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Text Troubles in Vegas Pro
I’m working on building some video-based online learning courses, and I’m interested in displaying text on the screen to highlight certain key points. My intention is to keep things quite simple and straightforward, but still I’ve been running into some trouble.
In a general sense, I’m able to add text to a video with both the ‘Titles and Text’ and ‘(Legacy) Text’ media generators without any issues. My primary problem comes into play when I’m trying to display several bullet points in a list, having them unfold over a period of time instead of all at once (in other words one item is displayed, several seconds later an additional item pops up underneath that, and so on). Here’s an image for reference; the individual items would be chronologically staggered:
I’m looking for the fastest workflow I can find to add in this text, since the courses are 2 to 3 hours long and have quite a bit of key points to display. Manually positioning each title and bullet point is too time-consuming. I’ve tried using animation in a single iteration of the text media generators, to have bullet points unfold one at a time, but whenever new text is added it will jump in placement on the screen (despite not jumping in placement when I preview it). The best option I’ve found so far is to work backwards and build out the full list of items I want, placing everything on the screen where needed, and then chopping things up into multiple iterations for each bullet point to build on what came before.
All of these methods have seemed a bit wonky and less than ideal, not to mention seemingly taking forever to build out. Am I missing something? The animation method seems like it might be best practice, but as mentioned the text placement doesn’t work as I would like it to. I’ve played with the ‘Placement’ and ‘Anchor Point’ options, but so far the results have not been what I would want. I also ran into issues with using the font I want as part of the ‘Titles and Text’ media generator, but I saw elsewhere in the forums that I could copy and paste text from other software to work around that. Doing so leaves me with concerns, though, about things like line spacing not being consistent.
Anyway, I’m hoping that some of you with more expertise might be able to help me find some faster methods!
Thanks in advance.
-Joseph
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4 Replies
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I’d make each title a separate event. Then stack them on additional tracks above your image, one track per title event.
You can then easily fade them in or out and place them on the screen where you want them.Use track motion to reduce the title size and to do the placement on each track. This can be tricky – but once you understand how track motion works it is very handy (and powerful) ..
Once you have a set of bullet point titles done and working .. you can copy and paste them into other sections of your piece, easily changing the text, placement etc.
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Thanks for the feedback, Paul!
I’m sure I did a poor job of describing it– I guess an image would’ve helped– but the method you’re suggesting is essentially what I landed on, other than I haven’t been using track motion. I’ll investigate that.
The main issue I was running into with that process is that the placement of text would vary depending on the text itself– changing the words would continually shift their orientation on the screen. Playing around a bit more, though, it looks like I can address that by making sure I use the ‘Titles & Text’ generator and changing the Anchor Point (top left seems to keep things in place). It’s still a bit strange that I have to eyeball making sure things are aligned (the X and Y coordinates aren’t precise enough), but I guess this is probably the best approach?
Anyway, I do appreciate you helping to point me in the right direction!
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This is an interesting problem and Vegas has so many tools.
Try this using the same scheme with Track Motion for sizing and placement and 3 stacked tracks.
Use (Legacy) Text.
1) In the Edit tab, set alignment to left.
2) In the placement tab, set text placement center left.
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You might also take a look at Titler Pro as see if it would suit your needs.
https://www.newbluefx.com/products/titling/titler-pro/
Edward Troxel
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