Sony Titles & Text - font issue?

[Ian Stark]

A client uses a specific font for all marketing material, inclusing video. The font is Theinhard.

I am putting together a simple animated typography piece for them and many of the text elements are so simple I thought I would use Sony's basic Titles & Text generator rather than incur the overhead of NewBlue's Titler Pro unnecessarily. I'm using Titler for the more complex text elements.

In Titler Pro I can select all the different variations of the font - black, bold, hairline, heavy, light, medium, regular, thin and ultralight. In Sony Text & Titles I can only see regular.

I have now noticed that the same applies to Helvetica Neue - I get four variations in Titles & Text but I get 27 in Titler Pro!

To add to the mystery, I get 8 Helvetica variants in ProType Titler and 2 Theinhard variants. I never use ProType Titler, but I was curious to see if it also follows different rules.

Anyone know why there's a difference? I thought fonts were fonts and if they were installed they would show up.

[Ian Stark]

Little bump . . . just wondering if anyone else has experienced this? Also a correction - the font is spelled 'theinhardt'.

[Leslie Wand]

sorry ian, can't help, other than to say the idiosyncrasies displayed within the various titlers available WITHIN vegas has always been a bit of a mystery to me ;-)

that's probably why i do nearly all my titling in ps, and any animated in ae (which isn't that daunting as long as you don't go overboard - then you really need to know ae!).

[Graham Bernard]

Repro'ed? Yes. Reported "directly" to SCS? Yes.

In my opinion, stop banging your head against a brick wall and do text-urgent or client-text-sensitive projects somewhere else, report your concerns to SCS detailing what is happening and what this means for your company/clients.

Have you tried the SCS Legacy Text? Same results?

Graham "Grazie" Bernard

[Juris Lielpeteris]

I mainly use the font Arial Black, which is available in all text generators except Titles & Text. I usually sufficient (Legacy) Text.

[Ian Stark]

Ah yes, Legacy Text did it. Thanks for the suggestion.

Originally Posted by Graham Bernard

In my opinion, stop banging your head against a brick wall and do text-urgent or client-text-sensitive projects somewhere else

I have a client (my biggest, richest and most active) who uses Vegas and they are paying me to find out the answer to the question, so using other software isn't an option. I create master projects for them and they can then amend the text as their needs and messages change. Just this one contract pays my mortgage and (quite literally) ALL my household bills each month. So you see I have a vested interest in finding a resolution or workaround ;-)

Besides that, I like to know WHY something is seemingly up the Swanee and before I submit anything to Sony I like to ask others if they are experiencing the same thing and/or have a workaround. No head-banging involved - it's therapeutic :-)

Legacy Text is going to do it for me I think - the ability to place text by dragging around in the preview window is nice, but not a showstopper to lose it. All the fonts work fine in NB Titler Pro 2 but there are often a hundred or more different elements in these projects, many of which have no animation or other special attributes. While I absolutely love Titler Pro (and now have it rock solid on my system) you pay a processing penalty, in particular when loading a project that has many Titler elements in it. Some projects can take two or three minutes to load, whereas with a less fully featured text plugin, the load time is negligible.

Here's an example of a work in progress for the client, Arrow (in this case a joint project for Arrow and Oracle. It uses all their current buzzwords so it's rather 'up itself' in my opinion! Their storyboard, not mine). It's all done in Vegas except the pie chart wipe which was done in AE (still haven't cracked that yet - if anyone has any suggestions as to how I can achieve a decent looking clock wipe I'm all ears! It needs to be controllable, so the Clock Wipe transition doesn't help me). This project is not finished - we're at the stage of getting the overall timing right before I go in and tighten up the animations, sequence it to the music and replace the placeholder graphics. Still, it gives you an idea of what you can achieve purely within Vegas, even if it is a little rough around the edges:

Arrow Oracle MASTER v 5.03 - YouTube

Thanks again for the suggestion about Legacy Text.

[Gerald Webb]

Loving that Ian.
Share the .veg?
Would love to see how you put it all together.

[Mike Kujbida]

+1,000 to Gerald's request for the veg file if at all possible!! That was an awesome demonstration of what a very creative user can do using just the basic text tools in Vegas.

[Ian Stark]

You're very kind, gents.

Couple of things - those are all examples of NewBlue Titler Pro 2 text elements, not the basic Vegas plugin. I had to use that because the client requires all text to be in Theinhardt Regular and Light and I couldn't get Light to show up in anything other than Titler Pro. I really wanted a resolution to this problem for future projects for this client.

As for sharing the veg, I'm afraid that we are talking about 26 different veg files! I didn't nest them because the loading times were getting ridiculous, so I rendered each element off and combined them into a master veg where I did all the sfx, retimed segments, added the audio etc. Bit fiddly, but it was easier for me to get my head around. And the veg files are a disgrace to look at! They won't win any prizes for neatness or logic!!

There's another more serious reason for sharing the veg being problematic - the IP of the project is owned by Oracle, as are all the graphics. In fact I'm not even allowed to use the graphics myself in other projects! Sorry to appear to be selfish - that really isn't the case. I just think I might get myself in a bit of hot water.

If there are any particular sequences you'd like to know more about, I'd be happy to put together something specific. Keep in mind that most of the nifty text animations are done in Titler Pro 2, often using tweaked presets.

[Gerald Webb]

No problem Ian.
I thought that right after I posted, that it would prob be legally complicated to put it out there.
Is a great example of Vegas at its best though, even with the help of a plug in.
Cheers.

[Ian Stark]

I'm blushing ;-)

Seriously, it still has a lot of tidying up to be done - and I've just been told to lose the Big Ben chimes when the London skyline slides in :-(. I thought they were great!

I did render a version with a gorgeous, subtle vignette which I thought looked fabulous, but when rendering it out it showed up a lot of banding that made it unusable. I think that the banding was particularly noticeable because it was against a completely even generated background, rather than regular footage. I tried NewBlue's Vignette plugin, Boris's, as well as using a feathered mask. All failed, sadly.

Anyway, thanks again for your kind comment. Have a great weekend.

[Gerald Webb]

Re the vignette, try this,
Make your own with a generated gradient then apply a gaussian blur fx to it.
Its a cow to render but does get rid of the banding.

[Ian Stark]

Cheers Gerald, I'll try that.

[Gerald Webb]

Originally Posted by Ian Stark

While I absolutely love Titler Pro (and now have it rock solid on my system) you pay a processing penalty, in particular when loading a project that has many Titler elements in it.

Just pushed the button on the Titler 2 upgrade ($50 bucks, how could you not)
Could you share the tricks you did to get it stable Ian?
Must admit I didnt have much interest in it until seeing your video above, you should ask for commission lol
I think our systems are similar from memory-
i7 GTX580 3gb.
Any tips appreciated.

[Ian Stark]

V quick reply as I'm on the road. What did it for me was to only use the OFX version. Haven't had a single Titler crash since then. I'm using the latest nvidia driver as well. Still getting annoying Vegas crashes though :-(