KEYFRAMES IN VEGAS
Keyframes are a way of turning FX on and off or morphing one FX setting into another setting. A good example of keyframes is having a zoom effect that starts off as the normal size clip and slowly (or quickly) zooms more and more in untill it stops and zooms back out. A keyframe is a checkpoint for the video to say to it that this is what the settings should be at this frame, so if you have a keyframe that has an effect at 50 and a second that has it at 100 that are 30 frames apart, it will equally adjust itself over those 30 frames to make it smoothly change from 50, to 100.
1. In order to use keyframes, you must first add an effect, on the bottom left, click the 'Video FX' tab and drag one of those effects onto your clip on the timeline to add it to the clip 2. A dialogue should open for that effect (if it doesn't, it can be reached by clicking the icon that looks like a green vertical rectangle with two small circles on each side which is located on the timeline on your clip on the bottom right). This is where you adjust all the settings and edit the keyframes 3. To add a keyframe, look at the small timeline at the bottom of the box, there are controls that looks like play controls and a <+> button. this button adds a keyframe. Click on the timeline and click the <+> button. If you only have one keyframe, the settings for that keyframe will remain the same for the entire clip, having two keyframes will change them 4. Just to test, add a keyframe at the very beginning of the clip (the beginning of the timeline) and another at the very end (the end of the timeline).
Tip: once you've added a keyframe, you can move it around by dragging it. You can also add keyframes closer together by zooming in on the timeline by pressing the [+] button next to the horizontal scroll bar
5. Leave the first alone but click on the latter, drastically change the settings of the effect 6. Exit out of the box and preview the clip, you will see how the default settings of the effect will morph into those that you drastically changed. Now try with an effect like brightness, make it start fully white and over time make it back to normal
Tip: you can do neat things with more than 2 keyframes such as having a clip start as normal by adding a keyframe and leaving it alone, then you can add another keyframe next to a normal one that has an effect on it then another after the fx keyframe that changes it back to normal. This will have an effect quickly fade in and out at that point on the timeline. This is how you do things like a quick flash when someone gets a headshot here is an illustration of the timeline to help better understand:
[o----------------------o--x--o----------]
The o represents a keyframe with the effect turned off and the x represents a keyframe with the effect at its apex. I usually like to add that o at the beginning to ensure that the clip starts off normal, in this case, it's not nessecary but its convenient when working with many effects and keyframes
