Yes, I understand. I don't think you, or any of us, will ever get "razor sharp" text in video. I've never seen it. Film is another thing, but we're not working in film.

As far as colors go, we need to be aware that the color of the text and the color of the background can and will effect the sharpness of the text. Some colors, reds for example, have a tendency to "bleed" or "glow". This can be made worse, as I said, depending on the surrounding color. Red on green is a perfect example (and vice versa).

The weight of the font--it's thickness--will have an effect on how sharp it appears, too. Roman-style texts can create some real problems! I try to stay away from those.

This has turned out to be an interesting thread.

It appears that Vegas can do interesting things with titles and rolling credits but is not the leading edge product some of us would like. For me the rolling credit capabilities remains a weakness. Yes I could do the credits with overlapping generators or by importing from Photoshop and using pan and crop or track motion. It would also be possible to import from a word processor but only a few lines at a time. Additional work could generate great results but it would be a lot of work - not a laziness problem on my part but rather a time allocation issue.

The rolling credits I have to deal with are an important part of the production. High school concert bands with each musician identified in the credits. These can be up to 600 lines long and should look great. The concert is important but seeing an individual students name in the credits is almost as important and a great sales tool. Retyping or cutting and pasting lines into the VV processors is not feasible due to my typing skills and the free time available. Proof reading the interesting variety of names is also an issue. Smiths and Jones are included along with those from a number of Asian and Middle Eastern ethnic backgrounds.

I am buying an alternative program which should help and will report back on progress.

Thanks VideoCurmudgeon on starting a most interesting and (for me) timely thread.

The adobe premiere titler is very good. It allows full control of kerning, baseline shift, small caps (and many, many other text control options alot of which Vegas does not have) this makes a big difference when designing titles. It also allows shapes with many options. The work area is very nice as well (I could never understand why we cannot expand the Vegas work area to full screen). Vegas rules but Sony could definately learn something from Adobe in this area.

Marc

I've found with experimenting with the credit roll that if you set the resolution to 1440x1152 in the box at the top of the credit roll dialogue erm, box, that seems to make the text appear much sharper. The same goes for ordinary text, and other generated media.

Then for the render, I set the project properties to Progressive, and also render progressive. That way I avoid the line crawl and text break up.