Essential Effects Every Editor Should Know Add amazing effects to your videos

Certain video effects give a certain obvious look and feel to video, and audiences recognize the effects in play. Examples include effects that create changes in speed, distortions, reflections, artistic filters, stylistic color grading, animated transitions, 3D elements like CGI and more. Done well, these effects enhance the storytelling, the mood, and the overall impact of the visuals.

Movies and videos also contain countless other effects which no one notices, because they’re implemented to be essentially invisible or at least not noticeable. Editors color-correct footage for more natural tones, or stabilize shaky footage, or even add subtle artistic effects meant to increase realism in the footage rather than to make it stand out. Editors also rely on certain compositing techniques, like blending separate locations into one scene, to create realistic effects but make the audience believe there are no effects at all.

Sometimes an editor has no choice but to work with a shaky clip. With video stabilization, the editor can salvage otherwise unusable footage.

Video stabilization in VEGAS Pro makes it quick and easy to make wobbly footage super stable.

Whether it’s to correct an image’s orientation, to reframe an image or change its aspect ratio, or even to create a “Ken Burns” effect by panning over still images, you can use crop and pan tools to create whole new motion possibilities in your images, whether you're working with video clips or still images.

Manipulating a video’s playback speed can add tension or humor to a scene, or draw the audience’s attention to key details or events in the image. Slow a dramatic moment to build anticipation. Speed up a scene for excitement or humor. Most software lets you manipulate playback speed while automatically adjusting clip length on the editing timeline.

The Optical Flow slow motion plugin in VEGAS Pro gives you amazing control over glass-smooth speed effects in your footage, and Event Velocity envelopes let you precisely define ramp ups or ramp downs of motion speeds.

Use motion tracking to apply an effect or “pin” something to a specific object in your video image. Combined with Picture-in-Picture, an editor could use motion tracking , for example, to place a video into a TV screen panning across an image.

Vegas Pro offers powerful motion tracking which, combined with other tools like masks, give the editor incredible flexibility for adding effects to specific parts of footage or creating brilliant animated composites.

A key step to creating composites, masking lets the editor remove everything from an image except the needed portion. Powerful tools for masking include chromakey, which makes a specific color like a green-screen background transparent, or Bézier masking, which allows an editor to cut a specific element out of an image. Other methods like luminance masks can achieve the same effect. You can use the tool which is best for the job.

Unleash amazing compositing possibilities with the Bézier mask and chromakey tools in VEGAS Pro. Unlock your creativity as never before and achieve incredible effects.