Re the first question, one way in Vegas Pro to do this is to add a black Media Gen to an upper track, reduce its opacity to taste, then in pan/crop add a mask to the bottom area of the image and use feathering to taste. Then fine-tune the feathering and opacity to taste. Here's one I prepared earlier:

Re question 2, in the past I've used NBFX's Titler Pro to do this. In TP, an adjustable rectangular object can be added to the workspace and then it just needs to be 'shaped' around the title. It achieves exactly the same result as you've exampled.

EDIT: Using Vegas Pro only, it can be done by adding a black Media Gen to an upper track and the using Track Motion (AR disabled) to size and place the black rectangle under the title. The huge downside is that if there are, say, 20 titles then that potentially would need 20 tracks with differently framed black backgrounds, one track for each title. Even though in NBFX TP each rectangular object would need to be adjusted for each title, there'd still likely only be the need for one video track containing all the NBFX titles.

Thanks so much Set and Dexcon.

I forgot there was a gradiant in media generators so that's the quickest way to do this since I don't need a very complicated shape.

While I don't have Titler Pro, I did enable ProType and it's close enough for this purpose. Odd interface with no color picker, and font size from 0-10 but I'll make it work. I see how a black media gen could work as well and there's only one instance of this in the video so either approach would be fine. Now I can appreciate why users want a better titler.

Example with ProType here:

(not trying to match the font as the text won't be in English).

Now I can appreciate why users want a better titler.

✔️✔️✔️

@RogerS I put a few text boxes in my videos to mention things i forgot when filming or i want to point out,

adding a black solid, change it's size, position opacity etc is the easiest for just the few texts i put on, If it's an odd shaped one i'll save a snapshot & create a background png in a photo editor (I use Gimp)

Boris Title Studio will do this, it'll do any colour, sq, rounded, convex corners, there's lots of adjustments & settings but it's a bit of fannying around if you're not used to it, & it's not cheap, not worth buying for the odd title or two,

Thanks Gid, good suggestions. I am a competent Photoshop user so could always hop over there and make more complex designs. Thanks for showing Boris, I hadn't tried that before. We'll see how much I end up doing this. In general I just do subtitles so it's text and a bit of shadow.

@RogerS 👍 Boris TS can pretty much do anything you want, but it's not very user friendly, as you can see from my vid the controls are tiny on my screen, & some are just really hard to fathom out, I suspect they inherited it & like Vegas would have to rewrite it to change it,

Looking at the controls of Boris my first impression was that it looks intimidating. I feel the same way about their Particle Illusion program I got for free- it's just a little too much for me to deal with. I really prefer intuitive interfaces!

Jack has made some good tutorials for Boris Title Studio

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1MVnsSmTsOu3oYwBuM9FCQ/videos

Re the first question, one way in Vegas Pro to do this is to add a black Media Gen to an upper track, reduce its opacity to taste, then in pan/crop add a mask to the bottom area of the image and use feathering to taste. Then fine-tune the feathering and opacity to taste. Here's one I prepared earlier

This is how I do it, except instead of a mask in Event Pan/Crop I would instead add the Crop FX to quickly crop it to size. This way gives you the advantave of control handles directly on the Video Preview window which make adjusting it very easy. @Dexcon's suggest has the benefit of allowing feathered edges, so if you need that, go that way. Or, instead of using a black generator and my method, use a gradient as suggested above and then crop with my method. As you see, you could take one of several approaches.

I use following selfmade Title&Text preset for decent and readable subtitles. Adding a background or using large bold characters makes a subtitle too dominant and takes too much attention from viewer especially when you don't want/need to read them.

Thanks for all the food for thought. I'd never noticed the crop Fx before, it is convenient to cut off the top of the gradient or shape.

Thanks 3POINT. The original here had a thicker font for captions (no voiceover- explaining the scene) and a thinner one for the subtitles so I see the wisdom of your suggestion.

Multiple alternative ways for a solution 🙂👍

Thank goodness it's once again time for sharing such helpful tips and tricks.👍👍👍
Would be nice if the focus shifted to these kinds of questions than the eternal discussion of render speeds - and which NLE is now using the graphics card or CPU by how many percentage points more or less.😪

I hear you Walter. Before posting this I was thinking this was different the usual thread about errors or technical performance and maybe I shouldn't post, but I'm glad I did.

Vegas is a deep program and there are many aspects I don't fully understand and think I'll be coming back with more questions as I try to solve other problems that come up in editing.

Thanks for the great discussion here.

@RogerS 👍🙂

@RogerS Another way to easily generate a background for a textevent is following trick (which probably even Gary didn't know...😃) Background can be easily changed in size, position and corner radius by adding following FX to Title&Text Event.

@RogerS

I think I arrived very late in the conversation, but I want to leave my contribution. I saw that you have Vegasaur, so you can use the Vegasaur Subtitle Generator feature of the Text Generation Wizard tool. The video bellow show one of the ways to use this feature.

which probably even Gary didn't know...

Now I know everything!

which probably even Gary didn't know...

Now I know everything!

Good to know! 😂

Sometimes ago a client asked for this 'curved box' which is 'more modern' according to them and I had to manually make that 'curved box' via photoshop... wish I knew this sooner! 🙈

Thanks for sharing @3POINT !

@RogerS

I think I arrived very late in the conversation, but I want to leave my contribution. I saw that you have Vegasaur, so you can use the Vegasaur Subtitle Generator feature of the Text Generation Wizard tool. The video bellow show one of the ways to use this feature.

Hi Joelson, thanks so much. I did create these subtitles using the subtitle generator (I had manually created region starting points only as there's no voice-over to sync to). I missed the background feature- I had tried other ways of editing text and didn't see it there. Thanks for showing how regions work, too. I'm still learning Vegasaur!

Another way to easily generate a background for a textevent is following trick (which probably even Gary didn't know...😃) Background can be easily changed in size, position and corner radius by adding following FX to Title&Text Event.

I had no idea about this either! Will give it a try.