Problem with typewriter-effect in title

Carter wrote on 4/2/2016, 7:19 AM

Hey everybody,
I'm just doing my first steps in Movie Studio Platinum 12.0 (Build 1184).

I wanted to do a title with a "typewriter-effect" - you know, not the whole text appearing at once but character by character. I found out MovieStudio 12 can't do this on it's own an I'm not willing to spend a lot on Titling-AddOns which I only need for one project, so I decided to do it by hand using the workaround with keyframes.

Here:

is, what happens. Guess you'll see the problem. The line with the date works fine, also the words "Schotia Private". But why does the rest shake like that? And of course: how do I stop it?! I don't think that I did anything different for all the characters.

Thanks in advance
Carter

Comments

Tim L wrote on 4/2/2016, 8:53 AM

I only have time for a quick reply here, and no time to test something myself before posting, but I think the issue is that Vegas uses the overall width of the text window when deciding how to place it. As you add characters initially, the placement is recalculated with each letter. On the second row of text, however, everything stays static for a time because the width is fixed by the top row of text. Once the second row gets wider than the first, it's back to recalculating placement with each new letter.

I think I faced a similar problem years ago, and got around it by typing a whole row of blank characters on the top line, padding the window out to a fixed starting width that never got any wider. I typed all my text first, with a "hidden" long row of spaces at the top, placed the text as needed, then either key-framed or split the text event into many pieces (I might have been doing a word at a time) and "deleted" text at the start, etc.

Carter wrote on 4/3/2016, 12:17 PM

Hi Tim,

thanks for your hint. I don't quite unterstand why this would happen, as I aligned the title "bottom left". So one would think that the first character of each row is allways at the left border, no matter how long the text in that row will be. But I will investigate into that. Maybe also a fixed position helps.

VEGASNeal1 wrote on 4/4/2016, 10:50 AM

Hi Carter,
Yes, that text in your sample video does jump around in a very strange way.
I've created typewriter-like titles a few times and never encountered anything like that. Are your keyframes for just the text box, or do they also include the location?
If the latter, I'd check that if there are unexpected location differences for some of the keyframes.
It is also possible that there's something with that particular font; using some other font might make a difference.
Lastly, rather than creating a keyframe as each character is added. An alternate technique is to use a slow linear wipe as the fade-in transition for each line of text.
The only keyframe needed is to move one line of text up to make way for the next.
The look is somewhat smoother, but it is much easier than key framing each character.