Blur out an irregular shaped section of the frame using Sony Vegas Studio I have a video in which a person is speaking something. He is right in the middle of the frame. I want to blur out all of his surroundings like you have when you shoot a photograph or a video with a shallow depth of field. I am in post-production.

I am using Sony Vegas Movie Studio 11 HD.

If the shape to be blurred was rectangular, I could overlay two duplicate tracks and blur out the section from the frames in the top track, but I want to blur out everything around the person's body, which happens not to be a geometrically named shape.

How do I do that?
Unfortunately you are asking too much from Sony Vegas my friend! In order to get a true effect you'd have to do something called "rotoscoping" which means you go into each frame and mask out the background.

You can do this in vegas by going into the pan/crop window on the video event. Look for "mask" and then you can key frame out the background with the pen tool there.

There is no way to automate this so you'll have to key frame quite a bit. Then once you have just the person visible you duplicate the track beneath it and uncheck the mask on the duplicate. You then can add lense blur or gaussian blur to create the desired effect.

Unless the clip is super short I wouldn't recommend doing it this way though. It takes a lot of time even for skilled maskers.