#Creating titles on PAR
18 messages in this thread
I'm in need of some help creating sharp titles to be output via my PAR to VHS.
The tools I am confortable using include 3DS, Composer, Quark, Photostyler with
preference leaning towards Composer. What I need to do is sharpen up some
simple text which will be small (8 Point, 10 Point and 14 Point) I'd like to
overlay text on a 3DS image to begin an animation segment. So questions are:
1. I can copy the image off of the PAR as a TGA. Should I resize it before I
begin overlaying titles? If so to what size?
2. Which tool will yield crisper titles?
3. Are there any Block settings which work better than others for copying the
image back to the PAR?
4. My PAR drive is 75% full should I kill a few files and Optimize the drive?
5. Does image image quality suffer if they are on the outer drive tracks or
does this only effect the playback speed?
6. Toss in anything you can think of as I need to get this right the first
time I'm afraid.
Thanks for any assistance.
Bob
Robert, your problem is ensconced in two limiting parameters for sharp text.
VHS is by nature going to fuzz out all hard edged graphics. Antialiasing will
help some but it is the worst of the formats for hard edges. In the video
business, when we know a project is being slated for VHS or any color under
recording format we avoid chroma (color) text at all costs. We stick to whites
with black edges usually a few pixels wide for best sharpness and… never use
tect without an edge added. Adding color will reduce the effective
resolution from 230 lines VHS to less than 100. Betacam will stay at 500+
lines because of its recording scheme and initial color resolution. If making
a dupe of the VHS it goes down from there. So using text without any color is
an excellent way to increase sharpness for VHS. You can use dropshadows too
but these should be black or gray but still no color. If color is a must then
work with pastels rather than the NTSC saturated primaries these tend to bleed
more than pastels on VHS.
You will never get the sharpness of a true keyed charactergenerator because of
the response timimg of the many keyers out there. Typical 35 nanosecond rise
time CGs are equal to a horizontal resolution of 1500 pixels per hor. TV line
in the VGA terms. (source: Laird) This is an interpolation not an exact
equation. Like relating lines of resolution to dots per inch on printers. At
752 PAR res it is not possible to achieve the sharpness of a keyed character
from a 35 ns. CG Even with this resolution we try to add the text at the last
stage of video master editing. to preserve its sharpness..
You can also achieve the higher res look of the CG using continuous tone
bitmaps and heavy anti-aliasing. Inscriber uses this method. Going down from
there you could try the filters in Photoshop for that quality look.
But this is a different look than the simple CG.
Other rules are the size of the type. In CGs the smallest usable is 25-30
characters per line. With computer graphics. I try to keep it no more than 15.
With VHS tape –less!
Hope these guidelines help.
Don:
Thanks for all of your wisdom on this topic. VHS is fuzzing out my first text
test alright. I picked a white/grey on black per your suggestion and it is now
readable. How does one add an edge to text? There's no CG in my future so I'll
keep at it with the tools in hand. Thanks again.
Bob
Bob
In Composer you can try the Edge tool or Relief/Raise command. If you try to
take the Composer tga's directly to the PAR, remember that the default is Alpha
on and you'll have to adjust the PAR for 32 bit.
I start with a new composition sized to 752×480 and allow plenty for underscan
(or is it overscan<g>).
TedB
!^NavFont01F0006MGHHHJ8E87
Ted:
I was up late last night getting a start on this and I settled on Composer and
have been able to use some of Don's and John's advice. My titles look
acceptable now but I think I might have time to check out the Edge tool and
also Relief/Raise. I thought that if I started my composition at 752 x 480
that it would get scaled horizontally when put to the PAR? Would it squish the
752 down to say 640. If this is true would I notice the characters getting a
little slimmer or would it be impossible to tell?
Bob
Bob
I start out with a comp of 752×480, when all text/objects are in place I
select all and collapse. Then I save and answer no to the save composition
prompt (make sure you do save it before collapse<g>). The images fit well on
the PAR, taking the safe frame area into consideration.
TedB
!^NavFont01F0007MGHHGED84DA
Ted:
I'm digging through the Composer manual and learning a few things I should've
known already. I kept using Flatten instead of Collapse thus causing me extra
work in image conversion. Did you ever want to just stop the world so you
could actually learn the software packages you own without having a deadline
forcing you to do things in the only way you know how? Sigh… Thanks again
Ted, my vacation cannot happen too soon.
Bob
Bob
The alternative is to be self-employed and take the time to dig through the
manuals of all your software. Of course, you don't make any money and by the
time you've got it figured out……New Release!<G>.
Composer really is quite a program for laying out titles/graphs etc.. The
Tools/Transform/Resize To command lets you adjust objects to the exact size and
the alignment tools pops everything into place. It is possible to do some
"painting" but I'd sure like to sit with someone who really knows the program
to learn some tricks.
Later
TedB
!^NavFont01F0007MGHHHC8BD56
Sorry for the delay but I've been at Disney World with the family for the
past week.
You can add an edge to text in 3DS with a beveled edge in the lofter. I
then assign these beveled faces a black matte material; assign the faces
front of the text a white material. Doing it in anipro is much easier with
edge tool.
Robert,
Its not totally clear what you want to do, but if I can extrapolate you want to
take images off the PAR and then overlay clean sharp text created from the
tools you've listed.
Considering what you've got to work with, your best bet would be to create the
TEXT in 3DS and render over the images you've acquired for the background.
Still images as opposed to animation images have higher resolution. If you're
doing frame grabs from tape in real time, the quality is going to be
considerably less than going from rendered TGA's to ani files. Your best bet is
to grab one frame at a time as a still, and then off load them into 3DS for
compositing with your titleing.
If you're trying to grab titles from tape and use them over images you've
already created, you're not going to get a good result.
-JE
John:
Sorry about the obfuscation. :-[ I am trying to add titles to images I've
already rendered to the PAR from 3DS. Creating the titles (about 25 lines of
about 35 characters each and I've gotta cram them into 1/3 the width of the
screen) in 3ds sounds pretty tedious. Is it worth the effort, in other words
will Composer give me a comparable result as it has decent anti-aliasing?
Thanks for staying up late with me on this one.
Bob
Bob,
Composer is probably your best bet all things considered, and probably the
fastest as well.
Hope it turns out for you.
-JE
To add a note to use of Composer, I find that if I use the largest font
available then scale it down in several steps the antialiasing is even better.
Just takes a little more time.
Michael B.
Mike:
I like your scaling the text idea. I'm gonna give that one a try, thanks.
Bob
Michael,
Sizing and scaling fonts is a really good technique, especially when using
Windows based text. I use Inscriber but there are times when doing printing
I've done the same.
Thanks,
-JE
In the absence of Inscriber and other video editing tools we make up things
that …sort of work.<g>
Michael B.
Scaling down the fonts in Composer is really a wasted effort, since Composer
already scales the fonts down when you create them. Specifically, when you
select a font size in Composer and create text, it first creates the the bitmap
in memory eight times larger than you specified, and then scales it down to
generate smooth, antialiased edges. If you scale the text down again, you're
more likely to create irregularities than to eliminate them.
(There's an extra "the" somewhere in the above paragraph that anyone can have.)
– Jack
I am aware that composer does prescaling but sometimes it just doesn't look as
good particularly if other enhancements are being done to the text such as
embossing, outlines, drop shadows,etc. It really depends on each particular
situation and what looks best. Your point is well taken and thanks for
pointing out that scaling can create irregularities.
Michael B.