Thanks for your reply. I am using a 2 parent tracks with 3 child tracks. Line of text top and bottom. I am using a silver texture and a stars background for both. All I wanted to do was show it on screen very large, then zoom out to see all the text (7 words total). My project is 1080p 59 fps. Please tell me how I can scale down this text and keep the same appearance. It's hard for me to accept this cannot be done. I am experimenting with trying to dissect the words into parts and downscaling with parent motion, but I can barely deal with 8 tracks, let alone 60-odd.

It's a nested project, so do you think setting it to 4k would solve the problem?

I managed to get this, and thought "wow! I want that", then was saddened to see it look horrible as I animated it to scale down. Such a shame

 

It's a nested project, so do you think setting it to 4k would solve the problem

I was hoping you would tell us that.

Please tell me how I can scale down this text and keep the same appearance.

I dont know how to do that.

It is not a shame. It's just math. Downscaling reduces source resolution proportionally.

 

It's a nested project, so do you think setting it to 4k would solve the problem

I was hoping you would tell us that.

It is not a shame. It's just math. Downscaling reduces source resolution proportionally.

I don't really understand. How is parent motion able to reduce the size while maintaining the appearance? Do you agree with the theory that each word could be divided into sections. repositioned and made smaller using parent motion? I'm not going to attempt it, but it would be possible judging by the first image in my original post? If you are satisfied that this cannot be done, then I will simply adjust the shadow and outlines, use a more colourful texture for when it's minimized, and move on and complete the video. Many thanks

can you upload the project file with just the text in it?

I don't know about any of that. I know that generated media should be created at output size for best results. Downscaling reduces data bits proportionally, as least in this quadrant of the universe. Vegas does not use vector scaling.

if the size of the input text is affecting the quality of the effect, do the effect at a higher resolution, render a video of it, then down scale that video from there to a lower resolution.

Thanks Frosty. I gave up on the idea, but now you mention that, I will certainly give that a go. From 1920x1080, what resolution to you recommend I render it at? Thanks. It's worth a go, if only to improve it. I guess there is other software where one can get fancy with text. Maybe SVP isn't the ideal place to do it.

Try 4k, 3840x2160. Render it to a avi file at 1080p resolution, change the codec to "uncompressed" and enable the alpha channel. Then try to put that file into your project. It may not play back very smoothly during editing due to being uncompressed, but it might solve your problem.

Try 4k, 3840x2160. Render it to a avi file at 1080p resolution, change the codec to "uncompressed" and enable the alpha channel. Then try to put that file into your project. It may not play back very smoothly during editing due to being uncompressed, but it might solve your problem.

I have to go to bed now, and will be doing my first test render over night. I will have a go at what you suggested, but too tired right now to make sense of it. If you have the time, you could try and see what I mean, Two text events at font size 30 (with a coloured shadow on top event), and a silver or gold texture underneath. Multiply mask, then the height map (custom), and the texture at source alpha. Scale it up to about 5 so only part of the text is on screen, and it should look nice and crisp. Then scale down to 1 so all the text is on screen, and in my case, it looked significantly degraded. These were the settings for the height map.

Thanks a lot.

Either my suggested method will solve it, or there simply are not enough pixels in the image to resolve the detail you are looking for when you shrink the image, in which case there is nothing that can be done about it.

Hi, No luck with your idea sadly. It seems to be more of a way the effect works, than a matter of resolution. I just wonder why the font and scale need to be so large for the effect to truly look good. It still confuses me when using the parent transform to make it smaller, the image stays exactly the same, the way I want it. So little information out there on this issue.

Cheers

Did you use Pan/Crop at any stage?

I did try that, but gave me the same effect. It's not just the heightmap effect that changes, but also the blur becomes foggy and wide too. I dunno, kinda given up on the idea of keeping the lovely mirror effect scaled down. Accepting it cannot be done on SVP. To hide the ugliness as it scales down. I have faded in a colour texture after the silver one.

Sounds to me like it just can't be done period, as I can't tell a difference between the two pictures other than one is lower resolution than the other (obviously, it's smaller, takes up fewer pixels on screen).

If you'd upload your .veg so I can look at your settings, I might be able to help, but it seems like this is just simple physics, not enough pixels there to resolve the effect you are after. This is especially true if rendering higher res and downscaling doesn't work, as the effect is still processed at high resolution, only the resulting video gets downscaled.

One thing to consider is heightmapping depends on the background pixel values around the foreground object edges. So if you scale your text you need to scale your background(s) exactly same.

Like fr0sty said, offering your project file would help a lot finding a solution.

Please try it for yourselves. There is alot more difference in those images than just resolution. I have tried to upload the veg file, but I get the message "Error: The selected format is not supported." Also, I did try using the pan crop to adjust the size of the texture to bring back the effect, but that didn't help at all.

Here is another example. The lower quality one was taken with parent motion box at 1920x1920, and the high quality one at 1080x1080 with a higher scale setting in the text event. That was a mistake at first, as I double clicked on the parent motion box size arrows and it gave me 1920x1920, even though "restore box" sets it at 1080x1080. Sony Vegas has really confused the hell out of me with this video. Anyway, the only difference between these two images is titles and text scale setting, and the parent motion box size. Both were taken on best preview at 1920x1080 project size.

P.S. Heightmap is very new to me. I decided I needed to learn how to do some nice shimmering shiny text, and I did a gold one quite well, but that was using a png image of text, and not the media generator. I found this video on youtube, and it got me started.

I have noticed though, that the few videos there are showing this effect, they have all had the font very large. It really seems to be just the way it is. I would love to have had that high quality effect still visible with the text at normal size, but I need to get this uploaded tomorrow so have lost heart in doing it now (unless someone comes though for me and it's easy). I would love to know for the future though, as it's stumped me.

Like I said earlier, I was tempted to create a whole load of tracks, and just set them large like above, and then reposition them all and use parent motion to downsize while keeping the exact appearance, (and it really is exact).

In my head, it seemed like it was possible, but ridiculous. Thanks for giving me your time on this, and if you can tell me how to upload the nested veg file, I will do it pronto.

As mentioned above you'd need to upload your project file to a file hoster like Dropbox or Google Drive and share the download link then. The forum upload feature is not suitable for sharing project files.

As mentioned above you'd need to upload your project file to a file hoster like Dropbox or Google Drive and share the download link then. The forum upload feature is not suitable for sharing project files.

Oh sorry, I don't use either of those, Could it be done my email?