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Typewriter-style text overlay?


avimagic

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  • 4 weeks later...

Hi

 

This can be done but is time consuming. Obviously you could scroll your overlay text left to right and add a sound track of key press sounds to match the speed of the letters but I don't think this is quite what you want and in any case would be difficult and not that effective. Here is something you could try which will work.

 

You will need a sound clip of your typewriter key press. A single short sound, eg a click or pip will do. It needs to be short-about 1/5 - 1/10 of a second in length. (Depends how fast you want your letters to appear.) Add this sound bite to the media list.

You will also need your video clip onto which your text will appear letter by letter.

I am going to assume you want the text to appear at the bottom left corner of the frame and bult up to the right.

 

First click into timeline mode then drag and drop your video clip onto the sequence line. Mute the audio track (at least for a start unless you need it to play later)

 

Now add the sound clip to soundtrack 1 and drag it to the place where you want your typing to start. Now add the sound clip as many times as the letters in your text. Do this by selecting it in the media list and adding them by default to the end of the track. Don't leave any gaps between them. You should be able to see the peaks of the "PIPS". If they are too close together, use the zoom feature to enlarge the sequence until they are easy to see. This results in the "PIPS" appearing one after another in a regular sequence. Unfortunately VP will not let you link these sound bites into a single sequence. An alternative is to have a longer sound clip consisting of dozens of regular typewriter clicks and cutting this to length later. The main thing is to be able to see the peaks of each "PIP".

 

Now, line up the red curser line with the peak of the first "PIP"on the soundtrack. Click the green overlay cross and in text mode type the first letter of your message followed by OK. The overlay will set itself at the cursor position. Now click the bottom left hand arrow in the overlay position box.(The arrow matrix in the overlay control area) This will place the first letter of your message at the bottom left of your film clip. The appearence of the letter will now coincide with the soundtrack "PIP"

 

Move the red cursor bar along to the next peak of your soundtrack. Click the green cross again and now type the first two letters of the text. Click OK and then the left hand bottom arrow. The two letter overlay will line up with the second "PIP" and also cover the first overlay. It will seem that a second letter has been added to the first. Continue in this way, each time creating a new overlay with an additional letter, and each time moving the cursor line along to peak of the next "PIP"

 

When you play the sequence each letter will appear with the "PIP" sound and the message will build up along the bottom of the screen.

 

By positioning the overlay text in different places and adding or subtracting letters you can create different effects. It's not what the feature was designed for but although it is time consuming, it does work.

 

Nat

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