Sony vegas 10 clip wont reverse!!

[Domiel]

Ok this is driving me crazy. Spent the whole day masking a moving sea lion which worked great. Put it on a white background and wanted to make it walk forward and then backward. First part works fine, but when i duplicate the clip and select reverse nothing happens...He just keeps walking forward ignorant of my swearing and yelling at him......Does anyone have ANY idea why its not reversing? To be sure i its not a setting on the timeline or anything i tried reversing the original clip before i masked it which worked fine.
Dying to know if anyone has a solution to this....

[budwzr]

You have to render it out first, then it will reverse.

[Domiel]

Ahh crap, is it always like this if you add masking?

Btw budwzr are you really located at the Galapagos at the moment? Asking cause its kinda funny since the video I'm editing is from there!

[budwzr]

Yes, I discovered something strange here, the finches are different on different islands Hahaha, just kidding, no I'm in LA.

Anyway, no you don't always have to pre-render a mask, but to reverse it you do. The reason is because "reversing" works on the event itself, not any edits you make.

IOW, the mask has to be "flattened" first so the keyframing can get reversed too.

P.S. You only need to render the mask part w/fish, not the whole video. Basically you're creating a finished animation that can then be manipulated.

[Domiel]

Yes, I discovered something strange here, the finches are different on different islands Hahaha, just kidding, no I'm in LA.

Hehe too bad could have sent you out filming more of them Sea lions!! Cant ever get enough of those..Those finches all look the same to me tho You've been to the Galapagos tho?

P.S. You only need to render the mask part w/fish, not the whole video. Basically you're creating a finished animation that can then be manipulated.

Thats exactly what i want to do but i don´t understand what you are saying:P; e.g how do i render the mask part w/fish(don't understand what you are saying here)
Been spending a couple of hours now messing around with the finished render with croma keys fx effects, traveling mattes, mask generator etc and its getting hairy....

[budwzr]

OK, sorry, it's a sea lion, not a fish.

Anyway, I'm assuming you have an animated mask that follows and cuts out a sea lion's movements and that the mask is keyframed, right?

Wait a minute! Hold the fort!

Are you using a bezier mask? If it's a "paper matte" mask, then use a green solid color instead of white and chroma key that, then use track motion to flip it around or whatever.

[budwzr]

Clarification:

Bezier Mask: Is a built in effect found in the pan/crop window and masks onto a transparent background and is essentially ready to go.

Matte: Is you take a snap and cut out a stencil in a graphics program and bring it back into Vegas as a PNG Still. The matte has the extra step of needing to be chroma keyed to get a transparent background.

Both can then be animated against other tracks via Track Motion.

Bezier is a tighter and "shape-able" mask, Matte is only really good for simple or artistic masking.

[Domiel]

Ahh ok you got me exited there, what I have is indeed a Bezier mask. I´ve masked the sea lion (like 150 times) with a key frame for every time it moves, so yes your assumption is right. Thought you meant i could render the video with an Alpha channel(that means transparent channel, right?) in some kind of animation format, since it seems i loose the alpha channel when i render it to video, or am i mistaken here?

[racer-x]

I believe budwzr said to copy and paste your clips into a new Video track and then use "Track Motion" to reverse all clips on that track.........

You could (if you want) export the clips with Alpha Channel if you export via Quicktime7 and use 32-bit PNG as export format. You'll end up with an .mov (lossless) that you can then import into Vegas. You'll need to go into the clip properties and tell it to use the alpha channel to make it transparent on the timeline. Use "Strait Unmatted".

[Domiel]

AHA! Awesome the PNG format is what what i needed! Hmm seems that i don't have the format installed though:

Is there any way to get it?

[racer-x]

Install the latest version of Quicktime Alternative. Get it in the tools section on this site.

It should then look something like this after you click "Advanced" button:

[Domiel]

Pure awsome-ness thx a bunch will try that!

[poisondeathray]

In racer-x 's screenshot it should say 32bpp under compressed depth , not 24 ( = 32 bits per pixel, meaning 8 red, 8 green, 8 blue, 8 alpha)

other options: ut video codec and huffyuv have both an rgba mode

[Domiel]

Roger on that, and thanx!

[budwzr]

Sorry, the render first suggestion was a mistake. My brain was on a still.

You should be able to just use track motion straight away, and reverse the direction off-frame then come back in.

I've never tried what racer-x is offering, but it sure sounds good. I learned something too.

Thanks

[racer-x]

Ya, my bad. I was in a hurry and forgot to set Compression Dept to 32bpp for the screenshot..........

I use this method all the time to create my animated lower 3rds and such. It works well.

[budwzr]

Yeah, that's cool.

That only works on uncompressed right?

Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGI8jMdlpRE

[Domiel]

I rendered a PNG from a compressed MTS file and it worked flawlessly..

[budwzr]

Yeah, I mean the PNG has to be uncompressed, right?

I tried it with compression and it doesn't have the alpha channel anymore. The codecs PDR mentioned are uncompressed too, so I guess so.

Yeah, that's pretty handy, you can make up some of those ahead of time and throw 'em in as needed for eye candy, watermarks, whatever.

Nice!

[racer-x]

In reality, you are compressing the images as 32-bit PNG image sequence. It's considerable smaller file size than Uncompressed RGB32, but it still produces a large file size compared to HDV or AVCHD. It works well when you want to do animated overlays.

[poisondeathray]

Yeah, I mean the PNG has to be uncompressed, right?

I tried it with compression and it doesn't have the alpha channel anymore. The codecs PDR mentioned are uncompressed too, so I guess so.

PNG = lossless compression , you can have PNG without alpha (RGB) or with alpha (RGBA)

Huffyuv and UT video codec are also forms of lossless compression, they have RGBA modes as well. The benefit is they use AVI containers, more compatible on PC's. Also playback is much smoother - PNG in MOV renders very slowly and the PNG MOV reader is poorly multithreaded. UT video codec is highly optimized multithreaded - on a i7 or better you can usually get real time playback

[budwzr]

Ah Hah! That's even more icing on the cake.