Cayman's reputation means little to me. The look is dated. Their website is dated. See a trend? If anyone craves the Cayman titler, more power to them. But $400? Please.

Likewise, for entry-level videographers, Videonics was popular years back. Not now. Better titles could be done on a PC, and they were finished.

If you've found a better way to do text I'm all ears, I've looked at a few, mostly they're designed for web content and / or have no concept of how to render text into video. I don't care much about the 'look', I care about quality. I like the idea of selling my work and one of the most common reasons independants get their work bounced is because of technical faults in their graphics.
Bob.

For several years I worked with MetaCreations, the company who brought you Bryce, Poser, Painter, KPT and Final Effects (remember that one?). I can't help but think that the quality of graphics software has deteriorated over the past several years. Those of you who have been in the business for a while know what I'm talking about.

Upon checking out the Cayman website, I agree with DGates. Also, I agree with farss about quality - so often overlooked. Since I work primarily as an art director, font and titling quality is EVERYTHING to me. The Cayman site is a joke, and the fact that they're charging 4 bills for their program is an insult.

After taking a very close look at Motion on the Mac side of the equation (if you haven't seen the program yet, you owe it to yourself to take a look!), that's what I've decided to go with. It's too bad that there's nothing even remotely close to it for Windows. And at $299, it's a steal. Don't get me wrong, Vegas 5 is awesome. But the lack of quality in third-party support leaves a lot to be desired.

Who would you expect to sell a Titler to if all you said was, “Look, it does simple white text, isn’t that elegant?”. The beauty is that you can do text with a gradient fill and shadow and not require multiple tracks in Vegas to do it.

My biggest complaint about Vegas is that it can do anything you want if you love (and have the time) to do everything from scratch every time you need it! I don’t. You don’t have to use the looks Cayman ship if you think they are dated. Save a bunch of your own. I’ll gladly spend a whole afternoon designing titles the way I like them if I can save them. With Vegas I could not save them if they required composited tracks (and they almost always did) With Cayman I can get the text just the way I like it no matter how complex and just save it as a preset. The next time I need it, all I have to do is drag and drop it and change the words.

You gotta remember, everyone here is not making major motion pictures. I use Pinnacle Hollywood FX Gold all the time. Every time its mentioned here, everyone jumps all over it call them a bunch of “cheesy” effects. Then every once it a while someone posts about, “how do I put a picture on a book cover and open the book to reveal the video?” and people post back about the laborious process of compositing, and buy Cool 3D and wait 5 hours for it to render, and this and that. I just sit back and laugh to myself, because I use this effect all the time in my Video Yearbooks and I just drag and drop it and I’m done. 2 seconds of work with the right tool!

I really like what Cayman has done. It’s like Title Deko on steroids. The typeface management alone is a big timesaver. I hate wading through hundreds of fonts that some program thought I needed on my system (all of which look the same to me) just to get to the handful that I actually use, Cayman only shows me the fonts I want and they do it in the typeface of the font. How about word wrap! How sick are you of typing your own line breaks in the Vegas titler and then re-editing them all because you added word in the middle? So many little things like that make it worth it in my opinion.

Like I said, you can do anything you want in Vegas as long as you have all day free to do it. I think Power CG RFS is reasonably priced at $149 for what it does.

~jr

spacesounds,
I've had a brief look at motion and didn't see anything that couldn't be done in Vegas although I'll admit it may take a lot of work. However be warned, my Macolite mate tells me the aliasing is very bad, for him to admit something from Apple has a problem it must be BAD.

I've just finished doing a really simple job, it's rendering while I type this. All I had to do was replace some text in a video that had been shot off a projected PP slideshow. You know what the original text look better, even on my c****y $200 TV used as a monitor it looks worse. I'd do better going back to Letraset and an animation camera.
This is just white text on a black background, nothing complex, should be drop dead easy but after a lot of research I can tell you it isn't easy for software to get it right.

Take a long hard look at text that the big networks put up, notice how they can get really tiny fonts to not fall apart? What's the most common advice i hear people give about text in ANY NLE? Use big fat fonts, yeah right, don't question why you can't do it like the big boys do it. And here's another test, notice how they can get text crawls that run as fast as you can read them, and they look great, try doing it in Vegas, and I mean feed it to a TV thru a composite feed off VHS and see how it looks.

Bob.

Sorry to rant on about this but to me it's the simplest things that matter the most, if they're wrong the creative bits a waste.

That's funny, my teacher at univeristy who is a video artist since 20 years did not like motion either, calling it a toy, he's quite pro mac also. I can't comment on the program because I did not try it. I guess future versions will be better.

JohnnyRoy - I'd like to ask you a question offline about your use of HollywoodFX but couldn't find your email address. Could you send it to me at

david at mcknightvideo dot com


thanks
DM

Email sent. Sure would be nice if Sony added our names and web sites back to our information page so we can find each other.

~jr

Good Grief!

Bob, the website looks absolutely awful. While I believe everyone when they say that Cayman is a fantastic tool, I've got to wonder about a titling company that puts their worst work forward to try to sell the product.

It's like putting your worst work onto your demo reel.

Rob Mack

One of the most usefull tools I have is Wavebreaker from Blaze Audio, costs around $10 and on the first job I used it on saved me 50 times the price. If you need to split 20 hours of audio captured from DAT it's the only tool I could find that did the job including SF7.
Bob.

Good tip!

It'd be worthwhile if we had a page somewhere that listed people's software favorites.

Rob Mack

I too find the Cayman product to be thin. I mean, it seems to do things in a realatively simple way and I like that you can save presets. That's all cool. But I was doing that in Title Motion 4 years ago. I still use and love Title motion. My main complaint about that prog (T.M.) is its spline tools are not, in any way, intuitive. I'm also a big fan of Boris RED. Love that prog.
When I first saw that Spot announced Cayman here, I anxiously rushed to the site, and... was very dissapointed for the same reasons in previous posts. On first glance, there was nothing there that wasn't easily done in a Vegas. That was my first impression. Tough thing to get past. Bluff made a better first impression. Closer examinataion reveiled that it could do a few neet things, but for that cost!? Not a chance. But that's a personal preference thing, based on the fact that I use RED & Title Motion (for Speed Razor, where I work). Then, to discover Cayman's tool had the same limitation as RED, I stopped looking at the product alltogether (that is, a proxy image).
Still, I'm curious as to what is meant by "better quality CG." Anti-aliasing? I'm not sure what Cayman can do to provide "better quality" than Boris or even Vegas - as far as simple text goes.

I just want to make clear that I'm not in any way saying that the Cayman software is bad. I'm sure it's great.

I'm just saying that the web site is like a turd in a punchbowl. It makes me want to look somewhere else. If I was selling a great titling tool I'd want some great sales material and I sure as heck wouldn't put that page up where anyone could see it.

Rob Mack

It looks at best like a shareware site, peddling products of a bygone era.

Aliasing is the core issue, Vegas can sort of be forced to get a passable result for static text but nothing stellar, beyond that you're pretty much on your own.
What is needed to get text to look correct is sub pixel rendering, unless you specify the text motion in lines per frame you get jitter on the edges. That's just for simple roller captions. Text moving horizontally needs to move an integer number of pixels per frame. Text moving diagonally will only work with sub pixel rendering from what I can see. You can see the same issues with Vegas's 3D planar surfaces, just take the revolving box demo .veg and replace the generated media with video, yuck!
On the admittedly very plain Cayman website this is one of the things that they do claim to take care of, 256 levels of anti-aliasing to 1 nanosecond resolution.
Thing is though, I've yet to find any of the companies that sell pro products have fancy web sites, some of them don't even seem to have a web presences at all. Those who can afford their products deal with account managers on a person to person basis, they don't have to 'sell' much, to those at the money making end of the business they're household names.

And here's the thing, when I got back into this game a couple of years ago I thought all those old farts with their linear edit systems were a joke, I mean when were those guys going to get with it, who would edit deck to deck? Well I've since had to eat humble pie, while I labour away for days on a simple project they punch out several per day. My biggest business opportunity next year will require just that, real time vision switching, title insertion etc. The product is to be delivered 1 hour after the event completes, potential income from 3 days work, more than I'm making in a year at the moment.

Bob.

Bob said:

"Thing is though, I've yet to find any of the companies that sell pro products have fancy web sites, some of them don't even seem to have a web presences at all".

You're kidding, right? Just what companies are ARE you dealing with? Quit trying to hold onto your Cayman argument. It doesn't hold water. You're making them out to be fertilizer salesmen, who wouldn't have a clue about web pages. But they're not. They're in the visual medium and they don't seem to be very good at it.

Leitch, Teranex, Laird, S&W.
I'm not for a minute defending the Cayman web site, sure it looks cruddy and could use some improvement to get their message accross, probably some examples of how much better they do it would seem very wise. I'll go further and admit that the screenshots on their web site looks like something from a bad acid trip.

I think we're not actually disagreeing at all, you're looking at the issue from a visual arts perspective and that's fine, I'd be the first to admit I have negative skills in that area. That's why I leave as many creative decisions as I can to those with talent in that area.
The point though that I think you're missing is that underlying any graphics system is a heap of technology and that needs to be specifically tuned to the needs of video, video is not the same as any other visual medium, it brings with it it's own set of complications and ones that can seriously trip you up, this I know as I've spent a lot of time cleaning up the mess created by those more creative than me.

As I haven't had a chance to check the output from Caymans system I'm neither defending them or attacking them. If they've got it right then they'll sure be getting my money, if they've also screwed it up I'll be the first to scream blue murder. The ONLY thing I've seen from them that gives me hope is they mention the critical area of aliasing.
Bob.

So the choice for titlers is between manufacturers' web sites?

If you are doing titles for MTV or Blind Date, you need one of those other titlers with LSD-inspired title designs or just that cheesy mosquito text look.

If you are pursuing that rock solid network title look a la ABC, CBS, NBC, get Cayman Graphics. It does that job well, and the output really looks different. On a good TV the titles look like they're printed on art paper. Probably the 256-level antialiasing with 1 ns resolution, but what do I know? I only know that this program makes my productions look more expensive, and I like its integration with Vegas (some of the misunderstandings in the postings above indicate that people haven't set it up properly).

If you're working on more serious productions, not shot in ADHD (no pun intended :O), try the demo version and just see for yourself.

I never paid so much attention to titles since I mainly do bits and pieces of video with Vegas... my titles were always very simple cause I like it this way. I'm really not into 3D and things like that.
But my question is: what about Boris Graffit ltd, the one Vegas5 came with?Is it worth the investment in time (learning curve) or should one go with another app for this purpose?

If high quality titles are your need, download the trial and give it a try. If you don't like the results, uninstall it.

Those who have been around for awhile know that some higher quality titlers look like they've just been ported from DOS. For those who've only cut their teeth on windows, it can seem foreign. But the results can be gratifying.

I see what you're saying about titles in motion and this sort of motion antialiasing is really important.

There's a difference between hardware companies like leitch and laird and a graphics company like cayman. You just don't try to sell graphics software with a mom and pop presentation like that. The first impression of the site is that this is shareware and if there were a message in there it gets lost because of the repulsive page.

The first impression should be that this is a great titling program. Instead, the impression is that the company is focussed on schlock. It's a shame. Luckily, there are people in the world who are willing to push the product for them and to explain why the software is good.

Rob Mack