'Dancing' Credits and Map route colouring?

[Rudyard]

I am comprising a DVD which will contain a mixture of the photos from my holiday and some video I took.

I had an idea I thought was cool to have a picture of a map and then colour the route I took to get there, similar to how they do it in movies such as 'road trip' where when I went from London to Manchester I would like to video the map of England and follow the route up to Manchester but have a line draw along the map as I pan up to Manchester. (does that make sense or do I need more examples and better explaining??)

Is that to hard for the home user who just likes to play around with video editing or is it possible?

The other idea I had was before my photos of each country I visited I was going to have a blank (or photo of the country) slide with text naming the country. But I saw the movie '10 things I hate about you' and the credits that appeared on screen were a funky sort of scribble font that bounced around like they were dancing.

Does anyone know of how to get text to 'dance' in a cool looking font so my title pages can look interesting instead of plain?? If anyone has seen that movie (10 things) I really liked those credits and that is the sort of effect I am after.

I have a few programs to use such as Roxio Videowave, Adobe Premier Pro and some Ulead video editing software that came with some hardware I bought. A friend has Vegas, I could bug him and use his PC for that bit if anyone knows on that. Or of course any free software that will do it!

Thankyou for any help you can give me.

[guns1inger]

Most of this would be simple in After Effects, perhaps with a couple of plugins to simplify things, but certainly doable without. Of what you have suggested you have avilable, Premiere or Vegas would be the best at this, but both would make it much harder than using something like After Effects.

For the map route effect, you can go two ways. Either gradually draw the route onto the map, or simply do an overlay of the entire route, and slowly reveal it. The second is the quickest and simplest.

As for the dancing text, pretty much anything with a key frame capability can do it. AE has the advatage of tools like the wiggler and expressions etc so you can use noise to create random movement. Simplifies things no end.

The isn't much in the way of simple, free alternatives to AE. Two you can look at are Wax2, from Debugmode, and ZS4. Both have their quirks, but may be worth a look.

Which ever way you go, there will be many new skills to learn.

One final alternative might be some of the simple flash generators that exist for doing text effects. You might be able to create your dancing text on one of those, and import it and key it to get your titles.

[Rudyard]

Thanks a lot gunslinger, I had no idea where to start and now I have a good idea. Cheers!

[Richie V]

This technique can be used to create a route being drawn on a map.

[Rudyard]

Gunslinger,

Ok here is some problems I ran into when giving it a try.
I took a photo of a map to test it and in a photoshop type program I made a copy and traced the root in a red pen.

In premier i then inserted the map in video 1 and then the map with the traced route in video 2. I then was able to reveal the route but not from left to right as I needed, only it all just appeard at once. So instead of the line 'drawing' the route I took it just sort of all fades in.

How do I get it to reveal one side to the other to create the effect of it drawing on?

Also that was with still images, if I wanted to pan across a map in video how would I trace a line onto a video?

Also just by chance when going to load Adobe Premier Pro, I noticed After Effects is on our computer aswell! I have never used this program but you said it is very easy in that program. Could you explain or direct me to a link how to do it in After Effects??

Richie V,

Thanks, I d/l the tutorial and will see if I can use that at home.

[guns1inger]

Look up the Premiere manual/help files for masks and motion as starting points. Createivecow.com has a lot of tutorials, some of which might help.

[gsh]

Use this tutorial from Wrigley Video - simulating handwriting. It will work well for having a route appear on a map.
http://www.wrigleyvideo.com/videotutorial/tutdes_handwriting.htm
Note that for Premiere Pro instead of a Black/transparent gradient you will need a white/black gradient.

[daamon]

Here' a recent thread on drawing routes on maps, with some good suggestions:

www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=279213

[Rudyard]

Thanks everyone for there help, im working on it, not having any luck yet - keep finding new prob's but im getting there bit by bit!

Gunslinger,
I found the wiggler in AE, seem to keep getting an open GL error and crash when I muck around with text and expressions. This didnt happen to you by anychance and its a simple fix??

I have been able to create motion using keyframes as suggested in Vegas which is great but I just need to find the 'scribble' type font for the effect im after.

daamon,

thanks for the link, thats exactly what I am trying to do. I used your idea with google earth (well i tried to!) as I thought that would be great for the flying overseas part. But when I captured it with fraps, I played it back in windows media player and it was fine.

However not 1 of the video editing programs I tried will open the AVI create by FRAPS. Did you have any similar problems or did it just work fine for you??

Thanks again to everyone helping.

[daamon]

...but I just need to find the 'scribble' type font for the effect im after.

Check this out - www.1001freefonts.com

daamon,

thanks for the link, thats exactly what I am trying to do. I used your idea with google earth (well i tried to!) as I thought that would be great for the flying overseas part.

No problem.

However not 1 of the video editing programs I tried will open the AVI create by FRAPS. Did you have any similar problems or did it just work fine for you??

I did have a similar problem - Re-read point four in my post (see here: www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1371583#1371583 ) in that thread.

[Rudyard]

Thanks daamon, totally missed that as I got carried away with fraps, seemed so easy to use!