Montage: Polaroid fly-in advice

mrp wrote on 3/14/2002, 4:47 PM
I am doing a video montage of some polaroid stills. I want the stills to fly in and drop, one on top of each other, onto a stack. Each succeeding picture will cover the previous ones, although I would like the stack to be uneven -- in other words, the borders from the previous pictures will be visible under the top picture.
What is the best way to do this?
Do I first need to create composites in a paint program as follows:
Picture 1, then
Pix 2 on top of pix 1, then
Pix 3 on top of the composite of "pix 1 & 2", etc. etc.

Or, is there a simpler way using motion control and overlays in Vegas Video?
Thanks for your thoughts on this.

Comments

Cheesehole wrote on 3/14/2002, 5:07 PM
I would probably create each photo in Photoshop with it's poloroid-style border, but make them all straight. the stacking effect where the borders of the previous ones show can be done in Vegas. you can save them as .PNG files for Vegas.

you can add each photo to the time-line, but insert a video track each time, so that you are creating a stack of tracks. go into PAN/CROP properties of each clip as you add it, and adjust the scaling and rotation a bit for each one, to reveal the edges of the previous layers.

as you stack up the layers in Vegas, you should see each previous picture's border in the background around the edge.

as for the flying in part, well that's kind of tricky. I don't know exactly what kind of thing you are looking for. Vegas doesn't have any 'canned' effects like that, so you have to use the tools to get what you need to happen. zooming/panning is very easy to do, so you could start each picture huge, and have it scale down to normal size, but that wouldn't look like it was flying in. search the forum on 'tutorial' and username 'GG' and you'll find a tutorial for getting 3d effects in Vegas.

the idea would be to get one picture to fly in, and then somehow copy the animation to the rest of your pictures. if you do it with keyframes in the Pan/Crop area of an event, you can copy those keyframes and paste them in a different event. you could create a fly-in animation, copy it to all your pics, then adjust the final keyframe of each one so the pic ends up a little rotated or scaled down from the last one, and you get the varied 'stacking' effect.

so have you seen Memento or what? ;)

- ben
mrp wrote on 3/14/2002, 10:19 PM
Loved Memento! I hadn't thought about the connection...
Thanks for your detailed help. It sounds like you have come up with a very practical way to do it. I will try it out and let you know how it worked.
Cheesehole wrote on 3/14/2002, 11:12 PM
the DVD has a really cool poloroid theme for the main menu. I remembered thinking how could i do this in vegas!? it shows a poloroid, and someone is shaking it like everyone does to poloroids in movies (i always blew them myself) anyway the cool part is that the poloroid has video playing on it instead of a still picture. it looks like the video plays on it even while it's being shaken, but I haven't looked closely enough at it. cool effect anyway. even if you had to do it frame by frame, it wouldn't be that bad, since it's so fast. the same might apply to your animation.