One of the biggest mistakes most "new guys" to video editing make is overloading their projects with every transition they can find nearly every scene change. Doing that screams you're an amateur and the reason you rarely see any transitions from the big Hollywood studios. Vegas comes with about 100 transitions. Pick one, maybe two or three per project and only use lightly. Your projects will look more "professional".

Exactly. When was the last time you saw a "star-wipe" on television? Cuts, fades--those make up most of everything I'll use. The only place we go wild is in a music video or the show's introduction.
Nick

Also from debugmode is winmorph which is a transition plugin for vegas

Using event FX (filters) for transitions works really slick. Same for event pan/crop. You don't have to use the same filter for both the in and out. Same goes for the regular transitions. On one track you can have the video fly off while another track has the video flying on.

Craig H.

I'm not sure how useful this really is, but I've been fiddling with making a tetris-style fake transition.

http://members.soltec.net/~cider/blox/blox.htm

(Very low quality audio and video done to make downloading contents of the folder quicker. I think I have everything there.)


Not really a transition plug-in; rather it relies on the use of .bmp files to create masks, rendering additional tracks, chroma filtering, adjusting the rendered tracks positions via crop and pan, etc... Long story short: I'm faking a plug-in transition. I put a more detailed description of what I did over at Chien's file sharing site under the comments for an earlier tetrishm.wmv I attempted.

But if you've got the time to download the various files (about 3MB total) and see how I've done it, it might be worthwhile (or not). But at some level it does give hope to the notion you don't need a transition plug-in to duplicate an intended effect on one's own, provided you have time and patience.

blox.veg is a non-transition with only one video source. (blox.wmv is the video output)
blox2.veg is the same effect with a transition between two videos. (blox2.wmv is the video output)

wdorr - very cool transition.

i have learned so much fmo reading posts in this forum
but i do realize one thing regarding transitions: people who are not video savy absolutely love transitions.
i agree with all of you that only a few transitions per project should be used. However, whenever i show a project to someone, they go gaga over the transitions.
as a result, i used many transitions in video projects---like taping a friends party etc.
when i make a slideshow of stills, i really like to utilize pan/crop for movement and use a slight fade.
this is what i've noticed
sb

Hi Boom... Yes what you've observed is typical. But the "wow" factor fades quickly. It is similar to people visiting a web site that has lots of eye candy and special effects. The recaction is, geez, how did they do that and many will be suitability
impressed on their first visit. Maybe on several visits. However, over time that first blush of excitement can turn to frustration and annoyance because it is keeping them from getting to the content of the web site, the reason they are visiting in the first place.

Same too for videos. The first several times it is watched many in the audience will go gaga over transitions and special effects. If they watch the same video again and again, the excitement fades. Probably more of a problem is the audience coming to expect to see a transition, and if you no longer have it at every point that it is expected to be there they may even start to concentrate on the transitions and lose focus on the video itself. If that happens you've diminished your work.

Of course anyone can use as many transitions as they want and some types of projects like music videos are more suitable for more extreme effects. Usually though, transitions are a good example of where less is more.

Big thanks to everyone who contributed their suggestions on this topic, all were helpful. Thanks again.

I totally agree with the limited use of transistions, but here is a good one! I had a customer 2 weeks ago come to me with an order for a 23 minute music video of stills, each one 6 seconds in length, she wanted a different transistion on every picture! What a chore!!! I told her about the use of transistions, but she insisted on using every one... There's all kinds out there.

dave

Right... the customer is right even when they are wrong.

I had a customer that had a fairly successful carpet cleaning business where I designed what was obviously his first web site for. Every other day, he wanted changes. Which itself isn't that unusual, but what he wanted to add was. He ended up with all kinds of animated GIFS, tons of Java scripting, way too many images and a home page that when on forever... and took that long to load too.

Couldn't talk him out of any of it. LOL!