Making an arrow?

Kit wrote on 12/15/2010, 6:52 AM

What's the best way of making an arrow to appear and point at something on screen? I created an arrow in Coreldraw with a mask the same size as the screen, but while it looks fine in Coreldraw the edge appears jagged in Vegas. Should I try using some kind of symbol font? Or is there a better idea? Thanks,

Kit

Comments

Opampman wrote on 12/15/2010, 7:00 AM

I do this all the time and never have a problem. Be sure to save it as a 32bit png file with alpha channel and I usually make it about twice the resolution as the video screen - such as a 720 x 480 video I make the arrow frame at least 1480 x 960 or even bigger.

rs170a wrote on 12/15/2010, 7:23 AM

Start - Programs - Accessories - System Tools - Character Map - Wingdings.
There are lots of arrows in there that can be coloured and re-sized in the text box in Generated Media and rotated in Pan/Crop.

Mike

xberk wrote on 12/15/2010, 9:51 AM

Thanks Mike. Simple, and very useful information.

Ethan Winer wrote on 12/15/2010, 10:54 AM

> Start - Programs - Accessories - System Tools - Character Map - Wingdings.

Exactly. I also use the canned Shapes in Visio, and export those to PNG files and bring them into Vegas. I did a lot of that in my recent video that exposes the incompetence of traffic lights in my state. If anyone wants a good laugh:

--Ethan

rs170a wrote on 12/15/2010, 12:46 PM

Thanks xberk. I first started using the Character map to get symbols © (Alt+0169 - numeric keypad only) and went on from there.

Mike

rs170a wrote on 12/15/2010, 12:55 PM

Ethan, you could change the name of the city to Windsor and state to the province of Ontario and, unfortunately, everything in your video would apply :-(
I'm glad to see that we don't have the only completely useless Traffic Engineering department.

Mike

TeetimeNC wrote on 12/15/2010, 1:25 PM

>Exactly. I also use the canned Shapes in Visio, and export those to PNG files and bring them into Vegas

Ethan, you probably already know this but you can access these wingding symbols directly from the Text Generated Media in Vegas where they can then be colored, scaled, rotated, etc. No need to go to Visio and export.

/jerry

Ethan Winer wrote on 12/16/2010, 11:59 AM

Maybe I wasn't clear enough. I do use text from the Windings and Symbol fonts directly. I was talking about the canned "sprites" that come with Visio. For my traffic lights exposé I used the cars and trucks and bus etc from Visio, as well as arrows from the Symbol font.

--Ethan

Kit wrote on 12/16/2010, 3:41 PM

Thanks, making the image size large has definitely improved the quality.

Kit

Kit wrote on 12/16/2010, 3:43 PM

Thanks, I'll try using text to generate an arrow in a future project and see how it goes.

Kit

TeetimeNC wrote on 12/16/2010, 7:50 PM

>Maybe I wasn't clear enough.

Ethan, you were... it was my reading of your comment that was clouded.

/jerry

amendegw wrote on 12/17/2010, 3:06 AM

You know, there's another way to do this (maybe easier, maybe not - certainly more limited shapes).

Add an mty event on a video track above the clip.
Add a cookie cutter FX.
...Select a shape (Arrows are rather limited)
...Select a border color
...Select a border size
...Select a shape size
...Position the shape in the postioning window.
...enjoy!

You might find the sizing and positioning easier with this technique.

The other,
...Jerry

Randini wrote on 1/13/2011, 12:59 PM

Thank you for this thread! This really helped me a lot today.
Randini