Observation about render speed and PIP.

[Chris B]

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.

[Steve Grisetti]

I know of no other way to create the circular effect you're trying to create than the way you're doing it, Chris. At least if you're doing what I think you're doing. Which is the way I recommend doing it in my Vegas Movie Studio books.

Although, if you're concerned about tying up a whole track just to do this one effect, it might be wise to create this sequence as a separate project and then embed this project in the timeline of your finished movie. Make sense?

As for smart rendering -- yes, you're right. You can't smart render when you've added effects to your movie because the program must create this new video based on the original video and the effects.

But in addition, I'm not sure it's possible to smart render AVCHD even if you add no effects to it. At least not in Vegas. The nature of virtually all video editing programs is that they don't use AVCHD as the entire workflow (unlike, say, DV-AVIs, which do remain the same data throughout a DV project). I might be wrong, but I believe all AVCHD is interpretted and then output as fresh AVCHD or whatever in Vegas (as well as Premiere, Final Cut, etc.)

[Paul LS]

Vegas Pro smarted rendered AVCHD in releases prior to 9.0c... ever since that release it has not.

And I have always thought it was wasteful to use a whole track.. but I think using the track motion is the only way to achieve what you want.

[RJ Johnston]

Instead of track 1 and 2, you could have the video on track 1, then use the mask tools in the Event Pan/Crop window to create a circular mask. You have to check the Mask option near the bottom of the Event Pan/Crop window, and then select that heading as well. Then use the pen tools to create a circle like you do in Photoshop. Good luck with that.

That way when you size and move the PIP, the mask automatically resizes and moves as well.

Anyway, don't know if that would help, but that's what came to mind.

[Chris B]

RJ - Thanks! - That's exactly what I needed. That tool/process is very powerful - I can't believe it's only a half a page in the manual!

Steve- sorry for confusion. Vegas didn't smart render the HDV video I had when it should have (in my opinion - there was nothing in the tracks above) - The timings were for a separate AVCHD video.