Why duplicate the smoke for each event? Just drag it out so it fills the entire timeline and let it loop. You should only need 1 smoke event, not 5000...

Alpha Cannels/Transparency have always interested me, there's way to do it within Vegas

As Jetdv says just drag the smoke & it will duplicate across the timeline, set the track composite to Lighten, here i have a jpg on the top track, I rendered that as a Quicktime mov ( because of it Alpha, that was quite slow), that's on the second track, i rendered the jpg again just as a simple mp4 that's on the third track,

The track composite to Lighten, you can see through all the black parts just leaving the white, Darken if you just want to see the black,

but you don't need alpha/transparency, here i have the mp4 b/w clip on the top with Mask Generator added directly to the b/w clip,

the mp4 track composite is set to Multiply (Mask) & the track below is a child, the mp4 media properties are still at None, i changed it to Straight (Unmatted) but it didn't affect the outcome. you could have smoke on the top track, red for your pictures & yellow as a color, (maybe white with an fx), for adjusting the smoke

I have 5000 static images that I'm needing to overlay some video "smoke" to the images. I have the smoke video and know how to overlay it, but can I export the edited smoke video in a transparent format? Or, is there a way to overlay this same smoke clip to these 5000 different images or do I just have to create each video one video at a time? I've used Vegas in the past, but this would be a new subscripton for the latest version.

Yes, Vegas can do what you want, but given the fact you have 5000 images, I would suggest a couple of plug-ins which would greatly speed up the process--Vegasaur and HappyOtterScripts.

Here's a demo of 10 images with "smoke" added using a free download I found (hopefully, you have better "smoke"). In a nutshell, the steps are: import your images, add your smoke media to the track above for the first image, copy that event to the remaining images, create regions for events using Vegasaur, and then batch render the regions using HOS. The only tedious part would be duplicating the smoke event for each subsequent image, although a script could easily be written.

Thank you so much for all the reply. This is exactly what I was needing an answer to.

@jetdv

"Why duplicate the smoke for each event? Just drag it out so it fills the entire timeline and let it loop."

You're absolutely right. I guess the reason was--it was late last night. LOL.

@wwaag do you do any work for hire? If so, how can I contact you to give you more details. I've used Filmora for many years, but I've been fighting through Vegas Pro. I have a lot figured out, but figure it better for me to hire someone for this. Thanks Scott