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Jimco Software Reviews - Sony Vegas 6 (continued)
More Cool Stuff
Track Motion
Track Motion is a great feature. Vegas 6 makes it even
better because Sony has added more control. What is track
motion? If you've ever watched a Ken Burns documentary,
you'll notice how he pans across photographs and zooms in and
out on them to make them more interesting. That's track
motion. It allows you to take an otherwise boring image
and make it interesting.
In figure 9, you can see the track motion
dialog. The dotted-outline with an F inside of it is the
frame indicator. Anything inside of that will appear in
your frame. By resizing this box, you can zoom in and out.
By moving it, you can move the "camera's" focus. You can
key frame the motion and zooming to provide a panning and
zooming effect over time.
Figure 9 - Track Motion
Supported File Formats
Vegas supports a stunning number of file formats, including
Adobe Photoshop files and Flash animations. Photoshop file
support means that you can use Photoshop to create professional
quality graphics for your videos and Vegas will read them in
natively, including support for transparency. While you're
editing, you can make a quick change to your file in Photoshop
and Vegas will immediately pick it up.
Flash support was introduced with version 5, and
it's a great feature when combined with a rapid-development tool
such as SWiSHmax. (Read
our review of SWiSHmax.) SWiSHmax makes it easy and
fast to create stunning text effects and render them out in
Flash format. You can then take that file and import it
into Vegas for use in your projects. Transparency is
supported in Flash format as well, so making animated credits is
a snap.
One thing we'd like to see Vegas do is add
support for AAC audio, but we have that beef with many
software products these days.
What you've seen so far is a general overview of
just the main features of Vegas. The true magic of this
application lies in all of the thousands of other features that
it provides. There's no way that we can possibly show you
all of these features in this review, so we recommend that you
download a copy of the trial version of Vegas and play around
with it. It's one of those applications that will continue
to amaze you for years to come, and the productions you create
will amaze your friends and family.
Other Sony Products Worth Reviewing
We realize that not everyone will want to shell out the
money for Vegas. For those who don't, Sony offers a great
alternative in Vegas Movie Studio + DVD. At less than
$100, it's a great solution for home users and hobbyists alike.
Sony even provides an upgrade path from Vegas Movie Studio + DVD
to the full version of Vegas.
Sony offers a
comparison chart of features that you should check out if
you're interested in this kind of software.
Highly Recommended
Sony Vegas 6
Web Site
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