go to digitaljuice.com and buy a couple of their products. They are cheap but are of amazing quality. For a couple hundred bucks you will get more professional transitions, mattes, backgrounds, etc. than you could possibly develop yourself (or that will ever ship with Vegas or any other NLE).

If nothing else look at their DJ tv section which will give you some great ideas.

lol, dont u just love the dodgy wow factor crap? lol

wot u want my friend, is what's called hollywood fx, pinnacle released this for ulead & premiere and obvioulsy pinnackle stuff..

this is what wedding nightmares are made of dude... spinning cubes, folding fans, rotating globes, cg gfx.... realy funny stuff, but not bad for corp work to be honest.

for vegas i think the closest thing to it would be the Adorage plugin collection.

Yeah, Adorage definitely for Vegas. Man I remember the days of "glitzy" fx. Wow - brings back memories of the Video Toaster and all the Kiki swipes ;)

Maybe you can tell your client that "pro" means less canned and cheesy effects. Some, however utilize these fairly well and they don't look too... ugh... bad, actually.

Just cause you can, doesn't mean you should is how I approach these effects. Again though, weddings and low budget car commercials wouldn't be the same without them. ;)

Some good ideas, however:

a) I'm not really trying to impress them with Vegas as such, I'm using Vegas to make something for them. If that works out either I get the ongoing work or they buy a copy of Vegas.

b) I got some DJ stuff, not transitions as such.

An example of what I'm after:

1)Shot of boar with matted rifle sights.
2)BANG. Boar explodes.
3)Bits come back together as next shot.

This I could do with Satish's shatter plug if the dang thing still worked

I think what this client has been using in the past are the Hollywood FX package from Pinnacle.

Thanks guys, I think you nailed, will look into Adorage.

Agree, agree, in this guys view if a consummer NLE comes with 100 FXs then a Pro one should have 1,000!

Bob.

New Blue have a fair range of "grotesque" transitions which plug in to Vegas - lots of shatters, metallic glows, skews and distortions.

You can download free trial versions to see if they're bad enough for your client.

Yeah, the Hollywood fX in Pinnacle ... I second that idea.

As for Kiki, she seemed to be at so many trade shows in the early 90s that I thought she had a twin. I just Googled her (Kiki Stockhammer) and found that someone had put up a tribute page (no, she's not dead).

Kiki Stockhammer

She, along with the whole Toaster crew, were what originally turned me on to the idea of using computers for video. I rate her demos as one of the top three demos I have ever seen. She had confidence, pace, connected with the audience, and knew her product cold.

I just rearranged my computer last week, and found a Snappy attached to the parallel port. The 9-volt battery had turned to mush (been seven years since I used that puppy). The link above will show you the famous pic of Kiki advertising this product.

Bob,

Plug-In Pac works fine for me - using it in Vegas 7 / 8 - didn't do anything special on install, just installed and it worked. Not sure what problems you're having with it.

I'm not using Wax, just his original plugin pac

cheno

I just picked up Adorage last week. I was looking specifically for an explosion transition. (embarrassed) Believe it or not, I have actually found situations where "loud" transitions are the right thing, and this was one of them... I was doing a flashy intro segment to demo Vegas capabilities and what "could be" to a blasting company. Well, they blast. One explosion and no more at the very beginning to kick off the video was right. One other time I've used loud transitions was when I did a slide show to some classical music and I had the photo movement timed at the end to give the feel of a fireworks show finale. But I will say, for 99% of what I do, I avoid stuff like that.

p.s. I love Digital Juice. I've got a ton of their Jumpbacks. I just picked up a Sound FX set. It arrived today. :)

i just tried the pluginpac I found on an old backup CD from 2003 & it works just fine. even works on HD footage in an HD project no problem.

just in case you need the file:
http://www.sterlingshield.net/home/steve/video/PLUGINPAC.ZIP

brings back memories of the Video Toaster and all the Kiki swipes ;)

Who could forget the falling sheep!!

Mike

I just picked up a Sound FX set. It arrived today. :)

I've got all 3 sets and the animation students at the college I work for LOVE them!!

Mike

Somehow I twiddled knobs and it's WORKING!
This is a red letter day.

Here's the trick. When you add the Wax FX it gets added but the FX doesn't open but it is there. Click on it again and hold the mouse button down. The plug seems to think it's lost focus, so drag the mouse pointer over to the Wax window and then it'll stay open.

Bob.

Speaking of Kiki, Has anyone ever come across that Amiga demo real? That demo alone sold the Amiga... that's why I bought my first one...that and that knight game.

Bob, I still can't make it work.

Drag the WAX Fx P{reset to new Event > Locked VEgas > Double click as per your "Red Letter Day" > Nada.

I've only tried it in V7 and then only as a transition.
First thing you have to do is either open it in standalone mode or Start>Programs>Debugmode>Wax 2.0 Preferences. Then tick the checkbox at the top that says Use Dummy Host Media....
Keep in mind also that you can run Wax 2.0 standalone.

I gotta admit even though I got it working in Vegas 7 it's twitchy, nothing crashes but the yards are hard. Standalone it seems way less twitchy. Even when I first used it back in V4 I found it difficult, then again if you can plumb the depths of ProType....

Bob.

I was the "Toaster Post" columnist at the Video Toaster Magazine for about a year after it started up. Had one of the first toasters in '91. I used to drive Kiki crazy because I speak German and once introduced her thusly. Fun.
Burt Wilson

then again if you can plumb the depths of ProType....

Not the same, Bob. PTT works as it should. May not be to everyones method of working, but it does work and no doubt, it will improve. WAX? Nah, not so much. It is all or should be about it working as a plugin. Going standalone kinda takes out the reason for me to have it running as a plugin?

Comparisons to an ability I may have to "work" PTT aren't fair at all. PTT does work WITHIN Vegas. At present, for me, WAX doesn't.

Bob,

Have you looked at Boris FX 9.1. This is close to what Hollywood FX can do (i love HFX for this sort of stuff). You can map video onto 3D objects and it's full of rotating cube transitions and the like. Probably what the customer is looking for and only $149 USD if you buy from Digital Juice. You could just add the cost to the price of the project.

~jr

Technically neither ProType or Wax are plugins from what I can see.
ProType runs as an application extension, a recent enhancement that wasn't available when Wax was written. I think that's the cause of some of the issues you'd raised with the way PT works for you.

As I said I can't get Wax to run to perfection, some of the issues go back to what has always been the issue for plugin developers, of Vegas not serving up frames to the plugin.

Technical details aside, what happens when you try to run Wax?
If I create a transition it does appear as a transition choice. I click on the transition to open it's interface, it opens and closes. I have to hold the mouse button down until the pointer reaches the Wax window. Then the window will stay open. It still does not have focus. I have to click in the Wax window to force it to get focus. Not exactly user friendly but workable. Now all this is in V7, maybe your problems are unique to V8 but before we write it off as a possibility tell me what's happening with Wax when you try to run it. Maybe we can sort it out.

And Wax is very useful standalone, it's a fairly friendly way to run a whole raft of VDub filters I just discovered.
That said even when you get it to work either standalone or inside Vegas there's a fair bit to learn. There is a manual, there is a training video and inside Vegas it does seem to correctly do a cursor sync.

What it cannot do is display the final FX applied to the media from the track within it's own window when running inside Vegas, so you have to work using it's own dummy media. That could make doing it's internal keyframing a bit hit and miss.

Bob.

Completely forgot about Boris. Then again I've also got AE. Thing is this is a borderline 'for the love of it' project, not even the money in it to cover my time futzing with AE or Boris. And if I did demo a Vegas / Boris solution to this guy I think he'd run a mile not so much at the cost but just the learning curve. That's why I was really looking for something dead simple to use.

Bob.

Well having nothing better to do :)

Managed to get Wax to run in V8. Still having issues understanding it though but it hasn't crashed. Where I'm coming unstuck is between it's internal keyframe and the keyframes in the actual FX T/L, I can animate the FX but my results so far are unpredicatble. Need more time to investigate, haven't even read the manual, that might help too.

Bob.