Animating Effects with Per-Parameter Keyframes in Sony Vegas Pro 11

But for right now, let's just stick with Scale. It's important to turn on Sync Cursor to Media Timeline when you're doing this type of work, because that way, no matter where you are in either timeline-that is, the plug-in timeline or the Vegas timeline itself--they'll stay in sync with each other (Figure 8).

Syncing cursor to timeline to keep the timelines in sync

Adding Animation

So let's to start with the first keyframe (the solid white circle at the left edge of the Scale timeline in Figure 7). In your own projects, if you haven't added any animation to any parameter, you will see in the timeline here there's no other keyframes, so that's all you'll have.

To begin working with that first keyframe, let's bring our scale out until our text is as far off the screen as it can get (Figure 9). This is where we start.

Scaling the text off the screen to start

Move forward in time just a little bit. As you move your Scale slider, you'll see that the text moves, near and far, and you'll also see that the rubber band in the keyframe moves up and down (Figure 10).

With the text scaled down (and appearing farther away by comparison), the keyframe rubberband in the timeline also moves up and down between keyframes.

For this exercise, let's move it until the text is on the screen at about what we think is the right point, which is about 10% of its highest point. Then press Shift+B to render the event to RAM and see what that looks like.

You'll see in the clip above that the text kind of pushes on screen. Now, if you wanted the text to appear on screen faster, you could just click and drag your keyframe more towards the beginning of the event (Figure 11). Render that to RAM and see what it looks like, and you'll see that it pops on screen really fast. That's the kind of bold, dramatic entry we want, so let's keep it right there.

Moving the keyframe closer to the beginning of the Event so the text pops on screen faster

Animating Tracking

Now that we've animated the scale of our text, let's animate something else. Click on the Advanced button and click the Animate button next to Tracking (Figure 12). That brings up a new timeline and a new rubber band for the tracking parameter.

Animating the Tracking parameter

Now, notice that if you just start manipulating the slider that you start affecting the tracking of the text from the very beginning of the event. In this example we don't want to do that (Figure 13). We want the text to appear fully on screen first. So our second keyframe is going to be the exact same as the first. That way the tracking is held through the entire time that the text appears on screen.

Tracking the text before it fully appears on-screen

Once the text has appeared on screen, we'll add another keyframe here and we'll adjust our tracking (Figure 14). Experiment: Bring it out. Go a little bit further in time, then bring it back. Go a little further in time, then bring it in, and so on, just to see how the tracking is affected over time as you adjust your keyframe.

Adjusting the tracking after the text has fully appeared