How to hide something with Sony Vegas Movie Studio?

[sdsumike619]

See the attached screenshot. I need to hide the Volume 2. In other words, make it look like it was never there. I tried to do it with just a solid color media generator and use the eye dropper to match it, but that didn't look good because there's more than one color in the blues. I could do it in Photoshop with the clone brush pretty easily, but this is not a photo, it's video.. My skill level is beginner with this software. I'm using Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum v11. Thanks..

[Steve Stepoway]

This is why movies with heavy vfx work need so many people to paint things out frame by frame.

But here's something that may work for you, since this is a very simple case. Save a still frame in an uncompressed format that supports transparency (like a png). Then in photoshop (or gimp, or your favorite), copy a section of the background of the right size and shape to cover the part you want to hide, and paste that into a new image, where the rest of the new image is transparent. Feather the edges of that part of the background. Take that new image and put it onto a video track above the existing one, and position it with the pan/zoom tool to cover the "volume 2. If the text moves, you'll have to keyframe the mask to keep it in the right place.

If this doesn't work well enough for you, then render your video as a still image sequence, and paint it out frame by frame. And hope that your video isn't too long. And plan on spending a lot of time doing it.


Steve

[Cornucopia]

You don't even need to feather/blur stuff. All you'd have to do is use a median filter with a pixel granularity of ~5-10 pixels or more.

It looks like this (took longer to do the fill than the median filter):


Scott

[budwzr]

Take Scott's color chip and put it on the track below your video, then on the video use the Cookie Cutter to punch a hole.

[sdsumike619]

I'm just now getting around to this. I downloaded the color chip, put it on the timeline on a track below the video, and found the cookie cutter tool. But now I'm stuck, I don't understand how to use it. When I apply the cookie cutter effect, it applies it to the whole timespan of the video. I'm still messing with it though to try and cover up what I need to cover.. One thing I can't figure out how to do is rotate the cookie cutter. I tried rotating using the track motion tool,as well as the pan/crop tool for the track that the chips is on, but the thing won't rotate.

[budwzr]

On the event with the text, open the cookie cutter, not on the track.

In Cookie Cutter, activate keyframes. Use the keyframes to turn the Cookie Cutter on and off.

Another way to do this is to split the clip at the points where you want the Cookie Cutter, then you don't need keyframes.

In Vegas, ALL tools can be local or global depending on where you invoke them and your needs. You don't have enough experience yet to appreciate this, but you will one day.

Vegas Baby!

[sdsumike619]

yeah that's what I did. Well, the cookie cutter thing was frustrating me to no end, so I'm just putting the chip on its own track above the video and then I'm using the track motion to size it and cover the text. I hope it looks good when I'm finished.

[budwzr]

That couldn't have been what you did, or it would have worked fine. If a simple tool like Cookie Cutter frustrates you, then video editing may not be for you, so I'm glad you found a workaround.

[sdsumike619]

I found the cookie cutter to be impossible to work with. It wouldn't do anything that I wanted to do. I couldn't figure out how to rotate the shape. At least if I just put the picture by itself on the timeline above the other track, then I can use the track motion to size and rotate it so it covers the area I want to cover. It doesn't look perfect, but it'll do..