aznfs wrote:...i use vegas 4/5 does anyone know how to make the piano key effect of vegas?
You've lucked out since I am working on a piano key AMV right now...now that I've been inspired by dwchang's amazing - or should I say, "Astounding!" - success with that and other video trickery.

(Your BS meter should be pegged about now.)
You've probably got the masks already, but for others who may not know, a piano key mask is the same as any other mask: a still picture with a white bar on a black background. I'm using PNG files that have a white bar on a transparent background, but as far as Vegas is concerned, it's the same, black or transparent.
These are the basics for Vegas:
1. Put your background clip on a track. This is what the key appears on top of.
2. Put the "key" clip on the track above the background. This will be the key image.
3. Put the key mask picture on a track above that one.
At this point you have three tracks stacked: from top to bottom, the key mask, the key clip, and the background clip.
4. At the far left side of the middle track, click the right-angle arrow symbol that is pointing up. This creates a child-parent relationship between the top two tracks. Put the timeline cursor on the key mask and you'll see the piano key effect in the preview window.
That's all there is to it. Some further tips:
a. Read the Help menu item called Compositing Video - Compositing and Masks for further info. They have some pictures that show how the parent-child thing works.
b. If your mask has any horizontal edges, be sure the add a few pixels of feathering to avoid flickering horizontal lines when you render to interlaced.
c. If all or most of your piano key points occur at the same interval in the music, set the default still image length
before you start placing the key masks on the timeline. You can do this at Options-Preferences-Editing-New still image length. You may still need to fine-tune the image durations, but this will get all of them in the ballpark.
d. The key masks can be made with any picture editor, including MS Paint. But it's better to use something that handles objects which you can copy and control by setting their sizes and locations precisely.
e. That last note suggests two different methods for creating the mask pictures. One method is to create a single picture, put copies of it on the (top) track, then use the Video Event Pan/Crop window to set the horizontal location of the key for
each one of these events. The other method is to create a different still pic for each different location, in effect using the picture editor instead of the video editor to locate the keys. You can name the files after the musical notes if you know what they are.
I'm using that second method since I've mapped out exactly how many keys I want and where I want them. It's a lot less trouble than doing motion and placement settings for a couple of hundred still pictures (although ctrl-C copies would simplify this significantly).
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That's the straightforward method, but Vegas also has its own generated media which can be used to do the same thing. I won't go into the details since you can experiment with these to see if they work for you.
Click the Media Generators tab in the lower right window (if it's not there, click View-Media Generators).
a. Select Color Gradient - most of these are presets for a general purpose image creator. Difficult to use, but do-able.
b. Select Checkerboard - drag Split Screen on the timeline and experiment with the control sliders. "Checkerboard" is a generic tool that makes more than just that. Although a checkerboard mask animated to the beat might be kind of cool. Or not.
