You can do horizontal scrolling titles with the Vegas titler. Just use two keyframes and adjust the position (by using the placement-function of the Vegas titler).

Marco

Except unless you're careful it can end up looking pretty bad.
If you don't mind investing a little time in learning something a little different try Caymen Graphics Power CG RFS, they have a 30 day full feature trial version, and it has a Vegas plug-in.
I finally have a project that needs it and I'm impressed, no fancy GUI, looks like it was designed in the DOS days but it's designed extremely well for serious work.
I'm just doing some text rolls with it and the one feature I've just fallen in love with, The Spell Checker!. The client had emailed me the wording and I'd just cut and pasted it into CG and well, you guessed it.
Bob.

Caymen Graphics Power CG RFS - yup, I'm increasingly impressed by what I can do with this. You can get up to 8000 characters scrolling lower third! Why, I even clicked "reverse" in Vegas and scrolled backwards. I'm using it more every outing. Darryl

Thanks for all the tips, people. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to learn another package but I'll definitely check out the Cayman prog when deadlines permit.

Of course, why didn't I think of the Vegas Titler? Works very well - took me a little time to work out what you were referring to by positioning the keyframes to the left and right etc.

This is done in the placement window of the titler plug-in and you have to move the text 'container' just out of shot before setting the markers. I kept getting my logic wrong so text ran 'backwards' to start with but dragging the markers to their 'opposite ends' of the timeline sorted that out.

Make sure you don't move the Y axis value by mistake or the text will drift about vertically as well as horizontally!

I also found it necessary to set the length of the clip in the plug-in window to the time of the relevant region on screen which needed the scrolling text.

I'm just waiting to hear if the speed is correct now from the client - has anyone got a rule of thumb for speed vs legibility?

Just based on the length of the clip and the number of words in the text, originally it was working out at about 1.5secs of screen time per word.

This seems far too slow to the client (and me) so tried 1 secs/word - again this seemed slow so went with 0.9 secs/word in the end.

Thanks again for the advice - the finished result looks so much better than the Bluff Titler version I had used before.

Cheers

gordyboy

Have you checked how it looks on a TV?
I had a lot of trouble in this area when I tried doing it the simple way, maybe I'm a more picky, maybe I'm nuts.
Oh OK 0.9 secs / word, hmm, that's pretty slow, much slower than you can read and normal speech so maybe the reason I had to do so much fiddling around was because I was running it at twice that speed.

BTW Cayman is pretty easy to use. A bit of a paradigm shift from Vegas but once you get the hang of it it's VERY fast to use, particulalry if you need to do a lot of text. Which is pretty much the way it is with text crawls, you either have a lot of them or none of them, or if you're a chinese network you have about six, all running at once.
Bob.

Cayman's main benefit, aside from being a true CG application, is that it also is very intuitive, fast, and easy to use. While it is "another app" it's also a quick learn with lots of power.

Hey Bob

Yes I have viewed it on TV after burning to DVD - it looks very crisp and a lot more legible than before.

I have found setting the speed of the text very tricky to judge - I don't think you can always compare it to normal reading speeds or speaking speeds as you are asking the viewer to do several things at the same time - focus on the activity in the scene, listen to the speech being delivered plus read some text at the same time as it reveals at a speed which may not match the reader's own preference.

I will definitely check out Cayman - anything that makes this easier as the client *loves* scrolling text!

All the best

gordyboy

gordyboy,
try this in BT, use the camera angle and moving the camera left to right with text fields being stationary. Move the light source for additional effect.

Hi all,

I just came across this thread, as I'm trying to set up horizontally-scrolling text across the bottom of my screen. a titler plugin has been mentioned several times in this thread, but I'm unsure as to what y'all are referring to. I've been able to find the Text media generator, and I've tried setting up keyframes (that was my first inclination). However, if the text is really long (as mine is - several sentences), I only see the tiny part of the sentence that fits within the safe zone box (or about two or three words).

So... any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
David

Just a guess, but it sounds like you should use a smaller font size.

True, I could reduce font size, but with several sentences' worth of text, I'd need to change it to, say, 3 point or smaller. The idea is to have nice, readable text continuously scroll across, sort of like a news ticker on CNN.

I think I'm fundamentally not grasping how to create a very long line of text and then pan across it. I thought I figured it out with the Text generator, but that didn't work, as when I type the text in (or paste it in), it's so long that it exceeds the "viewable area" of the 4:3 screen box, and therefore is never seen .

David

Ummmmmm, are you saying that the text isn't moving across the screen?

Sort of. I can actually get a chunk of text to move across the screen. A nice, small chunk. For instance, the text "A nice chunk" works just peachy. However, let's say I wanted to scroll the entire contents of this post across the screen horizontally, on one line, over, say, 30 seconds. I tried the Text media generator, but that only lets me work with the text that can physically fit in the bounding viewable-area box. Anything to the left or right of the "tv screen" is not accessible via pan/crop.

So... like I said originally, I don't think this Text media generator is the right way to go. The only other way I can imagine is to create some HUGE graphic file with text, and pan across that graphic file. That just doesn't smell right to me, as the size of the graphic would be thousands and thousands of pixels wide.

David

Here's a reply from farss from an old thread that may help you.

If you create the text in Vegas (the only way I've got good results BTW) you'll need to use two or more sets of text. Fit as much as you can in the first text event, get the motion OK and when you're happy with it copy it to a track above. Now type the next bit of text into that and then slide the event down the TL so the start of the text in it matches with the end of the text in the first event.
If you still need more text than will fit into two events, create a 3rd one again by copying, but that can go into the same track as the 1st one.
Pretty simple once you get the hang of it, of course unless you need to edit the text!

P.S. Make certain your text is left aligned for ease of alignement.


Mike

Ahhh. You shouldn't be using Pan/Crop. Use the Positioning tab in the Text Media Generator instead. This doesn't have the limits of Pan/Crop. Place a keyframe at the beginning of the text event and push the text all the way to the right, then place a keyframe at the end and push the text all the way to the left.

BINGO! The Placement tab did the trick. Now I also understand why the pan/crop didn't work (as it simply panned the text that was centered in the viewable area), where as the Placement tab allowed me to work beyond the "borders".

Thank you!!!

David