Whatever happened to paths?

farss wrote on 5/7/2008, 5:22 AM

Anyone remember back in the V4 days we had paths in something?
I was just thinking about this and how many of the great tools we have would be so much easier to use if we could see the path they follow when we animate them.

Simple example. Try animating a bezier mask. Once you get a few tracks of these happening it's really hard to keep track of where you're going. Scrubbing the T/L is slow in HD, you just loose the plot visually. If we could display a path for each point on the curve I think the task would be far easier.

Bob.

Comments

DJPadre wrote on 5/7/2008, 5:51 AM

yup, i remember paths all too well.. was brilliant when lining up pans for slideshows or workign with composites.
It was one reason i hung onto v4 for so long.. I also remember having rulers in pan crop tool...

I also rememebr where pan and crop used to animate along that path and it was fine when scrubbing, worked much like Matrox effects, one 2 3 keyframes, see the path, whammo, its working..

dunno why they got rid of all this, i rememebr bring ing this up when v5 or v6 was released... lol

JohnnyRoy wrote on 5/7/2008, 6:03 AM

They got rid of the paths when track motion added 3D. The paths make sense for 2D motion but for 3D they would be deceiving since you don't have a perspective view in Vegas (which is needed to really see where things are going in 3D space). It would have been nice of the paths remained in 2D view since there is a switch that you must press to go into 3D mode but they took it out. I miss it too now that you mention it. It was a real help.

jr

Rory Cooper wrote on 5/7/2008, 6:08 AM

I am hoping that one day soon we can import paths so instead of tracking and manually moving paths all you have to do is import from your graphics editor and past
Maybe every 30 frames and past the new path and Vegas will do the tweening as long as the node no. stay the same this should be quite easy

O well back to reality

Rory

Grazie wrote on 5/7/2008, 6:13 AM

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=2958222004[/link]

Rory Cooper wrote on 5/7/2008, 7:08 AM

We are moving backwards here folks please put it back

Very interesting

Rory

TheHappyFriar wrote on 5/7/2008, 7:11 AM

They got rid of the paths when track motion added 3D. The paths make sense for 2D motion but for 3D they would be deceiving since you don't have a perspective view in Vegas (which is needed to really see where things are going in 3D space).

http://img370.imageshack.us/my.php?image=4windowtrackmotionbg1.jpg[/link]

I see 4 views there & a perspective. Countless 3d editors show motion curves in all 4 views for ages. no reason vegas couldn't.

johnmeyer wrote on 5/7/2008, 10:25 AM

Yes, as Grazie points out, this has been asked for many times. Clearly it is never coming back. See here:

Keyframe now too marginal for still photo work

Keyframe smoothness NOT only spatial

ChrisMN wrote on 5/7/2008, 1:13 PM

I'm trying to have a clip move in a gentle curve or arc. So without the possibility of using paths, how does one go about doing this?.

johnmeyer wrote on 5/7/2008, 3:01 PM

Set smoothness to "100" for all keyframes. Create a few keyframes and let it rip. Should look pretty good.

You can also play around with the little circle at the center of the keyframe. Move that around and you will find that you can constrain the motion of the keyframes to some degree, although as I've written before, one of the key issues (pun intended) with keyframes is that Vegas does not give you independent control over spatial and temporal moves: one keyframe handles both.

I posted about this a few years ago:

Keyframe smoothness NOT only spatial

TheHappyFriar wrote on 5/7/2008, 6:45 PM

I'm trying to have a clip move in a gentle curve or arc. So without the possibility of using paths, how does one go about doing this?.

You couldn't edit paths, it just displayed them for you. So you could visually see where the frames would be ahead of time.

ChrisMN wrote on 5/8/2008, 6:37 AM

Thanks johnmeyer for the info.

DJPadre wrote on 5/8/2008, 7:54 AM

well heres the thing, they may have moved paths into the 3d track motion, but theyve stuffed those of us who want paths on a event as opposed to a full track...