Thanks to you both

@Cornico - yes, I've discovered that I can zoom the workspace view in and out. To be more specific, I would love to set the co-ordinates for two separate rectangular elements within a single mask. Some sort of 'merge' function, maybe ?

@john_dennis - Thanks for those assets. I have been toying with the same idea, but as this will be applied across a project hundreds of times, I'm having trouble working out how the cycle would restart. If you take a look at the video I linked to you will see the sequence unfold as

Image 1: A

Image 1: AB

Image 1: ABC

Image 1: ABCD

Then at step '5', Image 2 goes through the same sequence as above, with Image 1 as it's background. I can't figure out how to stack the assets to do that.

You are making it complicated... thinking.

hahha, yes John, I probably am. I'm very mindful of 'best workflow' practices, but as a newbie, I can only really discover these issues/limitations as I learn. As you may appreciate, there is a whole bunch of other stuff that is confusing me right now as well (namely render outputs, frame rates, BPM syncing etc). But that's a discussion for another thread maybe.

There *is* a solution if I were to be dedicated enough to do it... to create four masked stills in Photoshop of each image in 1080p........ (following your thought process from earlier in the discussion) and just yesterday I learned how to batch process, but that's going to take the number of project assets up to a stupid number. I have 120 of one series, and another 120 of another series. I don't fancy working on 960 files for a 2 minute video !

This project will make light work of creating the four stills for each quadrant of you final video (assuming I correctly interpreted your mirroring effect side to side and top to bottom). It also adds green sections that you can chroma key in your final project to reveal the picture beneath.

This project gets you started with the pattern of placing them on the timeline. The project proceeds up and to the right. I found it tedious but rather quick compared to other methods.  

The second project looks like this in action:

HI John, thanks so much for preparing these project samples.

#1: There are no assets in the download, so I can't determine what the flow is - But if it's simply to achieve the 'mirroring', I have already batch processed my images in Photoshop. I believe this is the preferred way, since the 200+ images I have need to be auto-aligned on the perspective plane (I shot t hem all manually, so there is occasional camera handling issues - ie; some are a fraction of a degree out from the others). Running an auto-align process in PS has dialled most of them in really well, and I'm going to hazard a guess that Vegas won't have that functionality.

#2: What you have so kindly presented is more or less the workaround that I have concluded, but thanks. It certainly does offer a solution, but it's going to be incredibly tedious. I was hoping to lock in some defined mask parameters, save as a preset, then apply across the board, rather than create 4x versions of each image (which would mean I'd be working with 1000+ individual assets!).

This is all a learning process, rather than a brief that's set in stone, so I'm starting to think I may just re-think the whole presentation. I'm going to give this masking one last go this afternoon with an idea I have, and failing that, will put it aside and get stuck in to some of the other functions of the software.

The first project contains four frames with the four quadrants shown in each of the four frames. That renders to a still image sequence with the four picture group named for the source image. Image 1 produces four output stills 1000, 1001, 1002 and 1003. The second image follows the same pattern, ad nausea.These sequences 1000-1003 become the input to the next project...

Question: I think I'm getting close with masking. If I upload a project file, will my custom presets be available to anyone who opens that project ?

This Magix site doesn't host project files. If you upload to a cloud drive and post the link here, it will be available to anyone who can see the link posted here on the forum.

These nested projects will produce assets in real time. The master project, Ripple Through Images-3.veg will handle 120 images. You must open each project, 001-120.veg and replace the imagen.png with your media.

Hey John, I won't be back in front of my studio workstation for a day or two, so I'll look at your contribution then. Nested projects sounds intriguing

But... I HAVE managed to create a keyed mask sequence that progresses through revealing the four tiles. Will share on this thread when I can. The short answer, I plotted anchor points, and at each one, I defined the x/y parameters for each corner, which made up a third quarter tile position of lower right, in the same mask as my upperleft+upperright mask .

When I get back into it, I will continue to try and work out how to save the whole keyframe progression as a preset . Thus far, I have not been successful . I do not want to have to key every image manually, and hope I can at the very least copy/paste.

I have found a solution to this, and decided to make a quick video tutorial (my first one ever!).
 

Once the initial keyframe sequence is created, this can be implemented very rapidly across many assets. It does away with the tedious process of manually manipulating each take.

Good. Now you’re hooked.

Good. Now you’re hooked.

Guilty as charged.

Wonder if I might expand upon this outcome - is it possible to save my four mask sequence as a preset ? Or is this when I would utilize the .veg within a .veg function that John showed earlier? It would be great if it were confined to a preset

" ...is it possible to save my four mask sequence as a preset ?"

I don't think so. I wish someone else could come up with a killer solution to prove me wrong. That's why I went with nesting right out of the gate. I've ended up nesting so many times before that I've just stopped beating my head against the wall. That said, I suppose you could render your mask sequence to a video with an alpha channel, place it in the Media Pool and drag it above each of the items you add your project. I haven't tried that and probably won't be able to do so today. My wife mumbled something about looking at furniture.

In your tutorial, did you use orange as an indicator for transparency or are you chroma-keying orange?

P.S. I'm contemplating restoring a fresh image of my workstation today. I do that fairly frequently when I get too many thing on my Desktop. Poof, in five minutes I can forget I ever did this stuff.