shadow effects on credit rolls

cbrillow wrote on 3/18/2004, 8:14 AM

A friend is auditioning Screenblast and wants to be able to use drop shadows on credit rolls rather than plain, flat text. I don't have enough experience with SB to be able to point him in the right direction -- I see that it's possible to have shadows in regular titles, but can't find a way to accomplish this on a roll. Can anyone help with this?

Comments

ADinelt wrote on 3/18/2004, 7:50 PM

I played around a bit last night and did not see a property that can be set on a credit roll directly to give you a drop shadow.

But, (and there is always a but), I did find a work around for simulating the drop shadow.

1) On the bottom video track, place your video clip that you want the credit roll to appear over.
2) On the top video track, create your credit roll using a transparent background. Get the credit roll the way you want and when you are happy with the results, go to the next step.
3) Now that you are happy with your credit roll, make a copy of it and place it on the middle video track. (Gotta' love the multiple video tracks!) Now, edit the second credit roll and change the color of the text to whatever color you want your drop shadow to be (black, whatever). To achieve the actual drop shadow, go to the Pan/Crop tab on the Video Event Properties for the credit roll and adjust the 'F' to achieve your drop shadow. Moving the 'F' up, will cause your drop shadow to appear below our text. Moving the 'F' up and to the right will cause the drop shadow to appear below and to the left.

The reason this works is the top video track will overlay anything on the middle track and the middle track will overlay anything on the bottom video track. It is maybe not quite as elegant as setting a property on the original credit roll, but it does work and creates the illusion of a drop shadow quite effectively.

Hope this helps...
Al

cbrillow wrote on 3/20/2004, 8:50 AM

Thanks. Al -- that sounds like an effective way to do it. (Notice I didn't say workaround. In my opinion, that's a term to describe a way to do something because the software doesn't work, not because there's a feature missing...)

Anyway -- my buddy has already moved to Vegas 4, and has created an specific text background using 6 video layers. (This particular effect was another thing he found lacking in Screenblast.) He's just too damned fussy to settle for the supplied font/backgrounds, and not willing to risk his mental health by using Studio. In fact, although he's auditioning Studio 9, it crashed on him one time and he says he can't believe that I put up with so much to get it running right. No way would he tolerate that. There should be more like him...