ROTATE OR FLIP YOUR VIDEO AND IMAGES

To use the Pan/Crop tool, 

✓ drag the media of your choice to the VEGAS timeline. 

✓ On the timeline event, click the Event Pan/Crop icon. 

The Video Event FX window opens, and the Pan/Crop tool is active.  Resize the window to display all of the controls if necessary.

In the large white area of the window, your image is displayed inside a dotted circle, with dotted rectangle around its edge.  The rectangle represents the frame of your image.  Adjusting the rectangle affects the frame of the image relative to the image itself.

✓ Grab a control point on any corner of the frame and drag it outward to enlarge the frame. 

Note that the image itself gets smaller in the Video Preview window.  That’s because you’re enlarging the frame, not the image, and as the frame gets bigger, the size of the image relative to the frame gets smaller.  Thus, visually, the image itself gets smaller.

✓ With the frame enlarged, move the frame around. 

Because you’re moving the frame and not the image, the image appears to move in the Video Preview window in the opposite direction from the movement of the frame. 

✓ Release the frame and look at the Video Preview window.  You will see that the position of the image in the Video Preview window corresponds to the position of your image within the frame in the Pan/Crop control.  With a little practice, you’ll understand exactly how this relationship works and you’ll know exactly what to do to adjust your image as desired.

✓ If you just want to flip the image, right-click on the frame. 

Choose “Flip Horizontal” to flip the image left to right, making a mirror image.  Choose “Flip Vertical” to flip the image top to bottom.  Note that the flipped image is also a mirror image, and not just the image upside down.

✓ If you want the image to be upside-down but not mirrored, right-click and choose “Flip Horizontal, and then right-click and choose “Flip Vertical.”  Or, grab the circle and rotate the image until it is upside down.  For a quick and precise inversion, type “180” into the rotation value. 

Track Motion affects the entire frame of the track, so it’s not relative to the image like with the Pan/Crop tool.  When you reduce the image size in Track Motion, you reduce the frame and image at the same time, so the edges of the image remain lined up with the edges of the frame, preserving the  border effect.

That said, the process of rotating and flipping images is very similar between the tools.

To use Track Motion, place the media you want to work with in a track on the timeline.

✓ Click the Track Motion button if it is visible in the track control panel. 

✓ If not, click the hamburger menu in the upper left corner of the track control panel.  Choose “Track Motion.”

The Track Motion window appears; resize it if necessary to display the full set of controls.

The box in the white pane of the of the Track Motion window represents your track’s frame. 

✓ Click on and move a corner of the box to resize the image.  Unlike in the Pan/Crop tool, you’re adjusting both the frame and image simultaneously, so the image gets bigger in the Video Preview window if you enlarge the box, and it gets smaller if you reduce the size of the box.  In effect, you directly control the size of the image, not just the frame around the image, so the process is intuitive.

Flipping an image using Track Motion is functionally the same as using the Pan/Crop tool. 

✓ Right-click on the box and choose “Flip Horizontal” or “Flip Vertical,” depending on how you want to flip the image.

✓ To invert the image without mirroring it, right-click and choose “Flip Horizontal” and then right-click again and choose “Flip Vertical.”  Or, grab and turn the rotation wheel. 

✓ Or finally, as with the Pan/Crop tool, enter 180 as the Angle value under Rotation on the left side of the controls.

Whether you rotated or flipped the image, or both, once the track keyframes are set, you can substitute any event for your original event. 

✓ Turn OFF Lock Envelopes to Events in the timeline toolbar.  Move or delete the original event, then drag the new media to the same location on the track to create a new event.  Because the rotation or flip is applied to the track and not the original event, the new event rotates or flips just as the original did.