Titles

clipmaker wrote on 7/14/2008, 9:15 AM

Hi All,

I just purchased Movie Studio. For the most part I am very happy. There is one area that is bugging me though. My wife has a mac with video maker (free with leopard). It has much better titling for videos than vegas seems to have. I can't create a title or use the presets to make anything that even begins to look professional.

What I want to do is something like the preset on Video maker. Just a nice black/Grey gradient (so you can actually see the title without blending into the underlying video) with white lettering.

There MUST be something I'm missing!!

Comments

gmes29 wrote on 7/14/2008, 5:46 PM

there really aren't titles per say in VMS as there are in Pinnacle and others where there a bunch of templates you can use. i use generated text events to create my titles. they offer features such as text placement and effects, pan and zoom, etc..

MSmart wrote on 7/14/2008, 7:33 PM

A couple ways;

1) Media Generators tab > Text > Solid Background.

Enter text in the Edit tab, adjust placement and colors in the Placement, Properties and Effects tabs

2) Insert > Text Media

Choose Solid Background Preset, and basically the same as above to customize.

clipmaker wrote on 7/14/2008, 8:02 PM

Is there a way to limit it to like the bottom part of the screen? I am going for a "documentary" or "news" style where you can still see the video, but also easily see the text. in a bar across the bottom.

Thanks for both of your responses.

gmes29 wrote on 7/15/2008, 5:30 AM

in that case you'd most likely want to use the title as an overlay as opposed to just a 5 second introductory clip to your main video track (which is my definition of a title). you would stretch out the overlay/text event for as long as you need it to run concurrently with the video. if you want the text to scroll right to left (or whatever), you can use the keyframing feature in the text placement tab, set the fore and background colors in the properties tab, etc. haven't done this so i'm not quite sure how you'd go about limiting the display area of the text to the bottom portion of the frames but track motion might do it.

MSmart wrote on 7/15/2008, 9:23 AM

Ah, you want to do a "Lower Third".

gmes29 wrote on 7/15/2008, 3:53 PM

actually you can still do this in VMS with a single text event as an overlay. here's what i did..
in the placement tab, placed the text at the top of the event and set up the keyframes so the text goes right to left.
set text foreground color to royal blue, background color to white.
in track motion, took the entire rectangle in it's original size and simply lowered it until the text and it's background were only visible in the bottom portion of the preview pane.

clipmaker wrote on 7/15/2008, 8:51 PM

Thanks to both of you for the information! That did it!

However, when I rendered it to .MP4 the text looked VERY pixelated. What am I doing wrong now???

Thanks

ritsmer wrote on 7/16/2008, 3:13 AM

Could be that the framesize for the generated text is too small?

You see the framesize in the upper line in the Video Media Generator (text generator).

clipmaker wrote on 7/16/2008, 4:40 AM

Good idea, but its 720X480 which is what the rest of the video is. I think it might have something to do with the compression. The .AVI file looks good. Unfortunately, I won't be making .avi files all the time.