I could probably think of hundreds of situations for using a third track.

You may have individual videos of three different people involved in the same conversation. You could place each video on it's own track and use Pan/Crop to arrange all three to be visible in smaller windows on the screen at once.

You might have a background video filling the screen and two smaller windows of narrators on the screen at the same time.

A travel video could be showing the scenic location full screen on one track, a map inset in a smaller window on another track, and the host speaking about the location inset in a smaller window on yet another track.

Track one could be used as a mask via ChromaKey to block out certain parts of track two allowing those parts of track three to show through.

Track one could contain titles, track two still images that don't fill the screen, and track three a full screen background image to fill out past the edges of the stills in track two so that you don't have plain black borders around the image.

... etc. ...

Of course, once you get hooked on multiple tracks you'll realize that three is a pretty small number. I've often used a dozen or more video tracks in Vegas to achieve exactly the visual effect i want.

How do I actually get the image smaller so I can combine it with a overlay ?
I'm in the pan/crop but I don't know how to get the actual video frame smaller.
Help?

Pan/Crop seems to be backwards at first until you get used to it. The dashed line you can drag around is the outer edge of the whole screen. It's not the edge of the clip that you are cropping. So, if you want to reduce the size of the clip, drag that dashed rectangle out larger. Once you've got it larger than the clip you can move it around to position the frame within that rectangle.

Thanks ! That is exactly what I needed !
I posted a new topic with this question as well. Thanks !

> Why does anyone want a third video track

Picture-in-Picture with a title overlay. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to render out my overlays in VideoFactory just to bring them back and add titles. You may also find a use for two overlay tracks when doing slide shows. Sometimes its nice to be able show a person today as a background image and then overlay several pictures of them growing up in smaller windows. The primary reason I upgraded from VideoFactory to Vegas 3 was for more video tracks. You’ll find lots of uses for it.

~jr

I'll throw in one more use I made earlier today. I needed a "lower third" text overlay (like you see on a talk show where they show the persons name). I wanted a colored background behind the text so I used the "fancy wooden board" orange background (in "Text and Backdrops" tab - Color Gradients section) then created my text using "Soft Shadow" text. Moved the orange background board to the Video Overlay track and the text to the Text track and viola I had the look I wanted.
Rick

I've used the three video tracks as well.

The first or main video track has close-up video of my son when he was first born. The top video track has his name (positioned at the top of the screen) fading in at the beginning of the clip, then fading out at the end of the clip. While his name is on the screen, the middle video track has his birth statistics (positioned at the bottom of the screen) fading in and out in succession (e.g. Date, Time, Weight and Length), each about 2 seconds in length.