The topic comes up a lot. See my little bird mask to get an idea of one way you can do it. To make any video or image black and white one quick way is just use the color corrector filter and push the color slider all the way to the left. Bingo, no more color.
The tricker part is having color for one or more objects. As you see in the tutorial I just colored a bird, and that was a simple Photoshop mask that then got placed in a overlay track. Such things are quick and easy to do if you have something like Photoshop or you can do it now in verson 5 of Vegas if you want to fiddle with make a more involved mask that way.
However if you have a longer video when the colorized object moves or changes it can get to be a pain to set up keyframes to track it
The newsletters has an article on how to do a colorpass - i.e. allow one color to remain with the rest of the shot being black and white. Will need to be modified slightly for Vegas 5.
I searched and found viscosity may work...problem, I can't open any of my .avi's that I have captured. So I went to look at them in win med player and all I get is audio....Tried in Photopaint and get and error message. Any one help me on this one?
Usually when WMP plays the audio but doesn't show the video, it means that you don't have the proper codec for the AVI (a DivX AVI, perhaps, or an XviD one?). But how you could've capture such a file without the codec, I don't know. Did you capture it on a different computer?
In addition the advice posted nearby, you might look into the new, free color correction tool that allows you to saturate or desaturate colors very easily with a slider.
Here's a direct link to the tool (hope its still current version)
regarding color pass with just one color showing thru: If you have Vegas 5 there are two ways of pulling it off easily.
One is to attend a VASST seminar and Spot will show you.....
or
Two having just seen it demonstrated myself at VASST I'll try and explain...
on your clip place the secondary color corrector filter
choose the "select effect range" eyedropper(pipette)
secect an area of the color you wish to keep.
now check the invert mask box
slide your (upper)saturation sider down
now do your tweeking with the sliders below and Voila!
no mask no fuss
Pleasant isnt it!
Epirb has it right. No longer do you need a mask track or parenting, or anything else to do this in Vegas 5. Substantially different in Vegas 5 than in Vegas 4. Follow his directions, you'll have it made. This is one of the tricks/techniques shown at VASST. We'll have a couple tutorials on the website for this shortly.