[Kevin Marlatt]

In reply to my first reply, I got to thinking that I would like to know how to do this, too. So after experimenting for a while, I came up with a solution. It may have been covered in other posts, or it may not be exactly what you’re looking for, but it is a way to fill text with particles. I use Corel Photo Paint for still editing. I’m not familiar with Photoshop, but the concepts should be the same. These are the steps I took to make a waterfall form some text in Pi3:

1. Create a text object on a background that is 720×486 pixels. 486 is to make sure that the edges of a 720×480 movie are covered.
2. Center your object so it will paste into the next step centered.
3. Copy and paste it into a new background with no background, ie. onto a transparent background, of the same size.
4. Create a mask from the object and keep the object selected.
5. Invert the mask so that the mask will cover everything BUT the object.
6. Feather the mask from the inside a little, otherwise you end up with a hairline outline when added to Pi3 as a layer. This will make the edges a little fuzzy, though.
7. Save the mask to Alpha channel 1.
8. Save the file as a Photoshop file, (PSD). This will save the alpha or transparency of your text. I couldn’t seem to get a PNG to work. Maybe I missed something.
9. Use this file as a layer in Pi3, with your particles underneath on a lower layer. The particles will “form” your text as they emit.

Hope this helps. I know I learned something valuable.

[Kevin Marlatt]

You could make a PNG of your word with the text as the transparent part and place it on top of your array of fireworks. Or a sequence where the letters expand as the fireworks explode.

[Kevin Marlatt]

So, I gather from the posts about 16:9 videos, that pI3 changes rectangular pixels to square ones when outputting. Which would explain why my widescreen captures turn into 4:3 videos. I work with Pinnacle Studio 12 for editing. I happened to right click on a thumbnail when choosing a video to edit, and found out that there is an option to choose between aspect ratios of 4:3 or 16:9. If I highlight a thumbnail that is a 4:3 and choose to change it to 16:9 it opens as a widescreen video. Yay! So there is a work around that I wasn’t aware of. There may be some loss of quality, I don’t know, or can’t tell.

So my wish list for pI4 would be that it doesn’t change the aspect ratios of videos containing particle effects.

I also think that shape-able blockers, say, with curved or bezier points would be handy so you wouldn’t have to make so many points to block a complex shape like a human.

Otherwise, I’m having a blast with pI3. Thanks very much.