adding text without black background

beckyg wrote on 1/30/2007, 11:09 AM

i just want to add some text at the bottom of a few frames, kind of like a subtitle. how do i do this without the whole text frame around it? it goes black when the text comes and then goes back to the video. i am using the "Default Text" with a transparent (checkered) background but why is there still a black background!? is there like a subtitle option anywhere?

Comments

abelenky wrote on 1/30/2007, 1:00 PM

I don't have my Vegas Movie Studio in front of me, but I believe the ordering of the tracks is very important.

So, if you have your sub-titles on track #3 and your video on track #2, try reversing them. In general, I believe transparent layers should have a lower track number than the main-video. (but, I could have it backwards, since I'm not at my terminal... sorry).

What you're asking for is completely do-able. You can see a video where I did the same thing at:

(the text effects are from 0:44 to 1:05).

autopilot wrote on 1/30/2007, 3:10 PM

Default text is fine to use here. Make sure the Background Color slider is all the way down, to transparent, under the Properties tab. The Title must be "higher" on the timeline, as in the title must be on track 2, and the video on track 3.

Chienworks wrote on 1/30/2007, 7:02 PM

The key thing in this case is to make sure the titles are on a different track from the video, farther up the screen on the timeline. I think what happens is that lots of times folks want to put text "on top of" the video, so they drag the text event onto the same track and it looks like it's covering up, or on top of, the video. The problem is, even if the text event is transparent, it replaces what's behind it rather than adding to it! And if the video event is replaced, what do we see behind the transparent parts of the text event? The black background that you see when nothing else is there.