Vegas Sabers - Creating the Effect

Now we get into creating the actual effect. This is all done in Vegas Video, but the principles are the same in any editing application.

Setting Up the Timeline

The basic compositing model in Vegas is easy: higher tracks are overlayed on lower tracks. So start by inserting a saber image into Track 1 over your raw footage in Track 2, as pictured below.

You can see in the Preview window on the right that the saber already has a properly transparent background. I'm going to show you how to put the glow on it first, since it looks cool, but we'll turn the glow back off when we do the animation to improve the responsiveness of the Preview window. The glow we are going to add is going to be a track-level effect, meaning that a glow will be added around the alpha channel (transparent area) of everything in the track.

To add a glow:
1. Click the Track Motion button on the saber layer (Track 1).
2. In the Track Motion dialog, select the Glow option (near the bottom).
3. Adjust the parameters.

You can do whatever you'd like, but in the example below, I've adjusted the X Offset to -2.0, the Feather to 50.0 and the Intensity to 0.70. Of course I dragged the color picker around to get a pleasing shade of blue.

Before we go on, I want to get you familiar with the Video Preview window. The window operates in "real time" and displays all changes you make more or less instantly. This is highly dependent upon the speed of your computer and the complexity of the rendering. We're performing some pretty heavy duty compositing here, so the project will not play back in real time without significant compromises, such as a much lower frame rate. In order to improve the speed that the preview is redrawn, change the Video Preview window's quality setting from Best Quality (as pictured above) to Preview Quality or even Draft Quality while animating.

Tracking the Motion with Track Motion -->