Vegas Sabers - Keyframing Tips

You'll quickly get the hang of keyframing and will develop a rhythm before too long. Still, it would not be unusual to take an hour to do a second of video at first.

Keyframing Tips

• Occassionally you might want to reset the shape of the saber: Right-click the motion box and select Restore.
• You can copy and paste keyframes: Right-click a keyframe and select Copy, then move to the frame you want and Right-click>Paste. Multiple keyframes can be selected by holding the CTRL and/or SHIFT keys while selecting.
• Squashing the saber's height while leaving the width relatively unchanged when shortening the saber will give it the illusion of moving towards and away from the viewer. Try to accurately follow the size of the stick in all situations, even though there is a temptation to make it longer at times.
• The Arrow keys may be the easiest way to make small adjustments in the position of the saber.

Fore and Back

At times, a single saber may be in the foreground and at others in may be in the background. Since higher tracks in Vegas appear on top, you are going to have to rearrange the layers at different times. The easiest way to do this is to have one saber on tracks 1 and 3 with the other saber in between. The timeline looks something like this:

In A, the red saber in Track 3 is behind of the blue saber in Track 2. In B , the red saber is now in Track 1 and is therefore over (in front of) the blue saber, which remains on Track 2. This could have been done with only two tracks by simply switching the clips, but I found this method to be visually easier to organize and manage. Since you are probably keyframing one saber at a time, you may find that you need to move a saber sequence from one track to another. No worries, mate: you won't need to recreate all of that keyframe data. Split and move the event, then multi-select the keyframes you need and paste them into the other track.

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