Highlight an area on the screen

[Big_Stein]

Hey guys, its been a while since i have been on here. I've been busy with school, but now i'm done. Thats right i'm a college graduate. Hopefully this means i can spend more time with the dvx. Anyways im trying to put together a highlight tape for a basketball player and was wondering how i can put a marker on the screen to indicate which player is the one to watch. I have seen circles and arrows used before, either one will work. If anyone knows how to do with with vegas i would appreciate the help.

Thanks

[scharky]

There are several ways that you could probably do it, here is the way that I would do it. Make a duplicate track of the clip that you want to have the highlight, and put it right above the other one. Now use the levels, or curves to adjust the brightnes of the entire clip to the highlight brightness that you want. Finally add the cookie cutter effect to the top clip. here you can adjust the position, size and feathering of whatever shape you want to be on top of the player. You can also keyframe the position and size to follow the player.
Hope this helps.

[David Jimerson]

Keep in mind that it will be a frame-by-frame process. Lengthy.

[Spot]

I use a gradient for this, creating an elliptical or rectangular grade, then blanking/making transparent, the hole that I'd like to work with. Easy to keyframe, and fast render times.

[J.R. Hudson]

Can we not just create an image in Photoshop (of an arrow) and keyframe that track to pan/crop its way around?

[David Jimerson]

You could do that without going out of Vegas. Spot's Vegas tutorials show some nifty tricks for doing little animations totally within the app itself, including arrows, rockets, etc . . .

[Gary_Kleiner]

Just use the text generator: the letter 'o' for a circle, or the arrow characters in the Dingbats font, then keyframe it with track motion.

Gary

[Big_Stein]

Thanks alot for all the advice, ill let u know how it comes out

[JohnT]

College will be officially over on Sat at 3pm BigStein. Welcome to the real world.