It’s good that there is a way to do this. I haven’t been adding text and other sources to my movies yet, but I would have been equally confused by this implementation. It’s one way to do it, but I feel like most video editors classify generated objects differently, rather than as filters. I consider them sources rather than filters. Examples would be shapes (rectangles, circles, stars, whatever), text, gradients, etc. In my mind, such objects belong in the same class and function as videos and images. They would be added into any video track as sources with a hard start and end point on the timeline.
Being able to set their entry and exit via keyframes is good, but my personal opinion is that it would be more intuitive for them to be separate blocks on the timeline in a video layer. It shouldn’t even be necessary to have a video or image to add text to a project in my opinion. Unless I’m missing something (I certainly could be, because I’m still learning), if you wanted a black video with text, You’d first have to add a black video or image just so you could add the text to it as a filter… which is a bit odd. If text, shapes and other generated content were treated as video objects, they could be added and their start and end points intuitively dragged on the timeline easily.
To a beginner in the software, it might not even be apparent that adding text and other sources is possible, since there isn’t a place to add them to the timeline if no video sources are there to attach them as filters. Unless again, I’m missing something. I can’t click + on the filters tab until something is added to the timeline, so I’m not sure how I’d add text without attaching it to something.
Also, I would think it would be easily possible to add keyframeable filters TO text and other similar sources. Maybe this is possible in some weird way, but I don’t see a way to easily do it without deep diving into advanced documentation with unusual tricks. As an example, one way I might do it is add a 100% transparent PNG with dimensions of 1920x1080 (or whatever my project res is) and add text to that as a filter, so I could add filters to the text and not affect what’s beneath it… kinda hacky though.
In case anyone wants to use that method, here’s a transparent PNG you can use, since not everyone knows how to make one.
Also, text that smoothly exists or moves over the top of the transition between multiple video clips or images (end of one and start of another) would be more difficult in the current filter method. If text was a separate source on a video layer, adding filters to the text would be super easy.
I’m sure this has all been brought up before, and I don’t expect it to change, but I see there being significant limitations with text being a filter as opposed to a separate video source. It’s just my opinion expressed, and I’m sure some would disagree.
