How to draw Lines or Arrows?

Tim L wrote on 10/26/2005, 10:12 AM

This seems like a simple request, but I was unable to find anything in VMS 6.0 Platinum last night that would let me draw a line or arrow on the screen. Is there any such capability?

I want to overlay text and an arrow on top of video: "This is where the old apple tree was" (for example) with an arrow pointing to the location. Any suggestions?

The only thing I could think of would be drawing an arrow in another program and saving it with a transparent background (or black background), then bringing it in as a still photo, on its own track, and using crop/pan to rotate it and locate it as needed.

Any other ideas? Am I missing something easy somewhere? (Like a built-in "Arrows and Lines Media Generator" or something...) Seems like a lot of trouble to do it the way I suggested, plus you waste a whole track for just the arrow, but maybe that's my only choice?

(Madison Media guys: can we have something like this in the next version? Please?)

Tim L

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 10/26/2005, 12:13 PM

You're not missing anything. Your thought about drawing it as a photo is about the best way to accomplish this task. You might also look through your fonts for WingDings or other symbol fonts for an arrow. Then you could use the text media generator.

Tim L wrote on 10/26/2005, 2:04 PM

Yeah, good thought. If I can make a "text" arrow, at least it keeps everything within VMS, and would let me apply coloring and effects (shadow, glow, whatever) -- consistent with the associated text.

I'd always thought that the text media generator could be quite a bit more capable without requiring a whole lot of extra effort from the VMS programmers (umm, but not to minimize their efforts -- Thanks guys! You rock!).

It seems like it could operate like a "frame" does in MS Word, etc, where you can put all kinds of items (multiple text items, lines, boxes, arrows, etc.) into one frame, and overlay that on top of your video.

Thanks,
Tim L