Hello,

I'm using Sony Vegas 6 and I've worked on simple projects using many overlaying video tracks, but each one squarely cropped/panned/motion tracked to a different size etc.

But now I want to select a part of visible area from one video track, and crop anything around it. And overlay this selected area ontop of anything else.

I'll give you my example...

I've drawn a cartoon figure. The face doesn't have a mouth. I have video'd my mouth up close, as I talk.

Now I want to cut out my mouth, selecting round it ideally (so, sort of oval shape, ideally i should be able to draw round it -- rather like cutting something out in a paint program) and crop around it. Is there a tool to do this? Would have thought it was quite an obvious requirement.

...Thus giving my cartoon character an animated mouth. (I'm going to fill colour the characters face the same colour as my skin, hopefully blending better with my mouth video. So if there was also a way to fade out the edges of the mouth video, it should blend better into the cartoons face colour.

Ok, I'll be fascinated to hear the answer! Thanks in advance.

Ah, just read someone elses post and advice has been given about using a cookie cutter... i'll look into this. But u get the idea of what I'm trying to achieve here. Cutting out the mouth and blending it onto the cartoons face, so you'll probably know the best way of going about getting a good result thanks.

I think that was my post! The cookie cutter will work OK, but you're limited to the shapes they provide. I suspect one of my alternative suggestions will work better:
If you're happy with a fixed shape, create a mask in any drawing package (make the shape you want white and the background black)*** . Make this track the parent of the track containing the video of your mouth and chage the composite mode to Multiply (Mask).
*** if you want the edges blurred, make the white "feather" into the black.

More timeconsuming but potentially much better, use pan & crop on the "mouth" video, Towards the bottom of the screen, next to the timeline is a checkbox marked "path". Check that and you can now create a keyframable Bezier mask. You could use this to EXACTLY follow the outline of your mouth. Result! (I hope)

Might even try it myself.

As an aside, have you animated your cartoon? If so what software did you use. I'm interested in finding a free BASIC 2D animation program.

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Tim

thanks for your information! --The 2D animation program I'm using is swish. If you don't have money to buy a licensed copy, erm, you can temporarily find ways around that if you search... but do register it if you come into money and the program alot. I find it's great. I make my animations, export them to avi. Then can jazz them up in vegas.