[Bf-committers] Bf-committers Digest, Vol 83, Issue 26

[Matt Ebb]

Hi,

On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 8:43 PM, Peter Schlaile <peter at schlaile.de> wrote:

> I know, your first idea was adding a very simple text tool, but there it
> usually doesn't stop. You will be faced with people, who want to do
> something special to the text, have it 3D extruded, adding parameters and
> then you start to add a seperate 3D renderer to the sequencer.
>

I find this very hard to believe. It's not uncommon for video editors to
have simple text tools for adding titles, subtitles, etc. FCP has it, Vegas
has it, Premiere has it - compositors like Nuke, Fusion, Shake have it, and
none of them have gone down a slippery slope resulting in 3d extruded text
effects. If anybody needs something like that, they can easily render it in
Blender, but for 90% of the usage cases, having a quick, simple way to edit
text in-place would be a real boost.

It's very easy to define that such a tool is for simple 2d text rendering
only - for anything more complicated you use other effects in the sequence
editor, or use 3d text in blender (which is a total pain in the rear when
used for this purpose), or do what you have to do now if you want anything
usable: make images in an external app like Photoshop.

(BTW: your text-tool even doesn't solve Algorith's problems. Fun fact :)
> He wanted some automatic layout with his title cards, and so the whole
> thing needs some fancy scripting to be right in all circumstances.)
>

I don't see how it wouldn't solve his problems - all you'd need is a text
area with width, height, X and Y position, plus some formatting options like
left/right aligned/centred and vertical alignment top/middle/bottom. Along
with a font and size, that's pretty much all you need, it's what most other
editors have, and covers most normal use cases. No scripting required. The
idea is to have something that is super fast for the 90% of situations where
you want text - not to have something that's totally flexible but clumsy to
use.

To summarize: I think, the most easy way to add this to blender is to add
> some small features to the scene strips, so that parameters can be passed
> to a scene and add some small operators, which make it possible to handle
> all this with python templates.
>

Blender already has an API for drawing 2d text to a bitmap. To me, that's a
lot simpler than a solution that has to access disparate parts of blender
and tie it all together with scripts, and more efficient than kicking off
blender's internal 3d renderer every time you want text.

cheers,

Matt