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Its Senior Editor D. Eric Franks has created another Sony Vegas tutorial for the Digital Juice website. This time, he combines an animation from one of DJ’s Motion Designer Toolkit, Vegas track motion, and the Ray FX from Sony Vegas Pro 9. Of course, you can use any basic animation or still image for the base if you don’t have the animation used in the tutorial. And if you’re on a previous version of Vegas, the track motion Glow or 2D Shadow options will provide something at least similar to the Ray FX.

Link: A Ray of Light with Motion Designer’s Toolkit in Sony Vegas

Tags: animation, fx, track motion

Digital Juice has just released a quick tutorial called Adding Depth with Reflection. Hosted by senior editor D. Eric Franks, the video describes how to use track motion, a gradient mask, and compositing to give your media the appearance of being reflected (on water, glass, some alien surface). And best of all, the tutorial is for Sony Vegas (including Vegas Movie Studio) users.

Tags: compositing, Digital Juice, gradients, reflection, track motion

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

A common question from new users of Sony Vegas Pro is how to create a “news ticker” — simply a line of text that scrolls across the bottom of the screen, usually over a black background. It’s very easy to do using Vegas’ text generated media, and this tutorial will show you how.

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Tags: pan/crop, text, 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