Bitmap text appearance...

newUzer wrote on 6/20/2005, 3:53 PM
...is horrible. This is what I did: I used an illustrator to layout a star-wars-like title, complete with green background, and saved it as a 1152 x 648 bitmap. I dropped it on the vegas timeline, keyed out the green, and things looked pretty good in preview. My goal was to make a small 320x180 WMV, so I rendered it that way to take a look. The bitmap work was awful (beyond jaggies). I played around with the rendering options and nothing helped. Interestingly, some vegas generated text media looked fine, and so did a star-wars-like text crawl made by combining 3D alpha, squeeze, and pan/crop on a simple GIF downloaded from the web. Needless to say, I'm confused. Why did the downloaded GIF work so well? What made my bitmap turn out so bad? How does one create decent text (besides using Boris, etc.) when vegas text isn't really an option?

Comments

Liam_Vegas wrote on 6/20/2005, 4:04 PM
Perhaps it is the keying that is causing the problem.

Just curios.... why did you have the green background anyway?

From illustrator you should have been able to have a transparent background and save as PNG and preserve the alpha channel. Then just set the properties of the graphic within Vegas to say it has (straight) alpha.

Can you upload samples of these graphics you are using?
newUzer wrote on 6/22/2005, 8:10 AM
Thanks for the suggestion. I created a GIF with transparency and rendered a WMV to see if things were any better. They weren't. The text still had that heavily pixelated look. Given this, it seems the chroma key wasn't really to blame. As an experiment, I rendered a MOV (default settings) to make a comparison. It came out great. i guess I'll have to experiment more.
Former user wrote on 6/22/2005, 8:32 AM
GIF is limited to only 256 total colors with only a single color being available for "transparency." It's intended for web use and not video use. PNG, on the other hand, has 32bits to work with -- 24bit for 16M+ colors, with 8bits left over for a clean alpha channel). You could also use TGA.

The other thing is that you should make the image larger than you spec'd if you intend to use it for a scrolling , Star Wars type title. I would double the size you mentioned.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 6/22/2005, 9:11 AM
it's most likely the codec you're using to compress that's the problem. Some codec's just look like crap at certain settings.


But.. why not just use vegas scrolling text? You could 3d-alpha it of use one of the debugmode plugins to turn it. That would work.
[r]Evolution wrote on 6/23/2005, 4:59 PM
It's funny that Liam_Vegas suggested you save a .png yet you saved a .gif...

save your file as a .png - this should cure your problem. I do it all the time.