Comments

ritsmer wrote on 5/5/2008, 9:17 AM
Welcome as Vegas user - hope You will get many good hours with it.

You will see, that the learning curve is pretty steep.

Now to the question: If you want to overlay your movie with a still then just put the still onto the timeline over the movie. If you want the still to fill up only part of the finished picture then you can use the event Pan Crop feature (the little square to the right in the still on the timeline). You can even make the still more or less transparent by placing the cursor near the top of it. When the cursor turns into a little hand just draw the opacity line downwards.
If you want to pause the movie then just put the cursor on it where you want to pause it and click once and type s (for split) now the movie is in two parts and you can draw the right part to the right to make space for the still...

There are many more possibilities - but most fun comes from trial and err... ah - sorry: success.

Have fun.
Tim L wrote on 5/5/2008, 10:08 AM
In the preview window, above the preview screen, there is a little floppy disc icon. If you click this, it will save a .PNG or .JPG of whatever is currently in the preview window. A window will pop up asking you for the filename you want to save it as, and what type (PNG or JPG).

For best results, undock your preview window by grabbing it at the vertical row of dots on the left side, and dragging it until it "undocks" and becomes its own window. Then set the preview to "BEST FULL". Finally, locate the exact frame you want to save, using ALT-LeftArrow or ALT-RightArrow to step a frame at a time, if necessary. Click the icon and save the still frame.

To put your undocked preview window back where it was, grab the title bar at the top of the window and push the window back to where it was. It should dock itself again once you get it down there.

NOTE: "Best Full" is needed to get a full size, high quality still frame. But, you can actually set it to Best Full even if you don't undock the window, and you will get the full image in your saved file even though you don't see it all in the preview window.

Tim L
Chienworks wrote on 5/5/2008, 3:09 PM
Undocking isn't necessary. Best/Full will save a full resolution still even if you only see the middle portion of it in the preview window.
Tim L wrote on 5/5/2008, 4:55 PM
Yeah, I agree Kelly. I alluded to this in my last paragraph, but the more I think about it, the more I am include to suggest NOT undocking the window, unless you need the image really big so that you can see some specific detail in the frame. (Undocking and moving windows around can be confusing for a beginner, since the preview window can accidentally end up docked in with your tabbed windows, like the media pool, Video FX, etc.)

So...
1. Keep your preview window on one of the "Auto" settings (Like Good/Auto) so that the full image is scaled down to fit into whatever size your preview window is.

2. Locate the frame you want a snapshot of, then momentarily set your preview window to BEST FULL. This will display your image in full 1:1 pixel size on the screen, but you will probably only see the middle section of your image. Don't let this worry you.

3. Click the floppy disc icon and save the file (PNG is generally recommended). Vegas will save the whole image, even though you are only seeing part of it in your preview window.

4. Once you've saved the file, set your preview back to GOOD/AUTO, or whatever you normally use, so that the full image is displayed when you resume editing.

Tim L
sheelz321 wrote on 5/6/2008, 8:52 AM
Thanks for that info - VMS has a different interface from my usual program (NOT WMM! lol)