What is this "chienworks site"? I've checked out chienworks.com and don't see anything regarding SOFO or file sharing, which seems to be how people refer to it in here.

His site is http://www.vegasusers.com/

Mystery solved! Muchas gracias.

Yeah - good init? - I've always been after a scratchy look to my video work - Something paintily something a bit more organic. I want to be able to draw stuff and either film, scan or draw on the TFT screen [ that's a joke -yeah?] But yes, once i did it a whole load os stuff came to mind - oooohhh I love this Vegas.

Okay, here we go.

You will notice the final clip shows a complete banner - yeah? It has the whole banner - yeah? Right, I imported it into Microsoft Draw - MD; I "cropped" out the long shape of "Floriade"; then I "removed" the pale areas of these letters by using MD "Erase by Colouor" - this is a very simple search and destroy function; saved the final piece as a PNG file. What I had then was a long "Floriade" with transparent areas where the "fill" of the letters had been.

This I then imported into V4 into Media Pool. I plopped it onto its own track. Put a moving piece of video underneath it and that was that!

This means I can now, litereally sketch out graphic concepts; scan and repeat the process. Lots and lots and lots of options are starting to come to mind . . . .

I'm gonna use this approach when we have our London's User Group meeting this Sunday - can't wait.

Again thanks for the appreciation - go have some fun!

Grazie

Confusied are you saying you did this in pinnacle 7 or 8 and then saved it as png and imported to vegas 4?

Bear, no need for Pinnacle. All you need is a photo editing program that can save with "transparency" or "alpha channel" or "mask channel". This doesn't work with JPEG files, but it can be used with PNG, GIF (not the best choice), TIFF, and Targa. Wherever the alpha channel is full, the image is solid. As the alpha channel decreases, the image becomes more transparent. In Grazie's example, he set the transparency to coincide with the letters. This image was then panned over the video using either Pan/Crop or Track Motion. The transparent letters allow the background video to show through.

GIF is good for logos, line art, or solid colors but it is awful for photographs. It has a very limited palatte range though (maximum of 256 colors) and only allows one single color to be transparent. There's no gradation of transparency so you can't have GIF images that are partially transparent in varying degrees. However, it's a small simple format that does have it's uses and it's supported in almost any image creating/editing/viewing software out there.

Thanks .. I didn't think it would be that simple. I guess you can do same with the erase/magic erase or whatever tool in Photoshop. Just need the imagination ...
Cheers,
Tom

I just changed my profile to link to vegasusers.com instead of chienworks.com. That may help lessen the confusion ;)

The next thing I'm gonna try is multiple trannies. Lots of "messy" type stuff to get a very jittery paintily effect. I'm thinking of scanning in real objects or even use still captrued stuff from my XM2 which takes remarkably high def pics. - OOooohhhh where's the Coffee Kelly! It's Gonna be a looonnngg nite tonite! "Somebody Stop Me!"

Grazie

Thanks, Chienworks, for explaining the detail - Yer know me too well by now - I dooo get carried away - don't I? - Thanks again - yer a mate!

Grazie