Grazie, I'm not sure that I can. Many have said that the title generator is the weakest link in Vegas. They'd like to see a beefed-up--industrial strength title generator. I'm wondering what, in their minds, or in reality, what that means--what separates the two... technically speaking. What is the one in Vegas lacking that prevents it from being a "pro" title generator?

Or is just just because they can't do 3D animated text?

Usually, most text you see in films and on television is pretty straight forward. Vegas delivers this, at least I think it does. There are the occasional "chessy" locally produced commercials that use animated 3D text to little or no effect, other than to show that they can.

I guess I'm asking if this perceived deficit is real or imagined. Does that help any?

J--

My issue with the Title generator is in the rolling credit area.

Granted I am a rather new and unsophisticated user so I may be missing something or not aware of options, but it seems that a rolling credit should import from a word processing document and if it does not import there should be an option for more than three different levels/type faces.

Additionally, it would be nice to have rolling credits from side to side (CNN Style).

I know there must be a way to do these things using track motion but I would rather not have to take the time to learn the long way.

You can do ticker-tape-type scrolling (right-to-left or left-to-right) using the "Time, Scroll Right, On Frosty White" under "Credit Roll" in "Media Generators". You change the individual parameters to suit your needs.

Mandk, you should be able yo pick any font installed in your machine, which I would guess would be more then the 3 you have.
You can not import from word put you can cut and paste on to the text window, unles you mean to keep the formating then no.

Tom, I agree with you whole-heartedly!

As far as getting more than 3 fonts? You can get around this limitation by using more than one title layer. The true strength in Vegas is the fact that a user is provided with just the right tools to pretty much create any effect imaginable limited only by creativity.
As far as getting fancier with titles, I use SwishMax. Much cheaper than FlashMX and it does what I need it to do.

While not as strong as some other editors with a little work you can get very good results with Vegas alone or by using the various 3D filters Satish offered. Beyond that there's Boris if you really want to go nuts with texture, lighting effects 3D special effects and so on for text.

There's nothing really "technical" about it. With some effort you can paste in all kinds of fancy effects using off the shelf 3D text applications, most costing $50 or less do a decent job. Like with other things how good the effects end up looking depends on how much effort you invest in learning whatever application you use works.

Told you I needed to lear a lot.

I agree with Billyboy. In Vegas, with some creative thought, you can create great title sequences. No, it's not Livetype, but it's a very functionable tool. If you are lazy, Vegas' titler leaves a lot to be desired. If you are lazy, get a tool like Caymen or something similar that doesn't require any thought.

I'd say the text capabilities witin VV are as good as they should be.

Creating the fancy stuff shouldn't be the role of a NLE, I even suggest that editors shouldn't be doing this themselves. Graphics designers spend a lo of time mastering their skills as do editors. Just having the tools doesn't make for good looking text on the screen.

The rolloing text facility in VV shouldn't be there I'd suggest. The way VV works isn't compatible with doing this properly. It needs to be done in a separate application.

What I'd like to know is if there is any application that does it as well as the hardware titlers do it. They were bult by people who knew how to at least make text look good on video, they're still no substitute for knowledge of graphice design but they do take care of the technical stuff.

Could you give a little more info on SwishMax and FlashMX? What do these do, where do you get them, and how much?

Thanks.

2G

Hi folks. This is my first post to this forum. I'm a relative newbie but I have learned the basis of Vegas and I am having a great time with it loving its robustness and relative ease of use. I came from (you will forgive me) Pinnacle Studio 8. I got so fed up with its reliability (or lack of same) that I purchased Vegas and DVDA based on good reviews and its reputation for rock solid stability. I haven't been disappointed. However, to its credit, I would have to say that Pinnacle Studio has a really good rolling credit facility which is part of its built-in "Title Dekko". You can select from a large number of built-in fonts including some with some nice 3D effects, without being overly done. You can paste text in from a text file. The rolling credit will automatically adjust itself to the length of the event you are overlaying it on. I realize you can do great stuff with Vegas by being creative (I've played with many of Vegas's features and got creative myself) but sorry guys, you should not have to spend a lot of time getting creative to make a nice looking rolling credit. I found Vegas to have a rather clumsy rolling credit capability and even now, I will sometimes go back to (shudder) Studio 8 just to get the rolling credit look I have used and like in Studio 8. I have input this as a new feature request. I have learned a lot from all of you folks and really appreciate all the friendly and helpful solutions. I continue to learn, but I feel very strongly about this one.

I agree with DigitalSteve. The Vegas titler could be a little more visual/WYSIWYG, and it would be nice to have more built-in fancy 3D FX (like Pinnacle's Hollywood FX). Anyone who finds them cheesey (they certainly are when they're abused) would not need to use them, but they sure come in handy when you're throwing together a quick opening sequence for a sports or music video.

I have been creating rolling credits using Photoshop, then importing the file into Vegas and scrolling the text using Track Motion. The good thing about this is you can have unlimited fonts in the credits as well as graphics! Works nicely for me.

v

My .02cents. Its too hard to get the pre roll delay, post roll delay, small color fonts to keep from blinking (20 or lower) like twinkle stars and the total design concept is not "Vegas Intuitive" . I will probably not use the credit roll function until they fix it. What good is a credit roll with a size 36 font? Reminds me of the big fat clown ties in the 70's. Its totally useless at this size unless you do not want the people to read the credits because they fly by so fast. But remember this: I might be just ignorant enough not to know how to use it. Then again I did not have that problem with Premier credit roll titles if I could keep it from crashing. You might check www.adamwilt.com if you can follow the technical stuff.

JJK

Vectorskink---
In using Photoshop, etc., are you able to set up -- and use in Vegas -- a set of titles larger vertically than one Vegas-screenfull of text?
Whenever I set up such a vertically long file and then try to use it in Vegas, using track motion, I'm limited to a single screenfull of text. The rest of my file gets ignored -- it's as if there were an invisible "fence" around the first screenfull, and trying to scroll up after that point doesn't work.

What I was thinking I'd do was have a vertically long set of titles, then scroll through the whole thing by using track motion. But in all my attempts so far, I'm unable to use any more text than will fit on a single screen. I can, of course, scroll that single screen up just fine--and then I can scroll up another screen to follow it, and coordinate them so that it looks like one continuous scroll -- but I can do this only by using another video track, with a single screenfull of text on that track.

But what am I missing, if anything, that would make it possible to create ONE vertically long file and then scroll the whole thing progressively through the "visible" window using track motion??

If that's the article I remember reading a long time ago then it's really mandatory reading for anyone trying to create text in video.

Only problem I have is trying to find software that does it right.
It's all well and good to know how great the hardware text generators are and I could probably buy one of the old ones for peanuts but from memory they take up a 19" rack, probably need 3 phase power and another few KWs of aircon to keep happy.

BTW we forget how spoilt we are with what we've got. I tansferred some film last week, one had the credits done with felt letters that stuck to a felt board. The other one used those plastic letters that clipped into a backing board. Shame about the flare form the light. Who ever did it spent ages stop frame animating the text.

earthrisers -
Pan/Crop may be better for this - moving around within the graphic rather than moving the graphic within the frame. Make sure you don't have "Match Output aspect" or something similar turned on - that can create an 'invisible fence" - it is certainly possible to do what you want.

The main shortcoming with the Text generator is the inability to have different letters or lines different colours in the same event.

Otherwise, I think it works and looks great - especially when you start dabbling with parent - child and show moving gradients or video "through" the text.

Vegas has a scrolling credits FX and a text generator. They are two different things with different capabilities.
Scrolling credits have three styles you can tweak. It will allow you to use three different text colours in the same event.
The text generator will let you paste formatted text from another Windows app - like a word processor. It will maintain fonts and sizes, but not colour. Because it uses the installed fonts on your machine (letters and dingbats and whatnot) and has adjustments for shadow, outline and alpha (background and/or text) you can create text with great variation with Vegas text generator. If you're a marvellous titler yourself, that's how your titles in Vegas will come out: marvellous! Combined with the image manipulations Vegas is capacle of, Vegas is like a gourmet food market (the one at Harrods comes to mind) for the discerning text creator.

But then it is a fact that some of you people prefer TV dinners. You may not want to spend time on making titles look special, you may not know what you want and prefer to see readymade suggestions, you may not have the typographer stuff in you. But you do want titles that adds flair and excitement to your videos. I guess you're the ones who will have to dish out a few extra bob for a titler that does what Vegas does not.

But there are a few thing I wish the Vegas text generator could do (Sony, start taking notes now):
- Semi-independent layers, so you can have different colours in the same text event while changes in lines and sizes are reflected on all text.

- That should also make it possible to have a semi-transparent bar behind the text and only there - following whatever changes you make to the text.

- Adjustable kerning between individual letters. Like, if I want the T to stand closer to the A but not the H to touch the E.

All this can be done to-day, but it requires several tracks and can be quite cumbersome. And when you make changes in one, it does not influence the other.

As you may have gathered, I'm not much into scrolling titles. I think it creates more noise than communication. But if you want them, a good tip is to use the text generator and scrolling titles in combination.

Or, to mess up your readability further, when you've made your scrolling titles, copy them to a track above, zoom in with pan/crop and make them semi-transparent by pulling down the opacity level. This is a variation on a great photo montage tip Shredder posted here last year.
Sorry for the long-windedness. Keep hope alive.
Tor

I would still like to know if there is something different "Under the Hood" About say After Effects, or Vegas Titlers. To my MiND, And this may not be right. But AE Titles LOOK higher quality.. Somehow... AND surely the Majority of Film Tiles are just very Simple.

James, I just did a credit roll for our video Christmas card using the Arial font, 20 pt. and it worked just fine. Granted, certain fonts do better than others at smaller sizes.

Although the application isn't perfect, depending on who you ask, once I've learned how to use the different components in Vegas I haven't been disappointed. Having said that, I will say that the title generator is borderline.

As I've thought about my original question in this post, I've come to the conclusion that considering what Vegas is capable of doing compared to it's cost, there really isn't any much room for complaint. But I'm still curious as to what other programs are doing on the inside that Vegas isn't as it applies to titles.

I really cannot speak for what other programs are doing under the hood, I've only used Premiere 6.5 and its titler is more capable but I found it quite twitchy to use.
Problem is the few other things that I've looked at for doing titles don't tell you much about whatthey do under the hood and a lot of them are designed more for Flash and web graphics with avi just going along for the ride. Good titles for video need a different setup. The color space is different and being a raster and interlced medium introduces a different set of complications.

From what I can deduce what is missing is sub pixel rendering and / or the ability to specify motion is lines per frame. The rest of it you can workaround. It's tedious and time consuming but you can make it happen if you don't want to spend the dollars on a third party app.

I've only seen one movie projected using video. Even at 2K res the one thing for me that gave it away as being video were the rolling credits, the line crawl was obvious.

I do think this is a significant area, mostly with NLEs and VV in particular its quite hard to get produce a bad video so long as you follow the KISS principal. Text is the one area where even doing the simple white text on black in a simple font may not look too good. I've taken to watching TV commercials and looking at the small details to try to see how they get the text to look respectable. I'm not talking about 3D or animation, just plain text that doesn't look like home movie stuff.