Lol! - I'm still none the wiser. But I appreciate your humour.

I really do want to understand this ..

Grazie

Best example I could think of is say I use a checkerboard gen media and then use a bezier mask. Then apply glow FX. Depending on the pre or post setting of the glow FX it is applied either before or after the mask. What difference does this make?

If it's applied before then the mask constrains both the checkerboard and the glow. Apply the glow after and the masked checkerboards glow extends beyond the mask. What the glow is being applied to is the output of the mask, in the previous case it's being applied to the input of the mask.

Hope this helps.

As to where you might use this, heck mate, I'm an engineer, we just build this stuff, up to you creative bods to find a use for it :)

The thing I find is that how this is implemented is not intuitive, I much prefer the nodal approach like Fusion and Shake uses, that gives you a graphical view of the flow of things. However I know some people find the nodal thing totally baffling and prefer the way AE does it.

Bob.

another example would be .. applying film effect to a clip that has been resized using pan and crop,, say to 16:9 from 4:3,, the effect will cover the whole 4:3 till you hit the toggle

Here's another one.
Drop an event (still or video) on the timeline.
Apply the Border FX (solid white so that it shows up easily) to it. Keep this window open.
Go into Pan/Crop and zoom out.
The border stays around the edge of the frame.
Go back to the Border FX window and click the Pre/Post Toggle so that it's pointing to the left.
Now zoom out in Pan/Crop and, TA DA!!, the border stays with the image.

Mike

mike,

that's exactly what i meant about the cigarette....

got love this ng.

Mike I can make your suggestion work. I didn't know or ever SEEN the value until then. There has to be some tutorial which describes, and then gets underpinned by some logic to make this sink in?

Winrock? Nope, can't make yours work here.

Any more examples? What is actually happening and how? There has to have been a reason for this to have been created?

TIA - looking forward to other examples . .

Grazie

Pre/Post decides whether effect is applied before pan crop or after pan crop.

I think Winrock's example should work. 16:9 clip in a 4:3 output frame leaves black bars top and bottom.

If film effects is applied before pan crop ("pre"), then things will work out right.

If film effects is applied *after* pan crop ("post"), then the film effects will be applied to the entire 4:3 frame, including the black bars -- will see scratches, dust, etc, in the black bars (which won't look right)

Tim L

(Edit: Gosh, I hope I got that right. Maybe I'm confused now...)

The reason we're all confused is because it's Before/After Pan/Crop and not Pre/Post Toggle. SHEESH!!

You don't realize how useless the search feature in the Vegas manual is until you do a search on "pre/post toggle" :-(

I found what I was looking for on the bottom of p. 226 in the Vegas 7 manual.
(note to self: Dummy!! Where else did you think it would be?)

*************************************
When you add a plug-in to a video event that has panning or cropping applied to it, you have the choice of processing the plug-in before or after the pan/crop.
For example, you might want to add a Radial blur plug-in before the video is cropped and then a Noise plug-in after the criopping is complete.

You can choose whether an effect is applied pre- or post-pan.crop in the keyframe controller at the bottom of the Video FX window.
Click the Before/After Pan/Crop button to the left of the effect name to determine whether the effect is processed before < or after > Vegas software pans or crops the event.
*************************************

Rant mode on.
To Sony coders/manual writers:
The manual says this is the Before/After Pan/Crop button.
The software says it's a Pre/Post Toggle button.
Make up your mind!!!
No wonder Grazie is bewildered!!
Rant mode off.

Clear as mud now, Grazie?
Whoops, I shouldn't say mud to someone who's had torrential rains lately.
I'll gladly trade you some heat (over 30° all week and no signs of relief in sight) for some rain for our area farmers :-)

Mike

edit: No worries there Tim. You got it right.

If you use bezier masking to isolate effects to certain areas, you will want to have the filter applied BEFORE masking for certain effects like color curves.

For still images, it's usually better to apply filters after pan/crop.... since the image gets smaller after pan/crop and there's less pixels to process.

There is just so much of value here, that I thought this would have been brought up before.

Strange as it may appear for me, I do want to know and understand the philosophy/science ( a bit, Bob, just a bit! ) so I can then sallie forth armed with clear knowledge as to the HOW & WHY something works, then I can intelligently apply what I understand.

Example: NDs these are like sunglasses for cameras - they dim the light levels. Simple, I understand that. Keeping the IRIS wide for improving shallow DoF - this create layers and thence improve my narrative. . . But this PRE/POST stuff, although it is starting to make sense - and that only by your kind examples - I am now more convinced than before that this should be better described and expanded upon. I'm taking notes here . .oh yes . .

So:-

Mike great research and thanks.

Glenn Point 1/- "If you use bezier masking to isolate effects to certain areas, you will want to have the filter applied BEFORE masking for certain effects like color curves."

What do you mean before? Before the keyframe? Exactly WHERE before? How do I judge a "BEFORE" from a P/C entry to an FX entry? I'm sure the FX entries aren't on the P/C-MASK Timeline? And as a follow-up what WOULD be happening if I did the opposite? And why colour curves? What would be happening there? If only I could get a sense of the SENSE of this then it would "stick" with me.


Glenn Point 2/- "[i]For still images, it's usually better to apply filters after pan/crop.... since the image gets smaller after pan/crop and there's less pixels to process. i]"

Now THAT I understand. You have given a reason AND what the value would be!!

So, examples that give:

1/- Setup - What When and How

2/- Purpose - Quality Speed Creativity

And Mike, we've had dry weather now for a week .. and . .the Sun's shining too!!

Grazie

before = pre / before pan/crop/masking gets applied.
To change it, click on the little triangle in the bottom left in the eventFX window.

2- It's important for the color curve filter since it affects premultiplied values or something like that. The bezier masking is outputting premultiplied values for the feathered areas... color curves doesn't play well with premultiplied values. (I think.)

Regardless, the easy answer is to click the triangle if it looks wrong.

Well this has been bought up several times before but it mostly arises only when those little triangles are the key to solving the problem. I recall over a year ago someone having some issue with difference masking and the triangle thing was part of the answer.

Anyway to try and flesh this out.
FX chains are pretty basic. Take an image and add the noise FX and a blur FX. The order in which they're applied makes a big difference. If your chain goes Blur>Noise you get a soft image with distinct noise. Reverse the order, Noise>Blur, the noise gets blurred into the image.

Now the masks and composits are NOT FXs, they don't appear in the chain and yet clearly they, like the FXs, are applied to the image. Those triangles, the pre/post things, let us control how they interact with the FXs. Perhaps the best metaphor I can dream up is this.

FXs run along the timeline, compositing runs down the timeline. The triangles control the points where the grid of FXs and composits interact.

Now for some geek speak. I've dabbled with building some complex composits using Vegas. It's got a lot to offer, I think way more than anyone apart from the guys who wrote the code realise, just take a look at the 2 cats demo. But for serious work there's a rather savage limitation that impacts the creative side. Everytime you change anything Vegas recalculates everything in the frame, yish. Trying to fine tune a bezier while waiting seconds to see what's happening is soul destroying, more so when working in HD. Background rendering wouldn't help with this and there's only so much horsepower that CPUs and GPUs have to offer.
One solution that I've used is to break the composite up into layers and render these out as uncomp files and then have a master composit project. Tedious but less frustrating as you can study what each part is doing. Being able to chain Veggies would be nice, kind of like Rewire for video, and no, this is different to nesting. This though is where the full on compositing tools like Fusion pay for the asking price. You can dig into the process and see what's happing at each point in the chain. But there's more, the smart (think they call it Lazy) renderer only renders what needs to be rendered. For example, if you're applying a mask to the output of a key and change the mask it doesn't waste time recalculating the key AND the mask, only the mask gets recalced, this is tech that aids the creative process.

Bob.