Editing with a Theme Kit

Editing with a theme kit is like adding the icing on the cake.  The cake would taste almost as good without the icing but not quite, and it sure wouldn't look as pretty either.  Josh demonstrates nearly every element of a theme kit and how they can be placed in the timeline with your own home movies to create unique video scrapbooks.

What is an alpha channel?  Officially it is: An additional image channel used to store transparency information for compositing.  To the rest of us that means it is the part of the video that is see-through or invisible.  When you activate the alpha channel of the clips inside your theme kit you "knock out" the background and create a piece to be placed over the top of video or photos.

By using the "Event Pan/Crop" tool you can resize any piece of video.  This allows you to have more than one piece of video displayed on the screen at a time.  There are lots of fun layouts you can design when you can place multiple video shots on the screen at the same time.  Remember that you have a total of 4 video tracks in Vegas Movie Studio so if you are using a background you will only be able to place three videos or objects over the top.

In this example we added a new track and then brought it down below the three default tracks to act as a background track, or the track we put the papers on.  In reality all four tracks work the very same way.  You can put video on the track labeled text or the track called video overlay, it really doesn't matter.  What does matter is that you remember that whatever is on the top track will be on top in the video, and whatever is on a lower track will be covered by things from the tracks above.

If your computer is a little older or slower, its not a bad idea to reduce the quality of the preview window in order to keep the playback from becoming too jerky and halting.  Don't worry, lowering the quality of the preview window has zero effect on the quality of your final video.  All it is doing it tossing out some of the fine detail information that requires a ton of processing power to play back smoothly in real time.  When you render your final video all that computing is done at one time so when you are finished everything looks crisp and clean and plays smoothly.

When you are adjusting a full screen wipe effect, be sure to have the entire screen covered with the effect, flowers in this case, at the precise moment that the video underneath changes to a new clip.  You can see in this example we didn't apply a fade to the picture frame because we didn't need to, the entire video frame was covered with flowers in the instant that the picture frame went away so you don't see it pop out.