Re: MAGIX - MEP Titles

Terry Pinnell <terrypin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"Ken Maltby" <kmaltby@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


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


"Terry Pinnell" <terrypin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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"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


You could use the .jpg as a "White-box" video effect for
your title also. Just put the .jpg on a track, then right-click
and select "Video effects". In the "Video Controller | Realtime
Visual FX Editor" select "White Box". (You could play with
the "Threshold" and "Fading Range" sliders, to see their effect
on the text display).

Thanks. Opened that dialog a week or so ago but found it overwhelming
(without any concrete examples). But trying your suggestion right now.
Presumably clicking 'White-box' in this case is same as changing
Advanced|Background to black? OK, I moved the Fading Range slider well
over to the left. But how do I reset it without canceling whole
dialog? I went ahead and clicked OK, and the preview monitor shows the
dark result. I use R-click | Reset video effects to restore the
original, and open Video Effects again. When I click White Box, I see
the Fading Range slider is still in the position to which I just moved
it. Do I have to reset it from memory? It was at about '80%', but it's
quite critical, going from black at 100% through various 'blurry'
stages back to 80%. Will it forever be set at whatever (probably
non-optimum) position I now drag to?

This will work with any similar images or
video clips (great for animated text). [I mentioned using
"BluffTitler" clips, earlier.] You can make a clip in MEP, or
any other video editor, that has the text (Animated, covered in
special layered effects or whatever) over a solid color
background; (black,white,blue,&green have some preset
optimizations [the "box" effects], but any color could be used.

Look forward to trying that.

In part as a workflow issue, but also to have access to
additional tools/effects, many create their "Titles" in graphic
editing programs like PhotoShop or the free Gimp2 that I
use. (This makes working with true Alpha channels a lot
easier in my opinion.)

I use PaintShop Pro 8 for such graphics. But so far these have been
for:
- Large introductory titles at start of movie
- DVD case covers
- Recently in TDA 1.6 menus; with the TDA 'Title' empty, minimised and
dragged to a corner where TV overscan hides it; ditto the Play All
button; and a button just containing 'Play - 25 mins' to start the
DVD.

Haven't managed animated text yet, but sound great!


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.


For the most part MEP does a good job picking that setting,
based on the text color(s) you use. Just don't insist on 40
different colors on one frame, and you should only want to
try the other on very rare occasions.

OK, understood thanks.

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.

Also meant to ask you about the dark borders that appeared around my
white text labels, even though I had not specified this in the Title
Editor. They're not crisp in this example, but that seems quite clever
of MEP if it's a design feature. But I'd like to understand the rules
here. Might affect whether I do or don't check the 'Borders' box. If
it's not a designed feature, I'm puzzled to know how they arise?

One of the main problems I've had with MoTV is its text titles. In
theory its spec included text borders, but they didn't work, period. I
tried a variety of bordered and shadowed font types, but none
successfully coped with captions against widely varying backgrounds,
mostly landscapes. I had to resort to always applying *two*, one
whitish (or yellow) and the other blackish (MoTV doesn't like
255,255,255 or 0,0,0), offset diagonally about 7 px. But obviously a
tedious affair. (The latest version, MoTV Pro 4, to which I recently
upgraded, does at last have a working text border facility. But I was
disappointed with it on my first test, admittedly hasty.)

Womble too is weak in this area. It has shadowed text, but nothing
really matches a good border.

So one of the great features of MEP for me is its titling. Not only
the borders, 3D and shadows, but also the templates and the effective
UI. So Titling alone will probably dictate which NLE I turn to as a
matter of course for a new project. (As you'll gather, I'm gradually
getting more confident and impressed with MEP - for which your patient
coaching takes a lot of credit, thank you.)

Digression: The possible exception might arise if I want to have
*full* control over my Ken Burns pan/zooms. (I apply it to all my
photos, so it's a key feature here.) Womble can do it, but sadly the
rendered quality when zooms are involved is unacceptable. However,
MoTV does a great job. MEP's flaw is that its Motion dialog offers a
*start* rectangle but not an *end*. So, for example, I have to zoom
out from a face to the entire image. I gather that I *can* achieve
this in MEP with 'Object Curve effects', but that looked very obscure
at first sight; still a long way up my learning curve!)

Also, branching off to yet another aspect, I had a post recommending
two alternative solutions to my 'elusive yellow header' problem. The
MEP forum site has been inaccessible for 2-3 days, so I can't quote
him verbatim, but recall they were
1) Change Advanced | Background setting (when necessary).
2) Change (any occurrence of?) white to 254,254,254.
I've not yet experimented with the latter.

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?


I'll give a try capturing the preview window, with CamStudio,
but I normally am more interested in the results as they appear
in the actual rendered movie. (For that it is easy enough to
export the region of the timeline between the start and end
markers.)

Thanks. It would often make it easier to discuss things like symptoms
of an apparent problem, or how to implement something. I was all set
to make my proud overture with a compact MPEG or WMV about my text
issues, based on Andre's method, so was disappointed it (or some
mistake of mine?) screwed up the text preview ;-(


PS I've been playing with the free "DAZ | Studio" as a
result of my efforts to work with iClone, you might want
to check it out, some day with a lot of free time on your
hands.


Will do - although somehow that sort of day never seems to come ;-)


I finally succeeded in capturing a MEP movie with CamStudio. So I can
now show you more clearly my difficulty in *consistently* making a
title with yellow and white. The movie is
TestTitleAgain-1-Capture-1-t.mpg (8 MB) at
http://www.speedyshare.com/183923400.html

It starts with my test title selected. The header is grey in the
preview monitor. Yet it is specified as yellow, as you see by
d-clicking the clip to bring up the Title Editor.(BTW, I don't know
why the Color box is shown containing white. With no text selected,
I'd expect it to be greyed out.) I now open Advanced | Background and
change to White. The yellow header is now visible but the white text
has vanished.

As you know, I have previously been successful in displaying both
yellow and white content in the same title. But I don't see what I'm
doing wrong here. Do you, please?

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK
.