Transitions and dissolves between stills etc

donp wrote on 7/4/2003, 11:18 AM

This may be a basic subject bit I have searched the forum archives and read the tops and tricks but I'm still a little confused on how to get the dissolves to be longer, not to go by in a fraction of a second as mine do right now. In Studio 7, I could drag and drop into the timeline as in Vegas but in Studio the transition (dissolve) could be dragged out to a longer duration and was its own frame. I did not need another application (Excalibur) to set the dissolve length.

Now that I am using Vegas and editing existing video slide shows that have no transitions, I'm having to split the frame and insert them insert them. They become part of the presceding or the next frame. When I tried to "drag them out" the frame came with it, or was reduced in size when dragged the other way. Is there a simple way it insert an transition, wipe or fade etc and and get it to dissolve over 1 to 1.5 seconds max. So far when I have gone into the properties of the transition and adjused what I thought was the length of time, it seem to have no effect and that transition still goes by in blink of an eye, way too fast.

I hope I have explained what my problem so it can be understood. I will be happy to provide anymore information as needed.

Comments

swampler wrote on 7/4/2003, 11:29 AM

Hi Don,

For dissolves, just overlap the edges of the video by however much you want the transition to last. If you want a 2 second transition, then move the trailing clip to the left so that it overlaps the previous clip by 2 seconds.

I haven't messed with the other transition types much.

Hope that helps.

Steve

TorS wrote on 7/4/2003, 11:53 AM

The other transitions extend the same way.
Tor

Chienworks wrote on 7/4/2003, 1:07 PM

I'm beginning to suspect that Vegas makes fades and transitions so incredibly easy that people used to other editing software have a hard time figuring it out (LOL). They seem to want to do a lot more work than necessary.

Crossfades really are that simple: overlap the clips for the duration of the fade. Done. For other transitions, do a crossfade, then drag & drop the transition you want onto that fade area on the timeline. Done.

kameronj wrote on 7/4/2003, 1:41 PM

I agree with Chienworks....I think that transitions are sooooo easy to do - it flies right past folks sometimes.

Interestingly enough, when I started "playing" around with Vegas, transitions was what I spent the first few days toying with.

Depending on the desired affect, overlaying the clips is really easy. But recently I have been getting into more "complicated" transitions and do more of an A/B track converstion where the transitions are more manual than automagic.

It just takes a little bit of playing around and thins will fit right into play for ya.

jeffcrow wrote on 7/4/2003, 2:59 PM

I have had problems like donp326 is having, but could not consistently reproduce it so I moved on. When I tried to troubleshoot donp326's problem, the one I am having appeared again. I think I may have figured out part of the problem, but maybe others can help with the second part. And maybe all of this will help donp326.

Every now and then, when I drag a transition to a cut and drop it, it appears as if nothing happened. But I found that if I zoom way in, that the transistion did indeed get inserted, but was only 1 frame wide. I didn't notice if this happened everytime, but at least sometimes when I dragged it out longer, it was applied only to one event or the other, meaning say it was attached to the second event, the first would end abruptly and the the second one would start with the tansition applied to it. I usually can't get it to do it again on purpose to try and figure out what is going on. Maybe someone knows?

Another problem I was having I think I figured out while trying to troubleshoot this for donp326: I noticed when dragging in transitions like this that every now and then it would be applied to the left or right event, but not both. I also noticed when I hovered the crusor over the cut, and it displayed the square with the + in it, that if I moved the cursor just a little, that I would get a cursor with 3 overlapped squares and a +. I could not find in the maual what this 3 squared cursor was trying to tell me.

Today though I discovered after zooming way in that there was a 1/4 frame gap between the two events. If I hovered over the left event, I got the single square cursor and the transition would apply on to the left, and if I hovered over the right event I got the 3 squares and the transition only applies to that event. If I closed the gap, everything worked as expected, and I could not get the 3 square cursor to show. So that appears to explain what was going on with that, I will have to watch that more closely to see if the gap is there each time I am seeing this.

Now back to the question, why does the transition get created only 1 frame long sometimes. The cut to overlap setting was set to 22 frames, so that wasn't the problem. Any ideas?

swampler wrote on 7/4/2003, 3:07 PM

I guess that's why Kelly says to overlap the clips first, then apply the transition. It eliminates problems of gaps and barely overlapped clips.

donp wrote on 7/4/2003, 10:38 PM

Thanks to all of you I will give all suggestions a try, I'm still in the learning curve so bear with me.

Again thanks.