This post isn't really a tip, it's an invitation to add your thoughts to improvements that could be made in the whole Avid Title Tool / Marquee environment for adding text to video. I've been having a sort of blog conversation with Steven Cohen over at Splice Here (an excellent editing blog if you haven't already discovered it) about the pretty woeful nature of the whole text on graphics experience inside Avid.
So I've been in touch with my one good contact at Avid (who will remain nameless so they don't get flooded with feature requests) and they've promised to at least get a list of suggested improvements to the right people. So in this post I'd like to do two things - outline my suggested improvements to Avid titling, and then invite any readers to add their own suggestions via comments.
I do understand that there is a Feature Requests forum on the Avid Website, but having looked through that it seems as if the Title Tool requests are a bit buried, along with many other calls for improvement. I also appreciate that there are other areas where Avid is less than perfect - but my intention here is to focus on one fairly narrow category of improvements and see if any results are forthcoming. Who knows, if this works I might move on to something else.
I also need to declare my interests here as an Online Editor working in Standard Def. on a one-hour weekly lifestyle show - a format where a substandard titling interface costs me a lot of time - so this post is pretty selfish, but by inviting comments not as selfish as it could be.So; here are my ideas for a better titling tool - and these points are in my rough order of priority.
- Powerful, integrated in-line titling - I want the upgraded UI to work directly on the record monitor. If I need more space I'll switch into big effect mode (or some other fullscreen mode provided in the UI)
- Full control over character and paragraph spacing, kerning, leading and all other options that you now find in a modern graphics app like Photoshop.
- Global Title styles - I want to be able to define Character and Paragraph styles that apply to a series of titles, and if I change these properties all the titles with that style will automatically update.
- Graphics and Logos integrated with titling. At the very least I want to add a sponsor graphic into a rolling title without the title size expanding to megabytes. And no, I don't want to import it as Matte and hand-animate it to match.
- Text Animation - sophisticated, fast text animation without exiting to After Effects, or starting Marquee. Marquee is powerful, but so slow.
- Data driven title templates - I want to be able to autofill a series of titles with text (and title properties like size) from a Word Document, a text file, an Open Document Format file etc.
- Virtually infinite text size, or change the title model to completely vector-based.
- Less, or no rendering
So please, add anything you think I've missed as a comment- and I'll post again with a collation my ideas and yours.
