlight the keyframes, and press CTRL-C

Go to the destination project, open the Track Motion dialog, highlight the first keyframe, and press CTRL-V
Liam_Vegas wrote on 11/10/2003, 4:08 PM
I think that was what John was doing (copying/pasting the track FX keyframes).

I also think this is an obvious "enhancement request" to Sony for the next release. It would certainly be rather useful to be able to copy complete tracks from one veg to another.

-Liam
jamcas wrote on 11/10/2003, 5:53 PM
the sparkle tooth that cheinworks shared with me is a lightray effect that rotates on a period character that is off center and trying to rotate the media
is a b*tch because the light ray goes off course and needs realignment.

Ill investigate the keyframe copying john and jet mentioned.

thanks again for the replies in this thread.

Regards
Jc
jamcas wrote on 11/10/2003, 5:59 PM
The other workaround i tried at cheinworks suggestion was to reder the fx track to AVI and then import that AVI to a new track in my project with composition mode set to add.

This worked but the result I feel wasnt as "sharp" in this instance.

more experimenting to do .....






jaegersing wrote on 11/10/2003, 6:17 PM
The importing of veg files would be a good feature too, instead of having to copy track by track.

Richard Hunter
johnmeyer wrote on 11/10/2003, 6:41 PM
Actually, you CAN copy the Track Motion settings:

I tried this, but if you have multiple fX attached to the track, you can only copy/paste keyframes from on fX at a time. Also, you have to drag select the keyframes which involves first zooming all the way out and then dragging the length of the timeline. Not a big deal, but it would be nice if Ctrl-A worked to select all.

Anyway, you are correct, jetdv, that you can copy/paste between tracks this way, but if you want to create four or five duplicate tracks, and have three or four fX on each track, it gets cumbersome pretty fast.
jamcas wrote on 11/10/2003, 7:42 PM
Im going to post a product suggestion to be able to import VEG files.

Please post one too , I guess the more attention it gets the increased chance there is to get something like this included in the next version

cheers
Jc

dat5150 wrote on 4/22/2004, 3:41 PM
I just encountered this problem today. Does Vegas 5 allow you to import .veg files with their properties?