Erratic behaviour when applying keyframes to text block

Bug
1

I’m getting problems trying to animate a block of text, using simple keyframes.

The short videos below show the problem - I have

  1. created a colour clip
  2. applied opacity filter set to zero
  3. applied a text filter
  4. applied simple keyframes (to make the text block scroll downwards).

The problem I have is that the boundary box moves as expected - but the text content doesn’t. (See first video below)

OR, sometimes… the text block is displaced outside the boundary box, for no apparent reason (see video #2).

I would add that it seems to be intermittent - occcasionaly it has worked OK. But it is VERY frustrating!

Is this a bug or are there any steps I can take to rectify this? (I’ve tried restarting SC, retarting the computer, re-installing SC, etc. Seems to be erratic in 18.07, too). Thanks for any help…


https://streamable.com/csvt8


https://streamable.com/6271y

Version 18.08.01
Windows 10

2

Here’s another short example of erratic text behaviour when I try to add keyframes to a clip with a text filter applied.

As you can see, it seemed to work at the beginning of the video but became erratic later.

https://streamable.com/gct32

Any observations would be gratefully received! Thank you.

3

Do you have the GPU Effects option on?

4

No. Unticked.

5

I was thinking about this problem with text keyframes not working properly and I wondered:

  1. is the process of moving text by applying keyframes very heavy on computer resources (memory and/or cpu), compared to moving a normal video clip?

  2. Could it be that it isn’t a bug as such, but just my computer struggling to cope with the demands I’m placing on it? My computer is an i5 -2310 2.90Ghz with 8Gb RAM, Windows 10.

Another thing: My project has lots of keyframes (Size and Position) in it and has several video tracks (see below). Sometimes the keyframes are in action at the same time on different tracks. I expect this is another factor?

vivaldi%20screenshot%2001
vivaldi screenshot 01.jpg1120×512 100 KB

Any comments/help/advice greatly appreciated.
Jon

6

I have just thought of a workaround technique to overcome the problem of sliding text not working in a project with lots of sliding text and images.

Open SC (blank).
Create sliding text (just one section of text, not multiple text clips) on a brightly coloured color clip (I chose pink).
Animate as necessary using keyframes. Because it is a single clip, it should work OK.

Export this animated text and save as an mp4:

https://streamable.com/j7y13

Import it into your project, apply chroma key (simple) filter, use the eye dropper to make the bright colour transparent. Place it on a track above the background video. Apply a (static) size and position filter if necessary to position the text exactly.

Result:

https://streamable.com/26bje

It works!!

In fact I’m so happy I got it to work I made this completely silly video to experiment with the technique:

https://streamable.com/fy91m

On a serious note, though, I notice the scrolling text is quite stuttery (the vertically moving text less so than the horizontal). Mainly because the hoeizontal text is moving a long distance in a short time, I think.
I wondered if it would look any better exported at 60fps:

https://streamable.com/qatn1

Hmmm, not much difference to my eyes…

Anyway, hope all this is useful to someone. Jon

7

You can export as a Quicktime Animation with alpha channel. and then you will not have to use the Chroma Key filter. Make a custom export preset and paste the following into the text box of the dialog:

f=mov
vcodec=qtrle
g=1
bf=0
progressive=1
mlt_image_format=rgb24a
pix_fmt=argb
meta.preset.extension=mov

You might want to disable the audio in the Export > Audio tab when using this.

8

Thanks Dan, interesting. Will look into this.

9

I am going to close this thread as a duplicate of Text filter presets
Also, that export preset will be in the next version as well.