Exactly what is a better titler?

farss wrote on 5/5/2007, 2:33 PM
The most common ongoing feature request is for a better titler but very rarely does anyone specify what they mean by better. So how about it folks, give SCS something more specific because to my mind a simple "better" doesn't tell a developer anything.

I'll kick this off by asking for nothing better in the core text generator although I think the antialiasing could be better. What I'd like is a better way to render text with motion so I could get real motion blur i.e. specify shutter speed / angle.

Comments

Jay Gladwell wrote on 5/5/2007, 3:02 PM

I would like to see text that is sharper with the ability to use smaller fonts without the loss of legibility.

johnmeyer wrote on 5/5/2007, 3:05 PM
I would ask for an interface that lets me control the results rather than providing controls that simply connect me to the raw internals of the program. While I may ultimately still need to control font, size, outline, shadow, scaling, tracking, kerning, etc., what I really want to do is create a lower third. Therefore, I want a "lower third" control that gets me started with some sort of background, text, aliasing, transparency, etc. that has been constructed by someone that knows broadcast standards and has some design sense.

Yes, I can hear everyone getting upset, saying that "presets" are never what you want. True enough. But, wouldn't you like to be able to start with something that at least creates the starting points? More important wouldn't it be better to have controls that deal with the final result as a totality, rather than forcing you to deal with the color and placement of virtually every pixel?

Another good example is the whole idea of having so many of the title controls settable only through the dialog box rather than through interactive on-screen controls. I'd like to be able to put the preview window into a "text title" mode where I can grab the text elements and move them around the way I would in a drawing program.

Of course, once you get to that point, it really does become something that is more than Sony should probably add into Vegas. As many have pointed out before, there needs to be a boundary around a product and features beyond that boundary should be done by another program or by a plug-in. Otherwise the product risks becoming cumbersome and slow.

Of course, having said that, it is truly amazing what is crammed into Word and Excel.

John_Cline wrote on 5/5/2007, 3:27 PM
"I would like to see text that is sharper with the ability to use smaller fonts without the loss of legibility.

There is only so much you can do within the confines of an 720x480 SD canvas. Small text in the Vegas titler looks quite sharp and legible at HD resolutions.
Coursedesign wrote on 5/5/2007, 6:20 PM
Working at HD resolutions also avoids the ugly NTSC 4:1:1 to MPEG-2 DVD 4:2:0 color sampling truncation that ends up as 4:1:0 (almost, there is a little bit of smoothing).

Let's face it, NTSC DV sucks when you're going to a standard definition DVD, particularly for titles. No title tool can change that. If you're working in standard definition, switch your project codec to 4:2:2 SD if you can. Makes a big difference.

If you're in HD, you're likely to be using a 4:2:0 color sampling that is similar enough to the one used for the MPEG-2 on SD DVDs, so titles will look good.
PeterWright wrote on 5/5/2007, 6:49 PM
About the only feature I miss is the ability to occasionally apply different colours/properties to individual letters.

edit - for clarity - I'd like the feature to be there all the time, but I'd only use it occasionally! ;)
John_Cline wrote on 5/5/2007, 7:22 PM
If you render directly from the Vegas timeline to MPEG2 for DVD with no DV intermediate step, the titles and any generated media are in 4:4:4 and will end up as 4:2:0 on the DVD.

Any DV footage will, of course, end up as 4:1:0, which means the DVD will only have about 12.5% of the original DV chroma information left after the 4:1:1 to 4:2:0 colorspace conversion. But as I said, any titles or generated media will end up 4:2:0.

If you render a DV .AVI and then compress that to MPEG2, everything will be 4:1:0, including the titles.
dsf wrote on 5/5/2007, 8:09 PM
PeterWright: 5/5/2007 6:49:31 PM: "...the ability to...apply different colours/properties to individual letters."

That and automatic word-wrap for longer captions/lower thirds. You change one word in a longer caption and you have to re-edit all the ends-of-lines. This is a nightmare if you have a long, scrolling or full-screen explanatory caption that won't fit on one screen. Also, for shorter captions, how about making the last line of such captions maximum length so that the first line of the caption (which most intrudes on the video) automatically as short as possible. You could override any of this just by hitting "enter" wherever you wanted to end a line. Much of this kind of thing is taken for granted on "consumer" level editors.

Also, how about being able to save "standard" or frequently used captions with the length and fades/transitions being saved also so they don't have to be set each time; then you just alter the text as necessary.

SeaJohn2 wrote on 5/5/2007, 8:25 PM
Ditto on being able control individual letters' colours, effects, etc..

Also, styles would be nice. If I have 50 titles in a project, and decide to change the font in all of them, it's a royal pain having to do each one individually.

The text box on the Edit tab into which you enter your text is clunky. It should resize when you resize the form, but it doesn't. For example, I'd like to be able to make the text box large enough to show all of the text which will appear on the screen. Its default (and only) height only shows about 1/3 of the screen height.

Justification doesn't work correctly (or as I would expect.) Try this: Create a 48 point title, left justified, with 'ABC' as the text. Then create another, exactly the same, but with 'ABCDEFG'. Put them one above the other on separate tracks. I would expect them to overlap so that you would only see 'ABCDEFG'; ie the 'ABC' of the shorter title would exactly be on top of the corresponding letters of the longer title. But it doesn't work that way. The 'ABC' shows up in the middle of the 'ABCDEFG'.

PeterWright wrote on 5/5/2007, 8:40 PM
Just remembered another thing - a polygon/circle and line creating tool (there's been one in Premiere for at least 10 years). These can be very handy not only for creating shapes to show in titles, but to use as masks.
Tim L wrote on 5/5/2007, 9:14 PM
I know there are probably clever ways to do the following, but it would be nice if these kinds of things were easy and straightforward:

1. Options for "prettier" letters -- i.e. beveled edges, extruded 3-d appearence, metallic looking text, etc. The "fancy" 3-d style letters might be a completely different media generator, vs. the normal paragraph text items (like with MS Word "Word Art" vs. normal "Text Box").

2. Easy way to make the appearance of a moving highlight or gleam across the letters. I know you can do something like this by duplicating the track and using a moving gradiant mask with a "glow" effect on the copied track, etc., but it would be nice if this sort of thing was just a built-in feature of the titler. (Keyframes for a "light source" location.)

3. Ability to animate to some degree: perhaps options to have the letters fly in one at a time, or appear one at a time like a typewriter effect. You could select from available "title text effects", just as transitions are selected for video transitions.

4. I agree with comments about justification and general accuracy of the placement of text. I also would like to see some simple line-drawing capabilities, arrows, etc.

5. I can envision a titling/text tool where the text window could actually contain more than one thing -- like a little MS Word "frame" type window or a Corel Draw window or something. You could have multiple text objects and line drawing object (rectangles, circles, lines, etc.) within that window. You click on an object and can edit it, or drag it, etc.

6. A spell-checker that somehow also knows the names of everybody in the video, and tells me when I've spelled somebody's name wrong. (Ok, just kidding about that one...)

Tim L
Steve Mann wrote on 5/5/2007, 9:58 PM
"About the only feature I miss is the ability to occasionally apply different colours/properties to individual letters."

More styles would help a lot and it probably wouldn't be too difficult to implement.
ushere wrote on 5/6/2007, 1:04 AM
one that can bloody well spell proper like.....

leslie
ScorpioProd wrote on 5/6/2007, 1:39 AM
Honestly, something fancier with more presets and more individual controls. I don't need animation in my basic CG.

But look at what can be done in even the QuickTitler in EDIUS or the CG in SpeedEDIT. There are preset styles that can be customized, there are justifications for normal needs, be they left, center, right horizontally and top, center, bottom vertically. And you can change the characteristics of any text, be it a single letter or a line of text and move them around where YOU want them on the screen, and actually see how you are laying them out on a real representation of the screen.

And these abilities should be available for scrolls and crawls, too. There's no reason one shouldn't be able to apply an edge and a shadow to text in a scroll or crawl just as easily as on a still CG page. Why would one need to use a filter outside of the CG module to do that on one and not the other? Consistency would be good. CG, be it still, scroll or crawl, is still CG.
vicmilt wrote on 5/6/2007, 2:35 AM
Spelling checker
Paul Fierlinger wrote on 5/6/2007, 3:50 AM
I type my text and spell check in MS Word (even select the font and size) and copy and paste into the Vegas Text Panel. It's pretty straightforward and requires two clicks.

Paul
ken c wrote on 5/6/2007, 4:04 AM
Great thread topic farss; agree it would be a big help to let the design team what exactly users need in a better titler from within Vegas.

Multiple effects on the same block of text.

Right now, for example you can only do a single horizontal shear or other effect on a given block of text; I would like to be able to do 2 or more simultaneously, as I'd like to be able to do things like keyframe in horizontal shears and compressions (for expanding text) without having to use both pan/crop and the text editor to get a simple effect.

And of course things like beveled or somehow texture mapped text rather than a simple color is a very basic, missing feature, that's in programs like bluff.

Whenever I need to do beveled text or more professional looking bordered text, (or text with a gradient fill), right now I have to create an alpha transparent png in fireworks and then import that to the vegas timeline, which is a bit of a hassle.

I do like the plugins out there, from newblue and pixelan, so that helps.


ken
TeetimeNC wrote on 5/6/2007, 4:56 AM
1. Current approach is very modal (do this tab, then go to this tab, etc.). I would much prefer a single dialog with all functionality accessible in a modeless manner. This alone would greatly improve my productivity with the current titler.

2. Ability to specify and keyframe at the individual letter level: font, size, color, position, etc.

3. Lots of cool presets similar to those provided by AfterEffects (e.g., fly in from right, drop in from top, rain in, dissolve in/out, etc.).

Jerry
ken c wrote on 5/6/2007, 5:50 AM
great add, Jerry - agree. There's no reason why they can't have at least expanded tabs for a single large page as an option, vs having to flip back and forth between many tabs. excellent idea.

and agree re individual letter level changes would be great, so we can have say a 40-point first letter/drop cap, then 36 point subsequent letters.

(NOTE To PLUG-IN Software Developers: Since Vegas probably won't improve the titler anyways (at least not this year), this user feature request list would make a great spec sheet for one of you enterprising plug-in dev's to create a solid titler plugin for Vegas. You'll make a bundle, if it's as well done as Ultimate S, newblue, pixelan plugins. I'd easily pay up to $200-$300 for a killer titler plugin for Vegas).

and I looked at Boris once and said to myself "sheesh" no way I'm gonna go through the learning curve on that... and it's not even integrated within Vegas anyways... Sony should think like Adobe's CS3, which w/PP/FCP/Avid is gonna eat their lunch, unless they do a better job with Vegas 8.

A real professional built-in titler would be a big sales point for Vegas. They haven't even TOUCHED the titler since they bought Vegas from Sonic Foundry, it's the same dang titler as V4 had. Come on Sony. PP etc are waiting to take market share from you, and will. Keep us in the fold here, by at least being competitive re titling and other workflow integration apps.

Ken
JJKizak wrote on 5/6/2007, 5:58 AM
The old Premier titler capabilities were the only thing I liked about the whole program. No blurred text at any time or size and an easy credit roll that you could slow down almost to a stop.

JJK
DGrob wrote on 5/6/2007, 6:29 AM
Pretty much all of the above is available with Cayman Graphics. I used it for a couple of years with outstanding results, but I think they dropped support for the Vegas plug-in a while back. When I went to their HD Beta, I encountered a couple of minor issues with resolution presets as I recall. Maybe a little interest directed their way? Check out the features list - very powerful.

http://caymangraphics.com/PowerCG_plus.htmlPower CG Plus[/link]

Darryl
Tom Pauncz wrote on 5/6/2007, 8:31 AM
All of the above AND Sync The Cursor to the timeline....
Tom
goodtimej wrote on 5/6/2007, 9:25 AM
3d text
Paul Fierlinger wrote on 5/6/2007, 9:37 AM
Why does everyone seem to shy away from Boris Graffiti? It came bundled with my Vegas 6 when I bought it and am considering buying the Vegas7 plugin for $ 200. It sounds (and looks; in the online demo) like a very slick, does-everything titler that can be controlled from Vegas' own timeline the same way as the Vegas' built in, simpler titler. I just never hear/see on these forums anybody mention it.

Paul
GlennChan wrote on 5/6/2007, 11:57 AM
Ditto to the spell checker!

A simple way to implement that might be an option to export all text into a RTF, XML, or HTML file. (Personally I would think a RTF file is most useful.) These files can then be opened in a word processor and you can spell check everything at once. You could also send the file to other people for spell checking... i.e. did everyone's name get spelled correctly.

2- Having inheritable styles would also be nice. Perhaps you can define text into different groups of styles (or sub styles), to get the first letter looking different from everything else if need be. But just inheriting styles would be nice.