The transition I want to achieve is similar to a linear wipe. But while a linear wipe in Vegas can have a soft edge, it’s still rather tidy. I want a deeper and more random blend between the two clips — something that resembles fog or smoke. For this, I’m going to combine two types of generated media, a standard Vegas transition, and some parent-child track relationships.

To begin, insert two video tracks by hitting Ctrl+Shift+Q twice. The top track will be for a noise texture that will make up the “edge” of the transition. Go to the Media Generators window, select Noise Texture from the list, and drag the Plasma preset onto Track #1. Vegas will open the Video Media Generators window for you to edit the new piece of media.

Make Color A transparent by entering 0 for its Alpha value (beneath Color A’s color picker, textbox labled “A”) and set Color B to white. The “smoke” is a bit too heavy for my taste, so under Noise Parameters, I’m going to raise the Min value to .250. I also want this mask to be much brighter, so I’m rising Amplitude to 2. You can tweak these and other settings if you like, but this is essentially what we need for the edge to look like smoke. Not let’s make it move like smoke, too.

At the bottom of the Video Media Generators window is a keyframe timeline. It takes a minimum of two keyframes to animate something — Vegas has already given you the starting keyframe with the settings you just adjusted. To animate this media, click the Last Keyframe button to move to the end of the keyframe timeline. Now change the the Progress setting to 10. Vegas will add a new keyframe to the end of the timeline (which represents the end of this media’s event) and give it the new setting. If you preview your video, you will now see that Vegas animates the event, making this resemble billowing smoke. You can now close the Video Media Generators window.

Figure 1: Settings for Smoke

We also need the smoke to move across the screen. We’ll do this with a linear wipe. Hover the cursor over the top left corner of the smoke event until you see the Fade Offset indicator (a quarter circle) and click and drag all the way to the end of the event. Then go to the Transitions window, select Linear Wipe from the list, and drag the Left-Right Soft Edge preset onto the smoke event.

So now we have a mask made of “smoke” that gradually fills the screen. If we applied this to our clips, we’d be left with relatively equal parts of them. That’s not exactly a transition, is it? No, what we’re trying to achieve is a wipe where only the edge of the wipe is smokey. Let’s fill in the rest of this moving mask.

Figure 2: The Completed Mask

On the second track of your Vegas project, add a Solid Color from the Media Generators tab. Use white to match the white for the smoke. Using the same method as before, apply a linear wipe transition to the entire event. If you preview your moving mask now, you may notice that the “edge” of the wipe is still awfully clean. That’s because the wipe for the solid color on Track #2 is filling in quite a bit of our nice smoke on Track #1. This is because they start and finish at the same time. But if we shorten the solid color’s event, the smoke event will have a chance to “pass” it up, therby giving the edge a smokier look. Grab the left edge of the solid color event and drag it further in. With both events originally being 10 seconds, I shaved two seconds off the solid color’s event. This completes the mask.

To apply a mask, we need to use parent-child track relationships and compositing modes, which can get a bit tricky when your mask uses more than one track itself. Luckily, current versions of Vegas Pro have the ability to nest projects. Save this file as smokemask.veg. Then create or open the project with your two clips. Put the two clips on separate tracks with the incoming event on the upper track. Also line up the incoming clip where you want it to first start coming in.

Now let’s get that mask in here. Insert a track above your incoming event and add smokemask.veg to it. Line the nested mask up with the incoming clip. This puts a white mask above your incoming clip, with your outgoing clip completely hidden during the “transition.” To use this properly, click the Compositing Mode button on the mask’s track header and choose Multiply (Mask). Then on the incoming clip’s track header, click its Make Compositing Child button. Now if you place the cursor on the timeline between the start and end of the mask event, your preview should show the incoming clip where the mask was white and the outgoing clip where the mask was transparent. Play your project, and you should see one the smoke transition we’ve been trying for.

Figure 3: The Mask Applied

Unfortunately, what you will probably also notice is that when the mask event ends, so does the incoming clip. This is because the track with the Compositing Mode determines which of the lower content is visible. In the case of Multiply (Mask), white will completely reveal its child track(s). The catch here is that when the mask event ends, the track is no longer white. No white, no child track(s). You have a few options to fix this, each of which essentially adds a solid white to this track following the end of the mask event. The options are:

1. From the Media Generators tab, insert a Solid Color of white. Make it as long as you need in order to reveal the child track.
2. Grab the right edge of the mask event and drag it out for as long as you need to reveal the child track. Then right-click the mask event, choose Properties, and uncheck Loop. What this does is extend the last frame of the event, which was solid white.
3. Right-click the track with the mask event and go to Insert/Remove Envelope > Fade to Color. By default, the colors for this envelope are black (lower) and white (upper). Add one point to the envelope exactly at the end of the mask event and add another to the envelope soon after. Grab the second point, drag it all the way to the top of the track and then shift it over so that it’s above the first point. If, for some reason, you need to return this track back to normal (but remember, it’s only masking its child track — it has no effect on any other tracks), then add two more points where necessary and drag the line back to the vertical center.

Using these techniques, you can build your own aresenal of transitions to use in Vegas.  Combine noise textures, text, gradients, any kind of generated media. Apply transitions and add video FX to twist that media into a mask that works for your content. Lastly, use compositing modes (usually Multiply, but go ahead and experiment with the others) to use this mask to combine multiple tracks in interesting ways. As interesting or, quite possibly, even more interesting, than this:

A menu designed in this way only needs two files: a background video or image, which contains everything your menu will show, and a mask indicating all highlights. This tutorial will walk you through creating these files in a graphics application and using them in Sony DVD Architect.

Ready? Then let’s get started!

Creating the Images

The background can be either a video or a static image. For this tutorial, I will be creating an image using Adobe Photoshop. You can use any graphics application you like, but it would help if it were one that supports multiple layers such as Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, or The Gimp. I’ll trust that you know your way around the graphics application you’re using. But if you’d rather skip this part of the tutorial, you can download the background image and highlight mask image that I’m creating.

Find a picture you’d like to use and open it in your graphics application. Usually, I’d begin with a still from the movie I’m putting on DVD, but here I’ll just be using a picture I found at Stock.XCHNG. Feel free to use the same image.

The first thing to do with your image is resize it so that it is the appropriate dimensions for your DVD menu. Keep in mind that your still image will have square pixels, whereas your DVD (incuding the menu) will have non-square pixels. For example, the dimensions of a standard NTSC DVD (standard meaning not widescreen, and NTSC being the format used in North America) are 720×480, but a still image for this kind of menu should be 655×480. DVD Architect will appropriately “reshape” the image as needed.

If your graphics application has the option to add guidelines, do yourself a favor and add some now to indicate the title safe area — this is the suggested region of the menu where your titles and buttons should be placed so that they are not cut off by the viewer’s television. (For more information, run “safe area overscan” in your favorite search engine.) You should allow for a “border” of around 10% for titles and buttons. For a standard NTSC project, this will be about 65 pixels from the left and right, and about 50 pixels from the top and bottom.

Figure 1: Background image

Now that you’ve got your background image opened and guidelines set up, it’s time to start turning it into a DVD menu. Using your application’s tools, create the “buttons” you want for your menu.

(I put “buttons” in quotation marks because, in truth, the background of a DVD menu is one complete video or image with hotspots (the highlights) over it. The “buttons” you see aren’t really buttons at all — they don’t do anything.)

For this tutorial, I used Photoshop’s text tool to add a Play, Scenes, and Setup “buttons” to the background as well as a title for the menu. You can use text or add images, whatever you’d like to represent the “buttons” is fine — so long as it’s clear to the viewer, of course, what will happen when they select the menu items. I like to keep each item on its own layer, but you can use as few or as many layers as you like. If you’re like me, save all of this to a multi-layered file such as PSD. Then save a copy as a single layered image that you will use as your menu background. Most any image format is fine — I like to use PNG.

Figure 2: With "buttons" and title

When your “buttons” have the look and position you want, add a new layer above all the others. This layer will contain your highlight mask. A highlight mask tells DVD Architect what the actual buttons will look like. On a DVD, the actual buttons are usually fairly simple graphics like a box, a circle, or an underline that “highlights” part of your menu background. They’re usually a single color or variations of a single color. On this highlight mask layer, you’re going to create the shapes you want to have highlight your menu background and indicate the item(s) being selected from the menu.

There are two main rules to remember about highlight masks. The first is that the mask should use only black and shades of gray. Don’t worry, these aren’t the only colors your highlight can contain, but the actual highlight color will be set in DVD Architect. This mask is simply for deciding the shape and position. The second rule is that while the highlights can be any shape, the actual hotspot will be rectanglular, and those hotspots should not overlap. So as you’re drawing your highlight mask, imagine that each shape has an invisible rectangle around it, and make sure there is space between each one.

With those rules in mind, draw the shapes for your highlights, using the “buttons” on the background image as a guide. I drew outlines around my menu items using the background as a guide, but you can do pretty much anything you want — underlines, circles, arrows, wavy lines, be creative and have fun.

Figure 3: With highlights

Now you’re ready to save your highlight mask to its own file. Hide all other layers so that only your highlights remain. The background of this image will need to be transparent, so here you must save to a format that supports alpha channels. PSD and PNG are popular such formats, with PNG resulting in a smaller file size.

Figure 4: Highlights only

That’s all we need is those two images — now let’s head over to DVD Architect and put them to use.