Lower Thirds and Rendering
 

Hi All

Maybe someone can answer this???
When I need to add a lower third graphic to a promo clip, I have always made the little caption strip and text in my graphics software as a full 1920x1080 still and then just keep everything apart from the lower third caption transparent and save it as a transparent PNG file. It works well and there is no shift in position as it's a full frame still.

Does Vegas see this as a full still when rendering?? I just did a promo clip where the client wanted an "info strip" at the bottom of the video and, of course, the preview is way slower as well as the rendering. Will Vegas also consider the transparent parts as part of the overlay and have to render them. If I make the graphic just the size of the lower third (like 1920 x 100, instead of 1920 x 1080) and use MT to position it, would that render faster????

Thanks

Chris

Graphics and text can be very processor intensive and can take a bit more horsepower to render. Anytime I need lower thirds or have any amount of graphics first thing I do after cutting is render VIDEO only to AVI THEN I put that on the timeline, setup and place my graphics and lower thirds (I set those to the actual size I need) then render that out to AVI. No there is literally no generational loss. Vegas is simply copying the avi and rendering the graphics and lower thirds.
I've been doing it this way since I started with Vegas back in Version 2. It may not be considered "the correct way" but it has worked for me.

Hi Don

I'm a rebel anyway so I always appreciate someone who does things the unconventional way. I'll give it a shot on the next project. 99% of my work is weddings so tacky graphics, thirds and charts don't feature but I do an occasiona' training/promo DVD.

Thanks again for the advice!!

Chris

Chris, I just tried a very unscientific test.
I created a very simple title in Photoshop at 1920 x 1080 and then cropped it down to only the text (1450 x 300).
I loaded an 18 sec. AVCHD test clip I had lying around into Vegas, dropped each title on and rendered it out in MXF format (HD EX 1920x1080-60i).
Rendering the clip itself took 52 sec., the full-screen title took 68 sec. and the cropped one took 87 sec.

Hi Mike

That's a very strange one??? One would think that a cropped file only overlaying part of the clip would take less time to render???? I have been using full size stills simply to avoid trying to make sure that if I use the same lower third further down the clip it's position remains the same instead of matching the position with the first one using the properties in Motion Tracking.

Guess I'll stick with the full frame stills as your test shows them rendering faster!!!

Thanks for doing the test!! I was going to do some comparisons but I have a wedding shoot in an hour so had to prepare and load up for that!! It's Thursday mid-day here..strange day to pick for one's wedding!!!!!

Thanks again guys!!

Chris

Chris, as I said, the test was very unscientific so I tried a few more render formats (same AVCHD clip) and here's the results.
You didn't say what your final render format was so, if I was you, I'd do a test to make sure that my numbers aren't skewing your thinking.

mpg-2 - HDV 1080-60i
3:22 (full)
2:22 (cropped)

mpg-2 - Blu-ray 1920x1080-60i, 25 Mbps video stream
0:55 (full)
1:17 (cropped)

avi - HD 1080-60i YUV
1:07 (full)
1:14 (cropped)