Adding a bumper with dynamic text

bradbradbrad wrote on 12/13/2016, 3:08 PM

I'm trying to add a 5 second bumper track to a video. The text will be dynamically generated and the bumper will contain the text with a black background, so nothing fancy. This is something I can do in FFmpeg pretty quickly, but for whatever reason I can't find much documentation online for Vegas. So, without scripting, it seems that I need to add a new video event, then add text media. Any help on how to get a hello world bumper script up and running?

Comments

Video_flaneur wrote on 12/13/2016, 4:37 PM

Not sure what you mean by 'the text will be dynamically generated'. Do you mean different text will be displayed each time the bumper is used, or simply that the text will be animated?

bradbradbrad wrote on 12/13/2016, 4:40 PM

Sorr for the confusion, flaneur. The text will change from video to video. I'm grabbing text from a CSV and wanting to add said text before the video starts. Thanks for the reply!

Video_flaneur wrote on 12/13/2016, 5:42 PM

Here is a clunky approach that has worked for me:

Create a new Vegas project called, say, Bumper.
Create some dummy text in the stationary mode (timer) of Sony Credit Roll in the media generators. Alright, you are not rolling credits, but this seems the only media option that allows you to import from a text file.
Once the text is looking the way you like it, you can then choose to pimp things up if you want using track motion, compositing, logo, sound etc.
Save your project together with its text file - all of this is a once-only process.
To create a new project using this bumper, first change the text in the text file to whatever you want, then drag the bumper project onto the appropriate position on the timeline of your current masterpiece.
If you are revisiting old projects you need to change the text file appropriately before re-rendering.

This is all pretty clunky but once set up it doesn't take long.

Other titling programs such as Titler Pro of HitFilm may also read from a text file. To my knowledge Vegas scripting cannot be used to alter titling text.Vegasaur has a text generation wizard which might be a possibily,

Good luck with the projects