Bluff Titler alpha

Hammer65 wrote on 9/19/2005, 7:03 PM

Does this program really output alpha info? I'm trying the demo and it seems like a nice little program. I exported to movie (uncompressed AVI with transparency) but it doesn't seem like it included any alpha information? I had to use the chroma keyer in order to composite the titles I created. Is this normal? I was assuming I could just set composite mode to Source Alpha in vegas and be golden.

Comments

Jimmy_W wrote on 9/20/2005, 5:14 AM

Try setting the alpha channel to premultiplied dirty.
Jimmy

djcc wrote on 10/16/2005, 8:57 AM

Any idea if/how to get this functional in Vegas Movie Studio?

FrigidNDEditing wrote on 10/16/2005, 10:31 AM

I use Bluff Titler (or at least I have in the past and occasionally do now) and it's GREAT for some things and not so great with others.

For one - the text edges will have blocks and lines (it uses your graphics card for it's capabilites and so it's not as capable as one might hope always.

There a couple of ways of "getting around that though"

The transparency works fine in Vegas

I like it because I was able to use it for a VERY VERY last minute project that need to be DONE, and they meant NOW.

less than an hour to show and I was able to pull it together with a few Bluffs and my trusty high speed vegas editing (man I love Vegas).

Dave

djcc wrote on 10/16/2005, 10:46 AM

Thanks Dave - I finally found the correct property dialog box to set the alpha channel just as it is set in the big brother version you folks are using here.

I'm sure there are more sophisticated titlers out there, but from what I have read on this forum, Bluff seems to offer considerable bang for the buck. My video projects are just for family & friends, which is why I am only using the studio version of vegas. Would love to play around in the full Vegas package, but I cannot justify the expense relative to my useage. Same goes for a fancier titler.

The one noticeable dissapointment is that the previews in Bluff are substantially cleaner than the resulting AVI. I don't just mean jaggies - the quality of the output seems substantially reduced. Not sure why.

Next demo I want to try is Ulead Cool-3D for comparison. The advantage there seems to be the ability to manipulate objects other than text.

Hammer65 wrote on 10/16/2005, 4:33 PM

I get what I consider to be acceptable results just by turning on 4x antialiasing on my video card. If your video card doesn't offer AA, use double the resolution for your show and then select "Scale Down to Half Size with Bi-Linear interpolation" option when you export. This gives pretty good results too. Oh, and the premultiplied dirty alpha options worked great.

ushere wrote on 10/16/2005, 4:43 PM

have nvidia card - and antialias. is set to program controlled. do i need to change this? results seem fine at the moment?

leslie

FrigidNDEditing wrote on 10/16/2005, 9:36 PM

Cool - 3D will blow bluff out of the water with results, but maybe not speed - just depends on what you're looking to do. Speed is the strength of BT, as for the quality of the output - what were your settings at? - may be that there was some Render setting that was funky.

Too - you shouldn't judge it by the preview window in your editor - only once you've rendered it.

Dave

djcc wrote on 10/17/2005, 8:05 AM

As Leslie mentions, my graphics card (also Nvidia) has those properties set to "application controlled", so I would also like input on whether that should be manually overridden.

Since I am only test driving the demo, I cannot save my work, which makes it difficult to create a sample, then change these settings, re-render, and compare the differences. I also discovered that any change to the video card properties causes Bluff to exit, further complicating matters without the ability to save.