Animating Effects with Per-Parameter Keyframes in Sony Vegas Pro 11
In this tutorial you'll learn how to make the most of Vegas's new by-parameter keyframing capabilities for effects plug-ins that ship with Vegas Pro 11 using the new Sony Text & Titles plug-in as an example.
In this first installment of our series of tutorials on using the new features in Sony Vegas Pro 11, we're going to talk about an improvement that Sony has made to many of the video plug-in effects included with Vegas Pro, whereby you can now keyframe several individual parameters of those effects.
What is Keyframing?
Before we discuss some of the new elements of keyframing effects in Vegas Pro, I'd like to provide a little background on keyframing for those not familiar with the term. Keyframing is just a way of marking points in events or changes that happen over time to ensure that those changes occur smoothly rather than simply jumping from one state to another.
Douglas Spotted Eagle illustrates this pretty well in Vegas Pro 11 Editing Workshop, his new Vegas book that comes out in April. He equates keyframes in video to your timeline of the day. So for example, at 6 o'clock, you get up. At 6:30, you take a shower. At 7 o'clock, you go to work. All these things happen over time, rather than the instants at which you begin and end them.
While that may seem obvious in everyday life, in video, you need keyframes to make sure events happen gradually over time, and to exercise optimum control over the parabola of those events.
In this tutorial you'll learn how that translates into Vegas for effects and the changing of parameters for effects, and how to make the most of Vegas's new keyframing capabilities for effects plug-ins that ship with Vegas Pro 11.
Creating a Title in the Sony Titles & Text Plug-in
To illustrate the new keyframing-by-parameter capabilities, we're going to use one of the titlers that's in Vegas Pro 11. To begin, right-click on your timeline and select Insert Text Media from the menu that appears (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Select insert Text Media.
This opens the new Sony Titles and Text plug-in (Figure 2), which may be familiar to users of previous versions of Vegas Pro as the Legacy titler.
Figure 2. The Sony Titles and Text plug-in (formerly the Legacy titler)
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