Sony Titles & Text - font issue?
 

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.

Re: Sony Titles & Text - font issue?
 

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

Re: Sony Titles & Text - font issue?
 

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!).

Re: Sony Titles & Text - font issue?
 

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

Re: Sony Titles & Text - font issue?
 

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

Re: Sony Titles & Text - font issue?
 

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

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:
Thanks again for the suggestion about Legacy Text.

Re: Sony Titles & Text - font issue?
 

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

Re: Sony Titles & Text - font issue?
 

+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.

Re: Sony Titles & Text - font issue?
 

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.

Re: Sony Titles & Text - font issue?
 

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.

Re: Sony Titles & Text - font issue?
 

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.

Re: Sony Titles & Text - font issue?
 

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.

Re: Sony Titles & Text - font issue?
 

Cheers Gerald, I'll try that.

Re: Sony Titles & Text - font issue?
 

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.

Re: Sony Titles & Text - font issue?
 

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 :-(

Re: Sony Titles & Text - font issue?
 

Thanks Ian,
Only used it for maybe 30min of playing around.
OFX version, GPU in Vegas turned off. No crash yet. Happy days.

Re: Sony Titles & Text - font issue?
 

Gerald, I have GPU acceleration turned on and I'm still not experiencing problems with Titler.

One other great selling point for Titler Pro 2 is its ability to handle vector graphics (i.e. eps). About a third of the graphics in the Oracle video were animated on and off within Titler using tweaked transition presets. Very easy.

Re: Sony Titles & Text - font issue?
 

hmmm, will try it out Ian.
My Vegas install hasnt been happy the last few weeks with one particular project with GPU turned on, turned it off though and everything was good again.
I really wish they would sort out these GPU issues, still a bit of a lucky dip for me from project to project.

Re: Sony Titles & Text - font issue?
 

Not happy, just went back to the one and only project I had used NB Titler 2 on, just one instance.
Would not open, stuck at 46%, background operation yada yada. hangs forever until force quit.
Delete all temp Vegas files in Appdata, can then open it. Close it, same thing happens. Start again.
After 2 hrs of mucking around, uninstalled Titler 2. All is good again.
Anyone know how to begin to troubleshoot?

Re: Sony Titles & Text - font issue?
 

Oh no! Have to say that's not one I've come across. Certainly I've noticed that projects take longer to open, even with a single instance of Titler, but not to hang. What's in the Titler project? Anything fancy?

Probably worth raising this as a trouble ticket and let Edward have a look at it.

(Feeling guilty for being the impetus for your Titler purchase)

Re: Sony Titles & Text - font issue?
 

Gerald, please send a support e-mail to NewBlue. There are certainly things we can check to see what is happening on your system.

Re: Sony Titles & Text - font issue?
 

Nothing fancy at all, Sample Text blurred in, camera shake and I think, Exit stage right.

LOL, I hold you entirely responsible Ian, I am plotting the method of my revenge as I type.....:)

Will do tonight Edward, thanks.

Re: Sony Titles & Text - font issue?
 

You can control it with Transition envelope

Re: Sony Titles & Text - font issue?
 

Latest build - B710 - still no fix on this.

Grazie