Positioning Text on the Screen

Peyton-Todd wrote on 2/10/2012, 3:30 PM
I used to edit video recorded on a vintage approx. 2002 Handycam in AVI, and have grown accustomed to placing my subtitles at Y = .85. That's where I want them to appear. Now that I'm editing video recorded on a newer Handycam in widescreen MPG, I want to get the same results as before. I've learned to set the Properties to Multimedia (320x240, 29.970 fps), and crop them to 4 x 3 standard TV aspect ratio. That makes them the right size. So far, so good...

However, when I position the text atY = .85, I find it appears higher on the screen than what I want. If I set the Y-value higher, the text gets sliced horizontally, and disappears entirely with a setting of at 1.0. So far the best I've been able to achieve is .929 but that still appears higher on the screen than what I want. Please tell me how to place the text lower on the screen. (Tweaking Safe Zone and Text Placement (e.g. Bottom Center) values has not helped.)

Thanks for you help.

P.S. I have Vegas 9.0e running in Windows 7 64-bit

Comments

Former user wrote on 2/10/2012, 4:16 PM
Are you setting the Project Properties to 320x240 or just the text properties? And of course, I have to ask, why are you doing this rather than just changing the size of the text?

Dave T2
Peyton-Todd wrote on 2/10/2012, 5:44 PM
In fact I set only the Project properties to 320 x 240. I hadn't noticed the text 'frame size' so I didn't set it at all. Sure enough, they were set to 720 x 480 in the offending clip. However, that seems to make no difference. I have edited five other clips since then and they all work correctly, i.e., the text appears just where I want it to set at Y = .85, and the text 'frame size' VARIES - sometimes 320 x 240, sometimes 720 x 480 although I never set it myself, but regardless of the text frame size, those clips appear as they should. And when I change the one that didn't work to text frame size 320 x 240 it has no effect - the text stays too high on the screen.

Noteworthy, perhaps, is the fact that the text on the offending clip appears SMALLER on the screen, even though I have the text size set at 22 on all of them.

As to why I don't change the size of the text, perhaps it would help to explain what this project is about: it's video clips of sentences in American (deaf) Sign Language, with sub-titles at the bottom to translate the signs for viewers who don't know the language. I want them at the bottom so they don't get in the way of viewing the signs.

The only thing I can say to account for the fact that one clip doesn't edit properly while the others do is that I performed the various steps in different orders on subsequent clips to see what effect that had. It had none as far as I could see. The clips (including the offending one) were all recorded on the same day with the same camcorder.
Peyton-Todd wrote on 2/10/2012, 8:08 PM
It turns out that Vegas sets the text 'frame size' to 320 x 240 if you crop to 4 x 3 before inserting any text, but leaves it at 720 x 480 if you insert text before you crop to 4 x 3. But either way, it seems to make no difference to the result. All of them are working now, and have continued to work (i.e. Y = .85 puts text near the bottom), ever since the first one that did not. So maybe it's a non-issue. But it would still be nice to know why...