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Someone in your documentary is wearing a t-shirt with a logo for a product you don’t really feel comfortable advertising. Or some random person walked into your shot but won’t sign a release form for you to use their likeness. Or maybe you just want to obscure a rude gesture.

Blur it. Or pixelate it. Easy enough, but how do you censor just part of a video in Sony Vegas while leaving the rest of it clear as day? Let’s find out.

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Tags: cookie cutter, effects, pixelate

They say the grass is always greener on the other side. Today, we’re going to prove them wrong. Or right. At any rate, we’re going to change the color of grass. And we’re going to do it with Sony Vegas’ Secondary Color Corrector. Whereas the main Color Corrector FX operates on the Highlight, Midtone, and Shadow areas of video, the Secondary Color corrector can be used to isolate a specific color or range of colors to adjust. This leads to a number of possibilities from basic color correction to some very interesting effects. In this example, I’m going to edit a fishing scene so that the grass in the background is no longer green but rather a brownish color you’d see in the fall or winter. (Depending on where you live, of course.) The clip I’m using is from Stock Footage For Free. Feel free to download it from there (as of this writing, registration and downloads are free), use your own footage with green grass in it, or any footage that has a color you want to change. Understand that if you use different footage, the steps will be the same, but exact settings will probably be different.

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Tags: color corrector (secondary), effects

Lower thirds are those graphics you see near the bottom of videos. They usually consist of a static or animated background and some information such as the name of the person speaking if you’re watching the news or a documentary, or statistics if you’re watching sports.

Often, Sony Vegas users create their lower thirds in other programs or buy pre-made ones, but we’re going to make one entirely in Sony Vegas. It won’t be the flashiest lower third you’ve ever seen, but it will be attractive and functional. So, here we go.

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Tags: bezier mask, effects, pan/crop, track motion

There is one problem that people often run into when turning a collection of photos into a slideshow: Not all of them are quite the right aspect ratio. In particular, when portrait (taller than they are wide) photos are placed into a landscape video (wider than it is tall, and the standard for just about any video), you end up with black gutters on two sides. And that’s just kind of tacky.

(Vocabulary bonus: When the gutters are on the top and bottom, the image is “letterboxed.” When the gutters are on the left and right, the image is “pillorboxed.”)

But what are your options? Crop the photos so that they fill the screen entirely? But then you may end up losing important parts of those photos. Add in a colored background or matte of some kind? Maybe, but how do you find something that looks good with all of the photos in your slideshow?

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Tags: effects, pan/crop, track motion