No reason to do all that extra work and waste the CPU's resources.

Just crop your event the way you want it. If you only want the top right corner of the event in to show, just crop to that, for example. Then using the track motion tool, move it around and shrink it to the PIP you want.

Piece of pie.

And what neither Steve nor HappyFriar mentioned explicitly is that you should do the cropping with the Pan/Crop tool. Then you can move the cropped version wherever you want with Track Motion.

Leave it to Chienworks to cut right to the best and simplest solution.

Very good!

Have you tried using the Sony cookie cutter tool along with track motion to get your crop and PIP? Use the cookie cutter to feature the part of the clip you wish to highlight and then use track motion to position it on the screen where you want it to be. It would have to be on the track above the one you wish to be in full screen. I find that when I use crop/pan that the image degrades somewhat but by masking out what I don't want in the frame that it stays sharp and crisp.

Leave it to Chienworks to cut right to the best and simplest solution.

When someone says they're cropping it's assumed they'd use the crop tool. After all, nobody says "color correction" and uses the transition's. ;)

There are cropping and cropping...
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/cropping_an_image_with_vegas_pro

I still think an excellent and powerfully useful addition would be to have two separate frames in Pan/Crop: a cropping frame and a positioning frame. Technically we do have that now, it's just that they are the same frame and it's not possible to adjust them separately. This could continue to be the default behavior. However ... there should be a switch one could click that would allow them to separate and be independently adjustable. Then, in just the Pan/Crop tool, one could choose the desired crop AND position the resulting crop where one wants it in the frame.

This would eliminate most of the need for the Track Motion tool and all the degradation it causes. It would also effectively give us all the benefits of Track Motion on an event basis, an "Event Motion", if you will.

+1

Christian

PS: this idea could probably also eliminate the limitations the pan/crop tool has on resizing (or minimizing) of clips

So you're wanting a pan/crop tool, a track motion tool, and an event motion tool, where it does the same as track motion but on an event level only.

I like that idea. I don't want the track motion gone though, I use it quite frequently.

But you currently can have the pan/crop tool open at the same time as the track motion too. They're not in the same frame (unless Vegas 11/12 changed this, I'm still on 10).

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/5/8fln.jpg/[IMG=http://imageshack.us/a/img5/2534/8fln.th.jpg][/link]

Oh yes, no reason to eliminate Track Motion. Also, this new "event motion" i've dreamed up, being part of the Pan/Crop tool, would of course resample after resizing rather than before. That's one of the biggest failings of Track Motion.

I guess what i'm getting at is that with the Pan/Crop tool you can either Pan, *OR* Crop. You can't really do both effectively at the same time because the two functions interfere with each other. My addition would allow it to do both very handily.

Ok, I'll ask: why can't you pan AND crop at the same time effectively with the pan/crop tool? The track motion tool doesn't pan OR crop at all, it just move it around and/or resizes. With the image on the pan/crop window I have linked to above, I can crop down to the heads and pan around with no issues.

Or do you mean you can't move it around the Project space, you can only move it around the space provided by the resolution of the event (could be a 18megapixel size or a VGA pixel size, for example)?

I've never personally thought track motion should increase the resolution of the project because it's on a track wide resolution, but on event I always felt it should be 100% in the event resolution (similar to the audio: if you have a track audio FX, it plays back the project audio properties. If you have an event audio FX it uses the audio event's audio properties).

If you crop into an image, making it smaller than the frame, Vegas centers the result in the frame and you lose any ability to position it where you'd like.

If you want to be able to move the image around, you can't necessarily crop in to only a portion of it, as you have to have the 'cropping' frame somewhere around as large as the output frame or larger.

Another problem is that if the image aspect ratio doesn't match the output aspect ratio, panning too far away from center crops the image to the output aspect rather than the source aspect and you can end up with phantom black bars covering parts of the image. That's fine if you want to crop down to a shape that is the same aspect as the output frame, but you don't always want to do that.

The problem is that the single frame has to do double duty (well, triple, if you count aspect in addition to crop and position), and depending on whether you end up with the frame smaller than the image or not, you can't control both aspects of it. Allowing two separate frames with independent control would eliminate all these problems.

I ended up putting a copy of what I needed on a separate track. Used the (Pan)crop on it and then applied the track motion to that track. Adjusted the trk motion to about where I wanted it. I didn't know that track motion changes the picture quality.

Track Motion resamples the image twice. First, it resamples whatever is on the track to the project settings size. Then it performs the motion and image sizing you've got set up, and then resamples a second time to match the project settings size again.

Pan/Crop only does the second resampling, not the first.

If you crop into an image, making it smaller than the frame, Vegas centers the result in the frame and you lose any ability to position it where you'd like.

I use track motion to move images where I like (I will admit, when I first started using Vegas I tried using pan/crop to move the images around).

If you want to be able to move the image around, you can't necessarily crop in to only a portion of it, as you have to have the 'cropping' frame somewhere around as large as the output frame or larger.

If I have the "stretch to frame" option to "Yes" then it makes the longest side of the crop fit to the project settings (similar to a zoom). If I have it to "No" then it cuts out the image w/o zooming in at all. Normally I keep it on "Yes" and use the track motion to shrink it down as I used the pan/crop to crop out the stuff I don't want.

Another problem is that if the image aspect ratio doesn't match the output aspect ratio, panning too far away from center crops the image to the output aspect rather than the source aspect and you can end up with phantom black bars covering parts of the image. That's fine if you want to crop down to a shape that is the same aspect as the output frame, but you don't always want to do that.

That's nothing to do with the tool, just mixing different AR's in the same project. There's nothing outside the image so it doesn't show anything. I've only gotten this if I take my checkered "F" box and move it outside the media in the pan/crop window. I normally avoid it by using the pan/crop preset to the AR my project is and keeping that box inside the media in the pan/crop window. I've zoomed in/corrected dozens of hours of HD footage for SD delivery this way.

The problem is that the single frame has to do double duty (well, triple, if you count aspect in addition to crop and position), and depending on whether you end up with the frame smaller than the image or not, you can't control both aspects of it. Allowing two separate frames with independent control would eliminate all these problems.

I only use pan/crop for cropping and panning and use the track motion for all my positioning. I use the track motion for just that, motion of the track. This way I do control both aspects of it. I 110% agree an event level option would be a much welcomed feature, along with showing the onion skinning path AGAIN in the track motion/pan crop windows.

Track Motion resamples the image twice. First, it resamples whatever is on the track to the project settings size. Then it performs the motion and image sizing you've got set up, and then resamples a second time to match the project settings size again.

Is Vegas actually resampling twice? I was always under the impression that it was only resampling on what you use track motion for & the pan/crop resampling was separate. So if you used track motion you resamle once, if you use pan crop you resample again, if you use a FX it happens again, etc. Tracks, as far as I know, are always the project size, events are always the media size.

I'd be interested to hear how you handle pan/crop & motion situations in Vegas.