Sony Vegas 8 Pro question

[ingeborgdot]

I have been using Vegas 8.1 pro for a couple of months now but still have a great deal to learn. I have a couple of questions about some things. Is there an add on that I can get to spruce up the menus a little bit. Animate maybe?
Also, I am planning on adding still pictures to a highlight video and was wondering how I can find out what to do to get this to work. I have not found it in the manual.
I would also like to animate the titles a little at the beginnings of the highlights also. I have not yet figured out how to get pro titler to work yet. Add ons that make vegas work better?

[guns1inger]

There are a few plugins for Vegas, but you really don't need much.

I don't get exactly what you are after, but here goes.

Any decent authoring tool that produces good results requires you to do most of the leg work. This means you have to plan out the design up front, create all the assets in whatever tools are necessary, and then use the authoring tool to assemble them. If you want an authoring tool to create fancy menus for you, then be prepared to have your video re-encoded unnecessarily, and to have all your menus look like canned, template driven menus. In short, buy a Mac and iDVD.

DVD Architect, while not my favourite authoring tool, is certainly capable of doing motion menus. Just create the animated clips in Vegas and use those as menu backgrounds. I don't use DVDA for authoring, but I do use Vegas to create, either entirely or in part, any motion backgrounds required for menus.

Drag and drop still images to the time line just like a video. Drag to the required length. Use Event Pan and crop and Track Motion if you want to move them around, or do the Ken Burns thing.

I usually create titles outside of Vegas. I am still using Pro 7, as 8 added nothing I needed. Either learn Pro-titler (look at the tutorial videos provided by Sony) or look elsewhere.


If you just want to use plugins to do everything for you then you have chosen the wrong package. You should have gone for the Premiere CS3/4 Suite. Then you could use Premiere and After Effects and all the plugins under the sun. Of course you also have to put up with a lot of crashing and the bundled authoring tool is Encore, but you can have everything.

If you take the time to learn your tools, and to plan out what you are trying to achieve, you will find that you really don't need many plugins at all (I have about 6 freeware plugins for Vegas and that is it). Most of what you need is right in front of you, once you know how to use it. And that comes from doing.

[ingeborgdot]

Thanks. I don't have any plug-ins at this time so you are ahead of me on that for sure. What plug-ins do you have and do you feel they are necessary for me? I still have a lot to learn like I said but am wondering when you say you create animated clips in Vegas and use them as backgrounds I am not sure what you mean there, my ignorance is showing and I apologize for that.
What do you use for authoring?
Ken Burns?