Time Lapse in Vegas Video

This entry is a little bit of a departure. I spent last week wading through Vegas Video for a personal video project of mine. There were clips that were very boring at normal speed, but when sped up by 400% created a more dynamic shot. It’s easy enough to speed up a clip in Vegas. However, when I rendered this out, the intermediate frames were blended creating this hellish motion blurred mess. The effect I wanted was like a real time lapse shot where every frame can stand on its own and no other flames are blurred into it. After much experimentation, I figured it out.

The Secret
When you render out a clip, the rendering quality plays a big part in the frame blending. I rendered everything out in “preview” quality and it did exactly what I wanted. The image quality of the video remained unaltered, including the text supers I placed into the video. You may run into problems if you have keyframed motion in your Vegas project, and you might have to render the “time lapse” effected clips separately in “preview” quality, and the rest of the project in “good” or “best” quality.

I wished there was an option to separate the rendering quality between keyframed and non-keyframed elements. I was working in Vegas 7.0 which is old, so this feature may already be included.

Good luck.