spray text / hand writing
 

is there a way in vegas to animate text so it apears to be being spraypainted on or hand written ?

Masking and Keying
 

The way I was able to do it was to create my text in Photoshop with a black background and then save it as a bmp.

I brought the bmp image into Vegas and used masking and keying to slowly reveal the text. When masking, the black background in the bmp image becomes transparent and only the text is revealed.

The effect is time-consuming to key, but it looks great when it is done.

Keyframing a moving mask is probably the best way if you only want to use Vegas but it's tedious and tricky to reveal in a way that would have been hand written especially where lines cross. Others have used screen recording (ala, Camtasia) to record themselves actually painting in a graphics program like Photoshop.

If you don't mind learning a 3rd party plug-in, you can do this very easily with Boris FX/Boris RED. You just use the spray can to paint onto your video and then change the first keyframe to animate the reveal. Very easy to accomplish.

~jr

Tedious, Yes . . .
 

John, I have to agree that it is tedious.

A couple years ago I was asked to create a video using chocolate Easter bunnies as the only characters. The short was called "Bunny Tales". For the opening I used key framing and masking to create the hand written look.

I found the original Vegas file and re-rendered just the hand written text to show as an example of how it can look using Vegas with key framing and masking.

I have attached a .mov file which is only 8 seconds showing the effect.

If there is 3rd party program that will do this quicker with the ability to control the outcome I would be interested to learn more.

thanks for the feed back
my problem is ive never been very good at freehand writing on a pc, i was hoping there might be a way to use a graffiti look font and an easier way to reveal it to give the effect

tim: that looks realy good :-)