You know how if you are watching the news and there is a semi-opaque banner beneath the news anchor that says something like their job title? this is a chyron, and I am looking for how to make that in shotcut. Thanks!
I’m sure there are multiple ways to do it, and there are multiple variations across different news stations. Here’s what I do; you can see examples in just about every video on my YouTube channel, including within the first few seconds of both my channel trailer and my most recently uploaded video.
I have an image of a semi-transparent grey bar that’s 200 pixels high (my videos are 1080p so that’s a reasonably height relative to screen size). That’s easy to make in Photoshop (create a blank image of the desired size such as 1920x200 for mine, fill it with your preferred shade of grey or colour, set the layer’s transparency to your desired level, save as PNG).
To use this, I put the image on a layer above the footage, add a Text: Simple filter with the text (I saved a preset for this so the position is always the same), and use the Size, Position, and Rotation filter with keyframes to animate it (put this filter below the text in the list and it will move both the bar and the text together). To keep a consistent look and feel for my videos, I use 1s for the bar and text to scroll up, hold steady for 2s, and then 1s back down.
One hint for the text: I use white text with a black outline. That, combined with the semi-transparent grey bar, ensures that the text is legible no matter how bright, dark, or detailed the video content in the background may be. It doesn’t have to be white with black outline; just make sure there’s plenty of contrast in the final product.
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Depending on exactly what is desired, it may be possible to do this with a single Text:Simple filter (not requiring a separate file with the transparent bar). Here’s an example:
And here is the .mlt that created this, along with the source video (a random clip downloaded from Pexels):
chyron.mlt (11.5 KB)
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