How Can I Improve "TITLES" in Vegas?

P

PhotoJim

Member
I recently upgraded to VEGAS PRO 8 BUT I have experienced problems in other
Vegas versions. When I render my video the opening titles and closing credits just look BAD! IS there an affordable "plug-in" for Vegas --- OR a "work around solution" that can resolve the issue????

The "Pro title effects" with Pro 8 look great... but my problem is with just ordinary
simplistic titles.... nothing fancy. The titles look fine before rendering, but after rendering... the edges are torn, jagged, fuzzy, etc. I eliminated key framing movement and Sony effects... everything I could think of.

I searched on-line for posted solutions.... "stay away from the color red", "make
the point size larger", "increase the title frame size to 1440 X 960 then resize with pan-tilt tool", " cover up the problem with some kind of effects" ... all posted suggestions which I used in an attempt to figure this out... NO LUCK, the titles still look amateurish and poor quality.

Vegas is a great NLE.... IF only I can resolve my problem with titles.

I tested using and then not using the drop shadow. I used big bold typefaces
and tried about 20 variations and point sizes. I tried 8-10 different colors including white, red, green, blue, and black... I tried rendering to AVI, MOV, WMV, MPEG 2 & 4, and I didn't see any big change in appearance on my monitor.

When you work hard to create a professional video for a customer and you are competing with other production companies to gain a decent reputation for professional quality work.... and the FIRST THING a prospect sees on sample videos are poor quality, jagged titles.... your dead in the water!

Any help or suggestions would be GREATLY APPRECIATED! Thanks !
 
Dont judge what you see on the monitor. Especially when it comes to titles. Render an actual small portion and see what happens. Or are you actually doing that and still ending up with lousy titles ?
 
Have you considered doing your titles in Photoshop and saving it out as a png, and then import it into Vegas? It's a little more work, but it can be rewarding.
 
I always go the photoshop route. If you have enough RAM etc. Then you can keep photoshop open simultaneously and if u make any fine adjustments to a psd or png file, the changes will immediately reflect in Vegas.
 
I always use just the plain old title plugin, and most of my work involves subtitles.

What I found is:

-Use a very light gray for the text colour (it will look white on the screen).
-Very slight "quick blur" -- around .3 The text shouldn't look blurry, but the edges should soften by 1 pixel.
-Put a black edge around the text, as thin as possible, and feather it so it fades away over a few pixels. This makes the most difference in getting titles to look great. Keep a finger on CTRL to have fine control over the adjustments. The text should "pop" without calling attention to itself.
-Drop-shadow can make text stand-out a bit more, but can look tacky.
 
plainman007 said:
I always go the photoshop route. If you have enough RAM etc. Then you can keep photoshop open simultaneously and if u make any fine adjustments to a psd or png file, the changes will immediately reflect in Vegas.
Click to expand...

I was just about to poast the same question, casue tonight I finally finsihed the soundtrack on my film and ready to shlap the credits and burn some DVDs.

I like above idea, any chance you can giove us a bit more info:

1. how can you create a credit roll with photoshop??? seems to be fade in and fade out type of credits woudl be the only option then, right?

For end credits, I think credit roll is the standard though, no?

Also I am not sure I understood what you meat by "you can keep photoshop open simultaneously and if u make any fine adjustments to a psd or png file, the changes will immediately reflect in Vegas":

Do you mean that if you make a change in the photoshop file ans save it as the same file name Vegas will update the media automatically? Please explain.
 
Photojim, can you post a sample frame grab showing what your lousy titles look like? I agree that Vegas titles are not the best, but I have done hundreds of them and find them perfectly acceptable quality. Mine are static, not moving around, so maybe if yours are moving that will make a difference.
 
Deuceofspades said:
1. how can you create a credit roll with photoshop??? seems to be fade in and fade out type of credits woudl be the only option then, right?
Click to expand...

You keyframe the frame position in pan/crop or in track motion. Usually pan/crop.


Also I am not sure I understood what you meat by "you can keep photoshop open simultaneously and if u make any fine adjustments to a psd or png file, the changes will immediately reflect in Vegas":

Do you mean that if you make a change in the photoshop file ans save it as the same file name Vegas will update the media automatically? Please explain.
Click to expand...

Yes. You hit "Save" in Photoshop, and as soon as it's done saving, the changes will show up in Vegas.

(This is true of any other program which might make files you can use in Vegas.)
 
Photoshop is a good option , but if you want to make a "wow" credits (which is important, I agree) take a look at After Effects, it's almost unlimited possibilities
 
Thanks For The Suggestions!

Thanks For The Suggestions!

Thank you all...

I'll create some test titles in Photoshop and import them.... and give that a try,
along with backing down on white to 235 instead of 255...

I did "look" at the titles I generated just on my computer monitor and did not
burn a DVD to play on a television set. I use an NVIDIA GeForce 5200 video
card so I can run two monitors and I move the VEGAS "Preview" screen over to
the second monitor and enlarge it to almost full-screen.

No one responded to "is there a decent Plug-in for doing Vegas titles?" so I am
assuming that nothing affordable (under $200) is available...

I really appreciate all of your suggestions!!!

Thanks for the help.
PhotoJim

​
 
Clip Board Sample - PhotoJim

Clip Board Sample - PhotoJim

Here is a frame sample from the clip board... it seemed to
be the best of the titles I created.... It's directly from Vegas
without using Photoshop.
 
Second try - Sample Title

Second try - Sample Title

Sorry...

I had to go read the FAQ to figure out how to upload the sample title.

1205944002.jpg


PhotoJim
 
Hi Photojim. Is that output as JPG or PNG? It looks as if it has compression artifacts around the title, so if that's PNG I would be disappointed with it.

BTW, what are your project settings for this?

Richard
 
PhotoJim said:

I did "look" at the titles I generated just on my computer monitor and did not
burn a DVD to play on a television set. I use an NVIDIA GeForce 5200 video
card so I can run two monitors and I move the VEGAS "Preview" screen over to
the second monitor and enlarge it to almost full-screen.
​
Click to expand...

You can take better advantage of previewing by using the little monitor button above your preview window.

You can set it so that it previews out to a TV through firewire -- you'd go through your camera or an A/D converter box. This is the better way for judging what something will look like on a TV, because as you've noticed, it looks vastly different than it does in your preview window on a computer screen.

If you want to use the second monitor as a full-screen preview, you can enable the preview button to use Windows Secondary Display, and then when you click it, the whole monitor screen will be a preview. This is than just moving and enlarging the preview window in two ways -- it will actually use the entire screen, with no framing or buttons, and it also allows you to keep your preview window smaller so that you can use more screen real estate for Vegas tools, instead of giving up a whole monitor for it.
 
I apologize for the delay in my response, I was visiting relatives for the Easter
holidays.

For the uploaded "screen snapshot" I used the Vegas preview window to grab
the frame to the clip board, then opened Photoshop and saved it as a TIF. I didn't want to use the JPG compression algorithm .

The Vegas project settings are:
Video = NTSC DV (720 X 480, 29.970 fps)
Field Order = Lower field first
Pixel aspect ration = 0.9091 (NTSC DV)
Output Rotation = 0 degrees (original)
Pixel format = 32-bit floating point
Composting gamma = 1.000 (Linear)
Full resolution rendering quality = Beast
Motion Blur type = Gaussian
Deinterlace method = Blend Fields

Audio
Master bus Mode = Stero
Number of stero buses = 0
Sample Rate (HZ) = 44,100
Bit depth = 16
Resample and stretch quality = Good

I received an e-mail from "Digital Juice" (I'm on their mailing list) about their Half-Price sale for "Boris Title Tool kit" and it sounded really good UNTIL I got to the disclaimer that it is only available for After Effects.

I do appreciate everyone's comments and suggestions.
 
I read somewhere on this forum long ago that it helps to change the resolution of the text. i think they just doubled it, so 1440x960.

worth a shot, I can't remember if it worked...i do all my titles with After Effects now.
 
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