Re: MAGIX - MEP Titles

"Ken Maltby" <kmaltby@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


"Terry Pinnell" <terrypin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:o1cho3d304c1md84obaknfl95b85ee6tfo@xxxxxxxxxx
"Ken Maltby" <kmaltby@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


If it is working the way I expect, this "Background"
setting is really just to define how the title editor separates
and defines the transparent portions of the "text" that is to
be overlaid over your video. (It appears the black
"Background" setting works best for the most colors,
[except pure black of course]. )

OK, thanks, understood. But even with Advanced | Background = Black, I
get a very unsatisfactory result: some invisible, the rest too faint.


When I placed your .rtf file on track3 it had it's
background set as White, (probably because the .rtf
has the default assumption that the background will
be white paper or video display). To have all the
colors display (not be transparent) I changed the
advanced setting to a black background. Then all
the colors were ok except Black, but the "black"
description text next to the colored text displayed
fine as well (again except for that which would have
been next to the Black. The "All Ariel 8" at the end
did not display either.) Switching to White
background gets the black color line and the All Ariel
8 displayed, but drops a number of the colors.


One other thing you might want to check, if you are
using one of the more complex titles; is if there is an
"extra" "empty" white-box provided in a track above
the .tfx that could be there to display whatever the
black "background" would ignore.

I'm not using any presets at this stage, until I work out what's
happening with the colours!


What appears in your final rendered movie ( and what
should be showing in the "preview" ) is the combined
results of the information/objects and effects from all the
objects that are in all the tracks; present under the scrub
line as it proceeds down the timeline. So what you see
in your movie, at a point in time, with your text displaying
could be made up of dark colored text in a "White-box"
on one track and light colored text in a "Black-box" on
another track. Properly aligned, it will appear as it would
have if all the text were in one box.

That said, for most color combinations you shouldn't be
having the problems you are describing. I have yellow,
white, and dark green text in the same black background
title object, and the colors look correct to me.

Changes that you can see when making changes to the
settings for "Playback in Arranger" and "Preview and
playback on VCR/Analog recording" should not have
any effect on the rendered movie. You could export a
range between start and end markers, as "raw" AVI
(uncompressed) to see the actual results of any change.

I'll make such a clip from the range of a timeline
that had your .rtf file applied to track3 and set to
black background. I'll then encode&compress it
into DVD compliant MPEG2 for download
posting. I'll try and make it PAL in the process,
but all I'll be doing is using the setting in TMPGEnc
4.0 XPress, so I don't know if it will effect what we
are trying to show.

Many thanks, Ken, it's kind of you to take the trouble. We were
probably working in parallel (albeit in different time zones) because
I too have now made a similar movie, successfully showing all the
colours. However, it ended up last night as a 157 MB DVD-ready MPEG!
I'll step through the key points:

The new RTF file is RTF-Colours.rtf
http://www.terrypin.dial.pipex.com/Images/RTF-Colours.rtf
and looks like this
http://www.terrypin.dial.pipex.com/Images/RTF-Colours.jpg

It uses much larger fonts than my earlier attempts, which I quickly
realised were far too small. It also includes a black *and* white
label. (Creating those in MS Word 2000 was tricky, because even when
*selected* they are not visible. That screenshot was therefore taken
in WordPad, smarter in this respect, with one of the white labels
selected.)

Given that I wanted to see all 40 'standard' colours, I tried to make
the file compact. But I guess I don't yet understand MEP's
word-wrapping rules properly, so the result was not the neat '3
colours per line' I'd intended. Or maybe I screwed up the RTF itself.

The structure of my MEP movie looked like this:
http://www.terrypin.dial.pipex.com/Images/MEP-MovieStructure1.jpg

First, the RTF file with Advanced | Background set to White is
displayed over 3 different (still) clips on track 1: black, white and
a multi-coloured photo. Same 3 on the right, but set to Black. In
between there's a comment, using my much-discussed yellow header and
white body, again with both settings of 'Background', over black and
white clips.

As mentioned, the rendered movie is very large. Even the AVI I made
with DivX in VirtualDub MPEG-2 is 27 MB, and that has the disadvantage
of looking distorted. The results are probably best seen as stills
anyway, so I've included them all in sequence in the files
TestRTF-Snapshot000.BMP to TestRTF-Snapshot039.BMP. They are in
TestRTF-MEP.zip (19 MB) at
http://www.speedyshare.com/681317153.html

I expect that after staring at the movie and work files a bit longer
I'll eventually grasp this black and white 'background' stuff,
although so far it's still hazy. But plainly MEP-11 *can* deliver all
the colours and in any combination, in various font styles and sizes.

It's now a matter of developing a few simple rules-of-thumb as to how
to do it quickly. For example, it's not intuitively obvious to me when
to change the Advanced|Background setting.

Also, re optimising quality, I'm pretty sure that in the 157 MB MPEG I
saw slightly better results from the last set, with
Advanced|Background set to black than in the first set. But maybe I
imagined that, I'll have to study again.

Another niggling outstanding issue is how to get authentic captures.
As per my last post, I feel close to that but not quite there. Any
thoughts on that please?


--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: MAGIX - MEP Titles
    ... be white paper or video display). ... What appears in your final rendered movie (and what ... The structure of my MEP movie looked like this: ...
    (rec.video.desktop)
  • Re: MAGIX - MEP Titles
    ... be white paper or video display). ... What appears in your final rendered movie (and what ... The structure of my MEP movie looked like this: ...
    (rec.video.desktop)
  • Re: MAGIX - MEP Titles
    ... be white paper or video display). ... What appears in your final rendered movie (and what ... The new RTF file is RTF-Colours.rtf ...
    (rec.video.desktop)
  • Re: video always on top issue
    ... > On top of that I display a video file, it turned out that this is a ... > the video ... > the labels are displayed under the movie. ... picture, and update the JFrame. ...
    (comp.lang.java.programmer)
  • JMF: video always on top issue
    ... On top of that I display a video file, it turned out that this is a ... I expected the video to be partially covered by my Labels, ... the labels are displayed under the movie. ...
    (comp.lang.java.programmer)