Tutorial: Page (1) of 1 - 03/03/06

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Create Brokeback Mountain-like Titles in Sony Vegas Movie Studio and Sony Vegas Software By Douglas Spotted Eagle

Having titles that fade on the left and right edges is a common practice, but the movie "Brokeback Mountain" made great use of this technique in their trailers for the film.

This is a two-step process, so you'll be able to achieve this in no time at all.

Step One:
Open new project, and add a new track by selecting CTRL+SHIFT+Q.
On the new track, make a selection, right click inside the selection, and choose "Sony Color Gradient" in the options.
Convert the Gradient so it is an Elliptical gradient instead of a Linear gradient.

Use WHITE for the inside color (default) and set the black to transparent by adjusting the small slider to the right of the display area, all the way to the bottom of the scale. You should see a display similar to the one above.

Step Two:
Insert a title on Track Two. In this title, you're going to want it to be just one line for now. Make it be a fairly long title, so that we can pan it across.
In the Placement tab, move the title all the way to the right so it is no longer in the frame. Now put the cursor at the end of the title tool keyframing window, (far right), and slide the title all the way to the left, so it is no longer in the frame.

Now comes the tricky part.
Click the compositing mode button on the TOP track, setting it to "Mask."
Click the Parent/Child button on the TEXT track so it becomes a child of the top track.

This puts the mask in control of the text. The white part of the mask allows the text to be revealed while the transparent areas prevent the scrolling text from being seen.

Now lay in your background media to the lowest or third track, and you're good to go. You can download this project , including the background media here (zip file/3MB).

Try adding a "Spherize" filter or slight blur to the text to get an even more creative effect. There are many things you can do with this sort of titling. We recently used this to create the image of text flowing thru the glass of a camera lens laid over the text. Don't be afraid to experiment. Put Vegas in loop mode (make a selection and hit the "Q" key) and let it play while you test various filters and looks.

Watch video

 

Happy Editing

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More tutorials and reviews by Douglas Spotted Eagle may be found here on the DMN Forums or on the VASST website, home of the shared veg files and other training media. "Spot" is the author of more than a dozen books on the subject of DV, audio for video, DVD authoring, and Sony Vegas. He is the co-author of "HDV-What You NEED to Know."

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