Interestingly, I applied the pixelation via the track fx button and not by dragging the effect on to the track. This made no difference until I produced the video and everything but the pixelation was there.

I reread your tutorial, dragged the effect to the track and then did the producing again and everything worked. I don’t know if it’s a bug in Vegas or a feature I don’t understand, but thought I’d share why it didn’t work at first for me.

I seem to need to set “stretch to fill frame” to “Yes”, or otherwise the video produced has black bars at both top/bottom and sides. I don’t quite understand why, as I’m retaining a height of 1080 when I crop.

Thank you so much for your help.

Jeremy

Check back, and you’ll see that it’s Lock Aspect Ratio, not Maintain Aspect Ratio, that I reference. The Lock Aspect Ratio option is as icon on the far left of the Event Pan/Crop window — looks like a white rectangle with a smaller shaded rectangle and a small arrow in the lower right corner). It controls the actual crop region.

The “Maintain Aspect Ratio” option (under Source), on the other hand, determines how the original source video behaves in the project as a whole.

At any rate, Sony includes a preset that, if I understand you right, does exactly what you want. Near the top of the Event Pan/Crop window, click the dropdown box next to “Preset” and choose 4:3 Standard TV aspect ratio and see if that gets you want you want.
If not, try some of the other presets.

Good luck, write back if you have any questions, and thanks for reading!

Rob

What I’m trying to do is actually rather simpler than you describe. My Sony HF10 produces 16×9 AVCHD footage, but when the shot is of someone standing I often tend to get extraneous material that I need to cut out at the edges. I thought I could just crop it to 4×3 aspect ratio, throwing away one or both sides of the image. But I’m just learning Vegas Movie Studio and I can’t find a way to do it!

Thanks!

A couple things I can think of that might introduce a black area:

• Not duplicating the media. If you only have one copy, the cookie cutter will cut away part of it and leave emptiness.
• Muting one of the tracks with the media. On the track headers, toggle the icon that looks like a circle with a line through it to see if that helps.
• Setting one of the tracks’ compositing mode to something other than Source Alpha. On the track header, click the icon that looks like two film strips and see what’s selected.

If you’re still stumped, you can send me the project file at rob AT vegasvideohelp DOT com (no media files necessary, just the VEG or VF if you’re using Vegas Movie Studio), and I’ll see if I can figure it out.

Thanks for reading!