Yah knows that thing that comes outta your head when you have a bright idea. . .. or you think that the guy/girl/dog/ferret is attractive and you want to ask them for their tel number . .. sorry cell! ( . .seesh that grazie is soooo stupid! ) . . yeah? Anyways, I find them annoying, 'cos every time I have one .. they knock the ceiling lights down! Hmmm thinks to himself .. must have ideas when I'm in open spaces and there is NO cloud cover! Hmmm . .thinks to himself .. .

G

<<spelling was RIBBISH edit . . >>

Grazie, now you know you arent supposed to drink with pain killers.

Ya just lost me, must be that state dependent learning stuff, I'll read this post later on , after a beverage or four, and then I am sure I'll understand a call out box.

A call-out box is usually a "label" with an arrow pointing to what is being called out.

It points something out in the picture.

Since they're for stills, why not use Photoshop for this?

Alternatively the Vegas built-in text plugin and some simple graphic elements that can be rotated, stretched, etc. as needed.

I think that they used one a lot in Dr Who.

Pretty much the same as a thought bubble. It's a graphic to point out a thing in the video and display a little text about it.

Someone here will sugest that there's a wingding font that does that trick.

I'd export a still to photoshop, draw the callout, turn off the still layer, and then drop the PSD back into Vegas. It's something that would take me 30 seconds if I had jigs set up for it. There are probably other ways to do it.

This could be a nice feature for Vegas. Make it as a sort of library that you can import Illustrator files into so that you could have libraries full of shapes that you could resize or change color attributes of.

Rob Mack

>I think that they used one a lot in Dr Who.<

Yes it was the Tarnish! ; )

OK, this is a silly way, but if you type out "callout box" in Goggle and search images you'll find all kinds you can modify. If you have Corel Draw there is a bunch of them in their clip art library. Ditto for other applications. Also they are very easy to make.

You could easily do this in Vegas alone.

Just go to generated media and type something and give it a white background.

Place this new generated media in a track over the video you want to crate the call out for and then open up the Pan/Crop tool. Click on mask at the bottom left and then use the pen tool to draw the shape of the "balloon" or "callout or whatever term you have for it. Voila it is done. You can then add whatever transition you want to it. I have recently been playing around with this and putting cartoon balloons in the photo montage sequences I build with Ultimate S. the pop-up video kind of thing.

-TomE