Recommendations On 3-D Titling?

[Clay Coulter]

I'd like to extend beyond Vegas' native capabilities and add professional 3-D titling. I am aware of Boris' plugins such as Grafitti and Red. I'm interested in knowing what recommendations the community would have for quality 3-D titling. Thank you in advance for your response.

[Don Bloom]

I've been using BluffTitler for a few years now and it works out very very well. The latest version has lots of bells and whistles. Take a look:www.blufftitler.us

Don

[Andrew Clark]

Here are some that you may wish to check out:

http://www.prodad.com/

http://www.wildform.com/

http://www.broadcast.harris.com/inscriber/

[Laurence Kingston]

Here's another vote for Bluff Titler. I just love it. The results look very pro to me and because of the way it uses the graphics card GPU rather than the CPU, the results are immediate. Once you have a registration code, you have access to quite a variety of user submitted projects as well. Among these are some very close approximations of some famous movie title animations. The GUI is very intuitive. I barely have to look at the help files to find my way around. It's inexpensive too. Pretty cool stuff!

[James Hooey]

I use Grafitti 5.0 and FX 9.1 with Vegas 7.0d. There are very useful plugins featuring many powerful titling and effects algorithms. When I upgraded from Vegs 4 to 7/DVDA it included Grafitti 3.0 lite so it gave me a taste of what it could do. From there I was able to purchase the Grafitti5/FX9 bundle from Boris as an upgrade and saved a great deal of money instead of buying them from scratch.

In general they have an incredibly vast capability and can layer and nest effect upon effect to build up very complex titles/effects. The workflow is somewhat more cumbersome however than some other plugins for Vegas. Boris works within it's own environment inside of Vegas and as such the video preview window is different not allowing you to work on your projects timeline while you create you titles and effects. However once you are ready you exit from the Boris environment and the work is then previewable in the Vegas preview window. The plugin also has a very steep learning curve in comparison to Vegas with things not being quite as logical and easily accesible. The trade off to this is the superb results that can be achieved once you get your legs under you.

Finally it would be a consideration on how much computer power you have. I am running an AMD 64 4gHz processor with 2gig OCR fast ram and a MSI 7800GT video card and there are many times where I start to crave more power. When working with NTSC DV it's pretty tame but when working with HDV then previews in Full mode can drop to 2fps or less and render times can be upwards of 15 to 20 minutes for 10-15 seconds of video. Again...this is dependent on format and what you are applying as effects/automation/layers etc.

Personally I really like Boris Grafitti and FX and would recommend it highly.

[Clay Coulter]

Thank you all very much for your suggestions and the excellent information as well. I'll investigate everything you've mentioned.

Best Regards,

Clay

[Laurence Kingston]

I tried and gave up on the Boris Graffiti 5 demo. The Heroglyph demo on the other hand is rapidly winning me over.

[James Hooey]

What made you give up on Boris just out of curiousity?

[Terry Esslinger]

Laurance, Did you try Bluff Titler and if so how do you compare it?

[Laurence Kingston]

I gave up on Graffiti because it's plugin integration with Vegas seems terrible. It only passes one frame at a time, that is, it just does static titles. Yeah you can pass a moving sequence from Graffiti to Vegas sort of, but you have to render it out before you see it. I have no doubt that as part of Boris Red, or integrated into another video editor that doesn't have this frame limitation, Graffiti is probably pretty cool, but I couldn't make the demo do much without a lot of difficulty.

I LOVE Bluff Titler. It is simple, fast, high quality, and can do some wonderful 3D moves that Heroglyph can't. Having to render out uncompressed alpha layer avis and overlay them over your Vegas tracks takes a little extra time and hard disc space. Other than that I like it. There are certain things like animated logos and titles that Bluff Titler seems to really excel at. By the way, 1440 x 810 x 30p is a really good resolution to fold into a 1080i HDV project. If you're not overlaying it, I find the Pegasus M-Jpeg codec works really well. It is cheap ($28), super CPU efficient, easily transportable between applications, looks great, and can do odd sizes like 1440 x 810. You can find it here:

http://www.pegasusimaging.com/picvideomjpeg.htm

What I like about Herglyph is that it's integration into Vegas is really good and it does most of what I want really fast and really well. It really is only 2D, but it can recognize letters, words or blocks of text and animate them in ways that make sense. Words with shadows as seen from various perspectives, words that spell themselves out or enlarge as they're being spoken, or fall of the screen after they've been used... Heroglyph does all this and more quickly and painlessly. I'm just using the Cheap "Rapid" version by the way. The extra features of the full version seem sort of redundant with what Vegas can already do just as well or better. My biggest complaint with Heroglyph is that if you want to use it on a second computer, you need to buy a second license (at a reduced price, but still...).

[James Hooey]

Originally Posted by Laurence Kingston

I gave up on Graffiti because it's plugin integration with Vegas seems terrible. It only passes one frame at a time, that is, it just does static titles.

Hi Laurence,

Actually graffiti will show titles in real time within Vegas. There are two ways to do this with slightly different workflows....

1) Within the Boris interface work with a 'static' frame from your video and develop the moving title over this video frame. Then apply the effect and see the moving result within the Vegas preview window. This works fine if you know the general titleing/look that you are going for and do not require to position it along with moving video.

2) For moving video you can bring a video clip into Graffiti as a background. This will then allow you to keyframe specific titleing moves along with the moving video within the Boris environment.

In neither case are you required to render the Boris title/fx before seeing a full moving preview within Vegas. This is only necessary if you are using the standalone keyframer for either Graffiti/FX (read that this means stand alone, not that it directly relates to keyframing).

I agree that the Boris interface is a bit more clunky than a simple plugin within Vegas and as I started I thought this would be a severe limitation. Upon further learning and use of Graffiti and FX I have learned to work within its workflow very simply and easily and it does in fact interface with Vegas very well.

I have looked at some of the other plugins mentioned in this thread and all seem to be pretty capable additions to what comes with Vegas. Boris works for me but may not suit everyones tastes. I certainly stand by my previous statement that it is a VERY powerful and professional, just slightly different.

:) Happy Titleing