Adding animated titles

[SearchQuality]

Hi. I am looking for a simple, free and dedicated software which I can use to create animated titles and place them anywhere on the video clips. Suggestions are welcome. Thanks.

[racer-x]

Simple - Blufftitler or Ulead Cool3D

Free - Wax2

[SearchQuality]

Yes indeed Wax is a powerful free utility. I tried it. Wax can surely do that. But I have encountered a problem and I need help. In Wax I am placing the video clip in the second track and in the first track I put the image of the text. I use the GIMP to produce a blank image with text on it. I make the background of this text transparent. But Wax still sees it as a white image with text on it. The result is the animation works but due to this text image I cannot see the video clip. How should I handle this prolem. Thanks in advance for help.

[racer-x]

Save your tittle graphics as a transparent PNG or PSD. Wax should then read the alpha channel correctly.

[SearchQuality]

I tried to save transparent image with text in png and it worked. Later I tried to use the 3dtext plugin of Wax and Wax crashed. Is anybody aware of this problem? Is there a way of going around the problem? Also I would appreciate if someone can point out to an example using the scale, crop and rotate functions of the 3d plugin of wax for animating text. Thanks in advance.

[racer-x]

Wax is powerful, but not the most stable so save often. It's free, so you can't complain too much.

If you already have the text title, then use the "Quick3D" plugin. To set the animation keyframes, you need to click on the little Clock icon for each effect you want to apply. Then set the in-out or start-finish parameters ect. It's a little complicated, but with some experimenting you'll get the hang of it. I don't have enough free time to do a tutorial for it so I can't help too much............

[SearchQuality]

I managed to use the Quick3d plugin. Now using Wax I am trying to put animated text at the start of a 13min video clip. I am going to use the first 30 seconds of this clip. What is the best way to handle this case? Should I read the whole clip into Wax and render it with the 30sec animated text? Should I take the first 60 sec and use that in Wax and later append the rendered clip to the main part using Vdub or should I render the animated text alone with transparent background and put it as an overlay on the original 13min clip? Could anybody point to the right direction please?

[thecoalman]

I don't use Wax but do use Cool 3-D you can probably apply this to Wax:

If I want to match the animation up with the video what I'll do is render the portion of video where the animation is to appear in my editor and import it as background into Cool 3-D just to use as guide. Complete the animation, remove the video as background then export as a sequential TGA with alpha channel, this seems to give the best results however I do still seem to get some stair stepping particularly on long horizontal planes.

Next time I do an animation I'm going to try and apply the second part of the method here described by jagaboo: https://forum.videohelp.com/topic309181.html

Basically you'll cut the resolution in half and export at 60FPS, apply the second part of his tutorial to combine every two frames which will give you a true interlaced video.

[SearchQuality]

I tried your suggestion with Ulead cool3d. But I could not get the avi clip as background into cool3d. If I can sort out that issue I'll try the rest.