Bob, have you tried synching and making "creative" decsions outside of Vegas with 3rd party text s/w? I have! It is messy!

"I can see no reason for them to do so." - Personally, I can see plenty of reasons. But I like things to synch and match up and whatever. BG3 maybe an "excellent" prog - but you try and synch and preview inside Vegas . ..


Grazie

It won't take much improvement to make the Vegas Titler acceptable - I'm not looking for 3D or anything flash, just a bit more differentiation so we can apply colours and other properties more exactly and individually.

If you use Vegas titler with Vegas transitions and effects, you can do quite a bit. Don't forget about compositing, also. You can really do some amazing things right inside of Vegas. You just have to dig in.

I can see no reason for them to do so.

Boy, I sure can! Why should I have to buy a third-party app to do titles? When you think of all the "extras" that Vegas has, and when you realize how basic creating titles is to editing, why should this be the weakest link in the system?

My biggest complaint is that we are limited in font size and style. That should not be that big of an issue to resolve (no pun intended).

Mixing the "as-is" Vegas titler with the current FX and transitions can give a really cool spin to titles. Still, I'd like to see the ability to control individual letters and variable paths in the mix.

Probably not to the extent that you have, just text crawls and lower thirds with Cayman but then again once I'd created them I use Vegas to tweak them / retime them.
Surely once you know how long you want them to be I don't see much of a problem, the film industry used to have titles outsourced, they managed it.
One project I want to get back to is extruding text along a path (like growing plants), another one I want to try is building 3D text from grains of sand and liquid. Another one is moving the camera through the text.

You mention BG3, yes it's a pain, I've had a quick look at it and it didn't look all that scary but you've first off got to understand the process. Text is vector based. Now at same point to get it into video it has to be rasterised. Now once you've done that you should try to move it, moving it in the same plane as the frame is one thing, trying to move it in 3D seems to produce nasty aliasing problems. So at a point in the process BG3 and even PS do rasterise, once that's done the text is no longer text, it's just pixels. That's the problem.
Now try working with 3D text with bump maps and lighting and shadows. You render it out, basically once that's done you cannot change it, you can go back through the process again, it's a pain but there are very valid reasons why. Does this hinder the creative process, you bet.
Bob.

I've done this within Vegas. You put each letter on it's own layer. Variable paths can also be done, you can have the letters each on it's own track/layer and use track motion to have them all fly around the screen and come together to form the words.
Trying to rotate text around an axis is more problematic, Vegas does it but I'm not so certain about the results, I'm seeing quite a few nasties creeping into thhe results. I'm suspecting that Vegas renders the text onto a planar surface and rescales that surface rather than rotating the text and then rendering it.
Bob

What you are looking for them to do is improve the basic editor. That would involve boycotting the purchase of Vegas 6 as I did with Vegas 5 only in far greater numbers. It would involve telling Sony in no uncertain terms that what you want is an improved basic editor not more bells and whistles. Last time I said this I got poo pooed, then watched the complaints start all over again on these forums regarding Vegas 5. Same thing over and over again and you guys are your own worst enemy. "Well, maybe in Vegas 3?"........................"Well maybe in Vegas 4?".............................."Well maybe in Vegas 5?"..............................."Well maybe in Vegas 6?".............................................."Well maybe in Vegas 12?".
Just look at the thread regarding the "flash frames" issue. And Sony has NO motivation to improve the titler or credit roll function because despite your complaints you are not willing to show them you will take no less than an excellent basic editor. It cracks me up that some of you are recommending 3rd party apps as a solution.
Is Vegas so inexpensive that improving the titler is an unfair demand?

John

For what it's worth in my opinion yes it's unrealistic. Text is a vector based entity, that'w why even in FCP complex text tasks are hived off to LiveType.
What might be viable but I'd imagine a huge programming task would be to be able to integrate tracks of 3D vector based objects into Vegas and control them from within Vegas. The cost of a product able to do this well though would have to be pretty high, you're talking something of the complexity of Combustion or Fusion.
I've had a look around at many of the low end text programs, all of them produce fancy low rent looking stuff, it all looks like it belongs on web pages from 10 years ago.

As to them fixing the basics that don't work right, I agree 110%. I can buy a 3rd party titler, I can buy a 3rd party compositing tool but I bought Vegas to edit (ie cut and join video), if I've got to buy a 3rd party app to do that reliably then I truly think I've got grounds for complaint.

Bob.

I never got the hang of it, but I remember one of Satish's demos with Wax involved moving through a letter like a camera.

John said..".Is Vegas so inexpensive that improving the titler is an unfair demand?"

Will someone from SONY respond to this.... or do we have wait till Vegas 12 to see some improvements !

Vegas is touted as a "powerful " NLE yet the titler is no where near as powerful. Why do users have to resort to 3rd party apps or tweaks with FX & transitions just to create some pro looking titles ??

No one from Sony will talk about Vegas 6 until the official announcement.

Bob,
I see your point, and perhaps there wouldn't be the fine control over each letter in a "dropable" text effect. I know I've set up text animations before and just copied the events and retyped the next set so that they would "do the same thing." It's just so tedious to lay out individual letters on separate tracks...

http://www.crystalgraphics.com/web/3dimpactpro.main.asp

I've used 3D Impact for a few years. The advantage to me is beveling letters and shapes, adding materials, and motion paths, for groups and individual elements. Large library of each of the above, or do your own. But not much going on with the program lately. Cheap, and easy for me to use. John.

"So at a point in the process BG3 and even PS do rasterise, once that's done the text is no longer text, it's just pixels."

Not quite. The pro titlers, for example Cayman, use subpixel rendering and it improves the quality quite a bit.

If you're working in DV, it helps to do the titles in a 4:2:2 (or perhaps even a 4:4:4 format, haven't tried this),, with low compression of course, and then render the result to DV as a last step.

You are correct, subpixel rendering is very imporant to getting text to look good. Issue is that how that rendering has to work is dependant on where the text lies in relation to the DV pixels. Even when it's rendered to 4:4:4 ( as anything coming out of PS is) once you move that rendered frame you destroy all the work that the graphics renderers did.
Once you start to rotate any 3D object things get much more complicated. A 3D app understands about depth of field, fog, surface texture, subsurfaces and motion blur to say nothing of camera position. Rendering a 3D object into a 2D plane and rotating the 2D plane is not the way to get a good looking result, you can fudge some of this in Vegas but only so much.
Bob.

Sad but true...

There are other apps that can do 3D transforms at higher quality though, even the $99 Au Naturel plug-in for Combustion & AE.

I didn't see anything in Au Natural that Vegas doesn't do. Vegas already does its calc in RGB at floating point precision. That isn't the issue with text anyway. The issue is the difference between manipulating a 3D object in a true 3D space compared to rastering the scene and then manipulating the rastered image.
Bob.

I know it uses 4:4:4 RGB, but does it really use floating point? I thought it used 16-bit?

My understanding of Au Naturel is that it takes the scene (rastered since it is video) and transforms it with better algorithms than anything but the most expensive compositing programs.
These examples don't show which app, but they mesh with other third party comparisons I have seen.

Here's a side-by-side comparison with the same transformation in After Effects.

I'm all for real 3D software though, just bought TrueSpace 5.2 for $89 (this is the previous generation but it can be used to upgrade to say Lightwave for not much money, $495 this month).

[Edit: deleted misunderstanding, added 3D sw.]

so...
if Vegas has a decent title system...how does one create a crawling text across the bottom of video that can run text ( without spending even more $ on yet another software system)?

Lots of posts here on how to do that, this should be in a sticky FAQ. For now, do a search.

Search on "lower thirds".

Also, Ed Troxel (jetdv) has a wonderful series of newsletters at his site:

Newsletter Archive

Download the December 2004 issue and it has a tutorial on creating lower thirds. If you have signed up for his site and have Acrobat reader installed, just click here to read the newsletter:

December 2004 Newsletter