I would love to find an easy-to-use credit roll titler a-la Cayman rfs for my home projects. I have Boris Grafitti, but for the life of me can't master it.

Thanks one and all for your most excellent suggestions -

have been out shooting, so I haven't really had time to experiment yet, but from the demos pointed to from this page, it looks like the Swish titles are closest to what I had in mind.

I'll let you all know as I procede, although, no doubt, every one of the programs has it's special strong points.

RE: After Effects - gosh I HAD After Effects Production bundle (complete with a safety dongle - $2,500 bucks) for a long time, but quite framkly replaced it entirely with the built in effects from Vegas. For what I've been doing lately (long form documentary work) AE is simply overkill - plus, getting back into that particular bath has got to be expensive.

RE: Photoshop - no doubt, the best graphics program in existance - but I was looking for animation, not layout. I DO currently use PS for a lot of my static title work in Vegas.

I like the look of that Swish stuff, if it's easy to do, and easy to import, yum... I've got a TON of lower thirds just crying out for a little "snap".


Thanks again.

v

For lower 3rds UltimateS is pretty handy and very easy to use although you're kind of limited to what's in the box.
Digital Juice also have a range of canned things that can be used to tart up lower 3rds.

Proanimator will let you easily create drop in / fly out etc text to lay into lower 3rds but as I said before it's kind of expensive unless you do a lot of this kind of work.

Bob.

"RE: After Effects - gosh I HAD After Effects Production bundle (complete with a safety dongle - $2,500 bucks) for a long time, but quite framkly replaced it entirely with the built in effects from Vegas. For what I've been doing lately (long form documentary work) AE is simply overkill - plus, getting back into that particular bath has got to be expensive."

I do long-form documentary, too, and I must confess, I don't use AE for an awful lot more than animated titles, either. (Although it does ship with a good .FLV flash video encoder that has proven pretty useful.) On the other hand, Adobe's added a lot of presets that make it much easier to use than it used to be.

If you still have your old license, the upgrade's pretty cheap: $299 to upgrade AE Pro Bundle versions 5, 6 or 7 to AE CS 3. I upgraded my version 4.1 to version 7.0 a year ago for around the same price.

if i remember correctly, a program named swish made flash animation supereasy, and came with lots of ready text things, like typewriter style one button at a time etc.


edit: lookie, so pretty :) http://www.swishzone.com/index.php?dir=products/max/demos/swf&file=effects_demo.swf&width=600&height=400&&showanim=false&swfbgcolour=FFFFFF

and kinda going ot here, but i am really happy with my text here:

thats all done in vegas, to start setting the modd of the film which is in a deep-sea base :) lo-fi sci-fi :)

After Effects is so versatile though, it is good for way more than pretty (or any other kind of) titles.

Vic, if you haven't checked out the book "DV Rebel" by Stu Maschwitz already, I can highly recommend, and I think there's a good chance that it would fascinate you enough to spend the $299 on an AE upgrade.

Here's a sampler of why he suggests using AE to "sweeten" the footage instead of doing it in an NLE:

If you're working in HDV, all the floating-point YUV processing in the world won't rescue you from the fact that you're recompressing back to a highly destructive codec. Even if you are working uncompressed, you may still be using a 4:2:2 codec, in which case you are still degrading the image by re-rendering it.

Meanwhile, in After Effects, you get impeccable 32-bit floating-point RGB processing, the ability to overlay "look" adjustment layers over entire sequences to make them cohesive (which you can't even do in a Da Vinci!), the ability to create thumbnail comps (automatically, thanks to DV Rebel Tools) to keep track of color continuity, best-in-class de-noise and sharpening algorithms, and a full-fledged compositing environment to tackle everything from painting out an errant boom mic.

The DV Rebel Tools he refers to are on the CD-ROM in the book. They just give you step-by-step menus that you go through to get the best looking output possible, even with minimal skill. Really not hard to use, and you do not have to be an AE phreak.

And the "DV" part just refers to anything that was recorded without sprockets.

The DV Rebel's Guide book is at http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321413644?tag=prolost-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0321413644&adid=1M2KZ17523NYMPP9QCFE&

You don't have to render to HDV m2t though. You just render to Cineform for things like this.

I read this thread because I have the same interest in titling software, and I thank everyone for their helpful suggestions.

The references to After Effects, however, have confused me somewhat. I have always heard that one of the big knocks on Vegas was that it didn't work with AE.

When did they become compatible?

Vegas has always worked with AE.

It's just not as convenient as it could be.

Especially not compared to Premiere Pro 2 with Dynamic Linking of course...

For titling this is less of an issue, because it is more isolated.

my weapons of choice for all future titling are AE and lightwave, though both have horrendous learning curves, it's worth learning I suppose... it would be *great* if someone could offer for sale, template source files with broadcast-type titles for either platform. Agree Stu's book is great, one of the best I've read in recent years, very very well done and valuable.

(and right re don't get hooked on bryce/poser, it's a very fun but very timeconsuming/expensive hobby. but a lot of fun eg see renderosity.com contentparadise.com daz3d.com etc)...

-ken

If you have AE 7.0 or above, be sure to check out the "text animation presets." I use these all the time, with just a little tweaking.

I haven't tried them yet, but there looks like there's some decent free stuff at: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=productHome&exc=21&loc=en_us
Looks kind of like the VASST veggie and script sharing site for Vegas.

As for round-tripping between AE and Vegas, see this thread:
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=526431

I downloaded and played with the latest version of Bluff Titler, and am impressed by its power and simplicity. Oh, AND the fact that it now can render to HDV sizes without doing the old-fashioned screen render thing.

One thing I haven't tried yet is a long rolling credit. Does anyone know if this is practical in this program? On first glance, I doubt it, because you'd wind up working with a very long and skinny (and miniature) document, like an unrolled parchment.

According to this:

http://www.ibc.org/cgi-bin/exhib_detail_cms.cgi?db_id=4287

You should wait for Vegas Pro 8 to see if the titler has really improved before buying something else.