Video:

Well it’s winter, or at least supposed to be. Doesn’t feel like it here in Texas but we can pretend it is. How you ask? By adding snow to our videos digitally in Sony Vegas! P.S. You can download the project file below!

Written Tutorial:

In Sony Vegas, go ahead and put together the footage you’d like to add snow to. In this case, I’ve added one of the lower thirds you can get from here. I then added a Christmas tree background behind that third to make it into a nice little scene just like you see below.

Now all we need is snow!

To add snow, simply go to Media Generators > Noise Texture > Standard Noise. Click and drag the Standard Noise texture in on top of the other tracks on its own video track.

Now in the Standard Noise Texture settings, you need to set how long you want it to be. By default, it’s set to 10 seconds. This can be whatever duration you need for your particular project. I do want to mention that if you need the clip to be longer than a minute, the snow may move very slow. You may have to duplicate the track and cross fade them together. The cross fade won’t be too noticeable.

Now, set Color 1 to white and Color 2 to transparent.

Go to, “Frequency” and change the X and Y frequency settings both all the way up to 30.000.

We’ll go ahead and leave the Offset alone for now and skip to the Noise Parameters.

In the Noise Parameters, I got some decent snow with the following settings.

• Min: 0.000
• Max: 0.335
• Bias: 0.160
• Amplitude: 1.370
• Grain (amplitude falloff): 0.500

Now, these settings can be different depending on how you want the snow to look. These settings will mainly adjust the thickness of the snow so it’s really user preference.

Now that we’re done adjusting the thickness of the snow, lets animate it!

Remember the Offset we skipped a few lines ago? Lets go back to that. We’re going to be animating all three of these parameters, starting with Y. Y is going to be the up and down position of our snow. Click the little animate button to the right of Y().

Position the cursor all the way to the end. Make sure you’re not zoomed in on the timeline otherwise the end may only look like its 5 seconds when its really 5 minutes long.

With the cursor at the end of the timeline, bring the Y offset down depending on how fast you need the snow to go. I set mine at -3.500. The maximum it will go is -5.000. If you need it to go faster, simply close the Media Generator window, hold CTRL at the end of your clip and drag backwards to speed up the clip. You can also slow down the clip by dragging forward. I have a tutorial on that here.

Now lets animate the Progress (in degrees). Position your cursor at the end of the timeline, click the stopwatch/animate button. Move the progress up to your desired offset. I’ve set mine here to 5.000. This will control the snows progress, meaning randomize the pattern and make it look more realistic.

Ok, now we’re ready to animate the X offset. We’re going to be gentle with this one otherwise it may look like a drug dealer lost all of his products. I’ve positioned my cursor toward the middle of the timeline and clicked the old animate button() once more. I’ve adjusted the X offset to -0.263 in the middle, then went to the end and animated it to 0.263.

To prevent the animation from jumping around, select the first keyframe, then while holding Shift, select the very last keyframe. You should now have all your keyframes selected. Right click and choose, “Smooth Fade” just to ensure that our animation will be nice and smooth.

There you have it! Snow in Vegas!

You can create more noise textures to include different sizes of snow either very small or large flakes. If you want to simulate the snow being close to the camera and out of focus, simply add a Sony Defocus event effect to the clip, bring down the radius and your snow will be blurred as if it were out of focus.

That’s it! You’ve just created snow in Vegas. Or at least learned how. Hope you enjoyed this tutorial! If you create anything cool with this or any holiday themed video, post it to the Facebook page! I love seeing what you guys make from what I teach! Get involved!

Download Project File (89.1MB)

What are you hoping to get for Christmas this year? If you don’t celebrate Christmas, what do you celebrate? Reply in the comments below! Happy Holidays!