Requirements: Digital Fusion 3.0 or greater, DFX+ 3.0 or greater.
Flow: N/A
Images:  Background Plate. (1.4 meg)
Archive:  Printable Microsoft Word Document. (200 K)

For our newer users who wish to have titles type on screen, I explain the simple process of animating the Text+ tool.

Lets start by building the basic flow;

1. Set your global out and render range to 90.

2. Add a loader to the flow, and point it at the image.
   1. Set the "extend last frame" to 90.

3. Add a Text+ tool to the flow.

4. Merge the text over the background plate;
   1. Add a merge tool to the flow
      1. Connect the background plate to the background (brown) arrow.
      2. Connect the text+ tool to the foreground input (green).

2. Drag a connection from the output (red square) of the text+ tool and drop it on the output of the background plate. This will automatically create a merge for you, and composite the first tool over the second.

3. Ensure you have an additive merge (drag the additive/subtractive slider to additive (1.0). We do this because text+ generates a pre-multiplied alpha image. For more information on this, go here.

So now we have the basic flow for any kind text supers over footage. Next we will enter our text, and modify a few parameters to suit our needs.

5. Open the controls for the text+ tool, and select the text tab. Enter the following;

   14:00 Zulu Hours
   eyeon Software Headquarters

6. Open the Alignment tab,
   1. Drag the Horizontal slider to the left (-1.0)
   2. Drag the vertical slider to the bottom (1.0)

7. In the large view, right click, and select "guides>safe title"

8. Select the text+ tool in the flow area.
9. In the large view, drag the text+ center (crosshair) to the lower left of the screen, just inside title safe.

This preps the text to be placed in the lower left corner of the frame. Now if we add or subtract text, the lower left corner will remain the same. To see this, let's change the text entry to reflect the following;

As you can see, it bumped the first line up as we inserted a line, but didn't move the text outside of title safe.

Lets go adjust the shading parameters to look more like a military style type.

10. In the text+ controls, open the font tab.
    1. Set the size to 0.05
    2. Uncheck "Bold"
    3. Check "Italic"

11. Open the shading tab.
    1. Select element 1 (White solid fill).
       1. Adjust the color to a nice shade of green.

2. Select element 3 (Black shadow).
   1. Check the enabled box.
   2. In the color area, adjust the softness x and y to 2.

3. Select the transform area, and adjust the x and y offsets to 0.05

So now merged over the backdrop we have some text. Great, when do we get to the type on part? Right now.

12. Open the text tab
    1. At the bottom of the text entry, you see a slider marked "write on".
       1. Right click on the "end" and choose "set key creating bezier spline"
       2. Go to frame 0, and drag the end to a value of 0.
       3. Go to frame 90, and drag it to a value of 1.

If we scrub through the timeline at this time, we can see the text types on over 3 seconds. If we want to have each line type on independently, we need to add a few more key frames.

13. Go to frame 10, and adjust the write on slider to approximately 0.27 (This will vary according to the font used.)
14. To create a hold effect, we go to frame 25, and enter the same value as above.
15. Enter the following as described above;
    1. Frame 35 = 0.556
    2. Frame 50 = 0.556
    3. Frame 60 = 1.0

Now if you play out the animation, you will see the text pause briefly at the end of each line.

Don't be afraid to experiment, how about adding a cursor to the text? Or if you feel ambitious, try adding another layer behind the text, and above the building to help readability. Whatever you do;