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Insight: Making a Broodwar Movie Part III

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GeckoVOD Germany814 Posts January 20 2011 21:00 GMT #1 Welcome to the next part of my Sony Vegas How To. We already know a few of the basics. Like how to create a constant border, how to make our camera fly over scenes, how to zoom in or out. Now we're moving on. Text You're going to want at least some text in your movie. There are several types of text, we're starting out with the easiest things. To create a text you first have to select the general area you want to have the text in. To do this press the left button of your mouse, hold it and drag it along. Release the button once you marked the gap you want to have your text in. The tracks (and the gap you selected) now should be highlighted in a baby blue. Right click in the text and select „Insert Text Media“. The menue that now pops out is quite self explanatory. You can choose the font you want to have, make it bold or change its size. On the placement tab you can change the position of the text. This is useful if you want the text to show the player's names at the bottom of your movie. On the properties (not sure if it's this in English for I'm using the German version), you can select the text colour. The 'Tracking' option that is listed there is quite useful. If you set it to 2.00 at the start (with the anchor points) and to 1.00 at the end it makes a nice effekt. It's like a nicer zoom on your font. You can change the text with the anchor points. You can make the color to turn from white into blue, or make a shadow effect (can be found in the effects menue) move behind the text. Note: if you change the writing, there will be no transition like you would get if you change the text color. It would jump from one text like (Player A in second 1-4) to the next line (Player B in second 5-8). This is useful for kill counters later on. Like you would have a text at the top that counts how many kills a DT made during its raid. You can close the window once you set up all the options and changed it the way you want. You can always edit it if you right click on the text and choose „Edit Generated Media“. In addition, you can fade in/out the text and make zooms via the pan/crop menue like you can do with standard video files. The text can be moved along the video track with drag&drop. Scores / Credit Roll In most of the movies you can see a score in the outro, like you often see in hollywood films. The text there starts at the bottom and slowly runs to the top and vanishes there. You could do this with a standard text that is scrolled out with the Pan/Crop menue or use a different sort of text. Usually the second option is less work and qutie useful. This kind of text is called „Credit Roll“. To insert a credit roll you select again the general area in the tracks like described above. When you rightlick now you select „Insert Generated Media“. In the new window you select „Sony Credit Roll“. The options there are again quite easy to understand, this is why I won't say much about it. Note: when you use a latter box (constant border), you might have to change the Pan/Crop of the credit roll, since the text could screw at the top and the bottom of your final movie. A thing you have to try out. The speed of the text depends on its length and the amount of lines that are used. The more lines with less length make a text run faster, few words and a long credit roll make the text move slower. Transitions In the last blog I told you that standard video scenes can be faded in or out. When you do that a fading arc appears. While this looks good on texts, it sometimes gets annoying with scenes. You have to transition each scene into the next one. Sudden changes from one scene to the next one are disturbing for the viewer. Here come transitions into play. Transitions are grafic effects. They can be a flash, a shuffle of scenes or others. To create such a transition fade out one of your recordings in a video track. Now you can select the 'Transitions' tab in the options window or right-lick into the fading arc and select 'Transition' -> 'add different Transition' there. I recommend the 'Transitions tab' if it is available in your Vegas version, as it features at least a preview of what you will get. You can drag and drop the transition you want to have onto the fading arc. The symbol of the arc now changes to the transition you selected. Note that you have to try a little with the transitions. Flashes work only if they're used on the scene that's above the scene it should transition into. Most transitions do, coming to think about it, only if they're used on the scene that is on top of the upcoming scene. Transitions via Zoom The German movie maker Konni aka Retuh used zooms quite often to transition from one scene to the next one. It is a smart move, as it is quite easy to make. If a special building or unit is used or is the center of the action in two different scenes, you can transition from one scene to the next one with zooms via the Pan/Crop menue (Camera Menue). This is a little hard to understand at first. So, for example a Vulture raid is done around a Nexus with a mine blowing up and stuff like this. Konni would show the mine blowing up the eco and zoom in on the Nexus in the last 1-2 seconds of the scene, when the action is over. He did not use any fades, but put the next scene close to the first one that ended with a big zoom on the nexus. You couldn't see anything BUT the nexus. The next scene was a Protoss expansion getting raped by a load of cracklings and swarms. He know set the Zoom on the Nexus that is about to get raped in the first frame and zooms out in the next 1-2 seconds. This transition now looks quite neat, although no effects have been used so far. Always keep in mind that transitions are good, but some things can be done with the easiest and most basic mechanics in Vegas. Changing the Pace Changing the speed of a scene can be quite important and is really easy. You could either record your scene with fastest*2 if you want to run it faster, or simply change it in Vegas. I recommend the last for it's a lot better. You can set the speed to 110% for example, something you couldn't get with the replay options. To change the speed of a scene right click into that scene and select what is highlighted in the screen below. Again, I don't know the English expression :[ The line that is drawn now across your recording is a symbol for the speed. When you left click and hold down the CTRL button you can make the record slower or faster. You can double click into the line and create anchor points. With those you can make the scene to start at 100% and get it up to 150% at the end. When you place two anchors on top of each other you can make the speed jump. A few important sidenotes: First: when you make a scene slower or faster the recording needs to be in at least 40 f/s to avoid the lag in your final movie. If the scene was recorded on a lower framerate it starts to lag, especially on slow-motion settings. Second: Once you made a scene faster the recording will repeat. The yellow symbol shown in the screen above usually shows where the scene starts to repeat itself. You had to cut off the scene at that point to avoid a repetition. Split Screens There are scenes that can't be recorded easy. Boxer's famous tripple play for example. There were three drops on three expansions, all at the same time. No way you can capture this in a single shot. What you can do is: record all three of them one by one and place them next to each other in Vegas. In my example I will use only two recordings. Place both of them on top of each other. Then open the „Track Motion“: You know see a window that looks exactly like the pan/crop menue. And it does almost the same. It changes the position of the track. Which means that you can squeeze and replace it the way you want. For our example we had to squezze the square, so it's only 50% of the one we originally edited. Then we would drag it a little to the left (or right), so it only covers half of the available space. After that we would open the video track of the other scene and do exactly the same, with the only difference being to drag the square to the right (or left, depending on the first step). You now have a split screen. Note: you do change the whole track. If you place a scene in this track somewhere else it will be shown squeezed and dragged too. You can, however work with anchor points again, and resett it to its original purposes once the scene is done. This should be enough for today. I hope to see you soon for future things, as we're now done with the basics. In theory you should be able to edit a nice movie already.

2Pacalypse- Croatia9528 Posts January 20 2011 21:14 GMT #2 These are awesome! I bookmarked all the parts and am planning to putting it in use.

GreatFall United States1061 Posts January 20 2011 22:20 GMT #3 Dude fuck yes this is great. I've had Sony Vegas for years now and never used it to its full ability. This is going to help so much with my movies. Thanks man. I'll post them here when I'm done. Thanks!

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