OK - so I'm still trialling Vegas Pro 11 - I think there's going to be a purchase made - anyhow I am doing some simple work with the "year" video - and I wanted to do a Picture in Picture bit. -Now - rather than a straight square - which is easy enough I wanted to use a mask and make a rounded picture. So - Mask on one track, video on the next - but I also wanted to scale and move the picture. At this point I feel a picture is in order.
So - I've got the mask on track 1, the masked video on track 2, titles on track 3, title background on track 4 and main video on track 5.
Track 1 has the "parent track motion" scaled and translated to move the image to the corner of the screen.
So - a question and an observation.
Question - It seems an awful waste to use a track for a single effect - yes I know you can keyframe etc. but it just doesn't seem "easy". The only reason I need to use the track is for the "parent" transform. I suppose I could apply the same transform to the mask and the video - but then I have to apply to both - is there a way to apply it to one track and have the other "follow". I.e. - is there a better way to do this?
Observation - I noticed that when I exported the video Vegas didn't seem to "smart render". This seemed to be caused by the mask tracks on the timeline - even if there was no video "above" the clip at the time. I got round this by making the video with mask a sub-project and inserting this in the timeline. Thus there's no need for a mask. Out of interest I checked the rendering performance difference to AVCHD with a sub-project vs a mask in the main project and found a minutes video (that didn't have the PIP effect) rendered in 1:39 with the overlay and 1:29 using the sub-project. Hope this helps someone.