How to make an animated title in Vegas using SWISHmax
There are times when you need a quick animated title in Vegas
but don’t have time to do a lot of keyframing. Luckily, Vegas
supports Flash SWF files which means, you can make animated
titles in any Flash tool and drop the SWF file in Vegas. Here’s
how you do it.
I’m using SWISHmax for this tutorial but any Flash tool that
supports the export of SWF files will do:
Open SWISHmax and select Start a new empty movie.
This opens up the SWISHmax interface. In the
image below I've highlighted all of the major areas that we
will use in this tutorial.
In the attribute area (right side), select the Movie
tab and set your movie up for the
video dimensions of your project. I’m using NTSC which is
720x480 with a pixel aspect ratio of 0.9091. Because Flash
uses a pixel aspect ratio of 1.000 we enter enter 655 width,
480 height to compensate. I've also used 30 fps, with a black
background.
Select the Text tool so that we can add some text for
our title. This will add a Text tab to the properties on the
right.
Go to the Text tab and set your color, font,
etc. and the text you want for your title. I've selected
the OCRATTRegular font because it looks like the early
computer fonts before Windows was popular. I've also
selected green as the color because most old computers had
green-screens. We associate green-screens and OCR fonts with
computers terminals.
With the Text Tool selected, drag your cursor to
position the text in the video area. You are just
positioning the width. SWISHmax will take care of the
height, which you can adjust later.
Your text may look perfect at this point but what if it
doesn't. In this example the text did not flow the same as
we wrote it in the Text Properties.
To adjust the text flow and not the size you use the
green diamonds on the text box. The green diamonds will
reflow the text. The white squares will resize
the text.
Use the Add Effects button to add an Appear into
position effect and select Typewriter – Slow.
You can press Play to watch your title animate and
make any adjustments before exporting it. I didn't like the text
being centered so I changed it to Left Justify to look more
like a computer terminal.
Use File > Export to export your title to SWF
format. This is a format that Vegas 5+ can use directly.
Now just drag-n-drop the SWF file onto the Vegas timeline and
you have an animated title. Vegas will automatically detect the
alpha channel and apply the correct transparency.
That's all their is to it.
Happy Editing,
Johnny
“Roy” Rofrano
Some of my work:
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