Vegas Sabers - Track Motion

It's already looking pretty good. You should be pretty excited and motivated at this point, because the rest of this is just tedious hand animation and keyframing.

Using the Track Motion dialog

The Track Motion dialog is pretty easy to work with and the basic principle is to resize and rotate the entire saber track to position it correctly over the stick in your footage. It should look something like this:

Track Motion Pointers:
- Turn off the Glow (makes previews faster and saber easier to position)
- Set the Video Preview window to Preview Quality (again, for faster previews)
- Turn Off the Lock Aspect Ratio feature (you'll usually want to only squash the length and not the width when resizing)
- Turn On the Sync Cursor feature (more on this later)

Grabbing the position box (central blue/gray box) will allow you to reposition the saber. The eight blue corner boxes allow you to resize the saber: the four corners modify X and Y together, while the other four only change one axis at a time. When you position the cursor just outside any of the four corner boxes, the cursor changes to a circular arrow, which will allow you to rotate the saber.

Keyframing -->