I may have to paste via a photo editor like you suggest if there's no magic bullet in Vegas to move events together like Track Motion while retaining the clarity of Pan/Crop. I'm not sure if I can fit all the elements onto the one image, so I may have to create multiple versions of the background/pasted elements & carefully swap them out between moves. Hmmm, gonna have to get smarter on my photo editor ...

Thanks for the help, Kelly. Just talking through this here helps firm the thought up in my mind. I wonder why the Vegas writers made Track Motion so pixel-limited in the first place? If it was a memory limitation concern, I wonder if they'll ever "fix" that now that 64-bit is here? It seems like Vegas has a significant limitation when it comes to moving stuff in 3D space.

You are quite right you have no way of seeing the elements within a 3d parent container I hope they guys will come up with a solution so we can see elements within a container

you need to make all the people and backdrop scene 3d tracks and place them in a parent 3d track then you only move the parent track and everything will pan and zoom in relative space and time

your back drop split up into 3 panels trees in front trees behind middle ground and far background plane blue and blue green gradient
mask the trees

Rory

"It seems like Vegas has a significant limitation when it comes to moving stuff in 3D space."

Well, it is a audio/video editor after all. It's not billed as a 3D composition program. There are lots of wonderful programs out there that do 3D composition, many of them free.

Like Blender for example (which you can also do standard video editing in but it's in no way intuitive to someone used to Vegas)

EDIT: Forgot the link: LINK

Rory- I'm on board with what you're suggesting, but from what I've seen, Track Motion/Parent Track Motion look terrible if used to zoom. I forget exactly why. I seem to remember it having to do with the video signal flow (p. 39 of VP8 manual). By the time the image gets to the Track Motion processing the amount of image info is limited (hmmm ... I'm guessing max image size at this point is equal to project size, but not sure), so zooming in on it results in a pixelated "digital zoom" and it looks bad. Hmmm ... I wonder if increasing my project size to HD would improve the Track Motion processing any, or if I'm totally wrong on the science behind this? In any case, Track Motion turns out to be a terrible way to zoom. I've heard it on this forum before ("zoom with Pan/Crop, move with Track Motion) & now I've seen the results myself.

Chien- I'm not asking Vegas to be an awesome 3D compositor like AE (I'm assuming people think AE is good; I've never used it) ... it'd just be nice if Vegas would give us some better handling of images that are either completely off screen or just extend off screen. It'd also be nice if the basic 3D capabilities that do exist didn't degrade our images so much. I imagine image quality is paramount to most folks (especially those getting paid to edit!), and basic 3D handling seems to be a relatively common requirement these days. I've no idea if Premiere/FCP/Avid do any better at this, but as a big fan of Vegas, I was surprised to discover this limitation in Track Motion.

Porpoise- Blender looks cool! Hard to beat free, either. I wonder how many years it would take me to learn that software? It's far more sophisticated than I! Thanks for the link/idea. I bookmarked that for when I have the time for some serious learning. What do *you* use Blender for? Are you a more serious user, or do you mostly use it like I describe using AE below?

So ... what do Vegas folks use for 3D compositing that slightly exceeds VP's capabilities, but doesn't require 3D extrusions/modeling? Is AE the primary tool? And do folks usually just do the required composite within AE & import back into Vegas or use AE exclusively for those videos that require more than Vegas has?

Blender does do fantastic things. The 2.5 version is in beta release so
might want to stay with 2.49 until out of beta.

A good book is "Mastering Blender" by Dr. Tony Mullen. ISBN 978-0-470-40741-7
Add in motion tracking and you have a winning toolset.

Tattoo try anim8tor it’s free and good to start out on. Blender is better but takes a while to learn

New project. Build. Primitives select non gon 4 OK draw it out select build convert to mesh select build select fill
Select View. smooth select UV to move image select options materials double click material panel double click select textures in ambient select … box load texture select that texture for ambient and diffuse = ok
Select settings.. object..name…save

Do this for all your images

Then select mode select scene select build select add objects

Select view. select all .place images in 3d space then select view camera select camera on timeline and do your walkabout using rotate NSWE controllers
You can do a camera track tilt yaw etc and curve the tracking spline etc like most 3d apps use WER keys on keyboard to manipulate images and tracking

Render and done
You can also make extruded images and other models very easy with this app


But I would still do this project in Vegas because if my project settings are say 1280x720 that all the pixels I have and need. if my images are double that it will be fine
So the zoom will be from the 3d track motion moving forward in space and not an actual zoom which will cause distortion

I will do a small project tonight save with images and send to Stephan you can download and see what I am referring to.

Rory