Mp4 Overlay - Compositing Mode - Pan & Crop problem (Vegas Pro 12)

Daniella wrote on 12/21/2017, 5:30 PM

Hi everybody! I hope you are having a great month of December.

If you have a spare minute, I would very much appreciate if you could give me a hand. For two days I have been stuck on a very silly editing problem caused by an .mp4 overlay.

The overlay shows sparkles on a black background. To get rid of the black background I chose the usual 'add' in the compositing mode and it worked well. Then, as the size of the sparkles was too big for my music video project, and I didn't want them to cover the whole event either, I used 'pan & crop' to make them smaller and I pushed the overlay to one of the corners of the event. Weird thing, a greyish/whitish rectangle appeared in the event: the shape of the new (reduced) overlay.

Why is the background colour of the overlay grey while it should be transparent? Inexplicable and sooo annoying.

I have tried everything but nothing works, I badly need your help. Thousand thanks!

DS

(Link to the overlay in question + a 2sec quick render

Comments

Marco. wrote on 12/21/2017, 5:47 PM

For compositing in Vegas Pro areas which are meant to be transparent must be R'G'B' value 0, but the background of your sparkles is R'G'B' value 16.

So to solve the issue apply a Levels FX onto the sparkes Event and select the preset "Studio RGB to Computer RGB".
 

Daniella wrote on 12/22/2017, 2:28 AM

This is absolutely brilliant!!! You have just made my Christmas, thank you so much!

A question: How did you figure out that the background colour of the sparkles was RGB value 16 and not 0? How can I know (easily & quickly) the RGB value of the backgrounds of my other overlays? Thanks

Marco. wrote on 12/22/2017, 3:34 AM

I checked via the scopes which are availabe via the menu "View/Windows/Video Scopes". Waveform monitor is a good selection in scopes to see where the blacks are (here 0 % equals R'G'B' 16), also Histogram.