Hello,
what is the easiest way to add text to a video, in Blender?
Creating a text animation in 3D and mixing it with the video?
I have tried mixing an avi video with 3d text in the Node Editor, but, unfortunately, the composition keeps flashing, as if the text were not fast enough to catch up with the video.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Many thanks.
philroc
might want to put this into one of the support forums
but to answer i’m not sure why your node setup goes wonky
I usually just add the text scene as “scene strip” layer of the video editor then set that layer blending as alpha over or whatever it has
never had problems with that way but i never do anything too complicated
You can use either the compositor or the sequencer to add text. I usually create a text object in 3d, type or insert text and import the scene strip using alpha over in the sequencer. But if you want to have multiple texts objects then creating multiple scenes is not a very appealing option. I have tried it and it’s not very easy to work with.
But you have to be more specific about “text”. How much text do you want to add and how often? Also at which point in the frame? How many text objects per frame?
Even though it can be done in Blender it might be wiser (and perhaps simpler/faster) to create the captions using other apps (such as gimp or inkscape) and import the stills (probably pngs to use the alpha channel) to Blender for further overlaying.
Oh, and one last thing: Blender does not support text entry via the keyboard for some languages.
Thank you for your suggestions, blendercomp and ikeahloe.
To answer your question, blendercomp, I would like to add text comments every n seconds to a video which shows how to use an intranet.
Creating the text in Inkscape or Gimp instead of Blender sounds like a good idea. I will follow that route.
Many thanks again.
philroc
3point that’s very interesting, but I couldn’t get it to work on Linux. It’s a promising start though.
If it’s of any use, I was trying to work around using multiple text objects over a single piece of footage the other week. I couldn’t figure a way to do it using multiple scenes, that wasn’t a headache. In the end and after a bit of searching on the forum, I found a way to turn on and off layer visibility and animate it, by inserting key frames on the toggle. Go to the toggle for object visibility in the outliner panel and insert keyframes. If you need a complex transition, this might not work, but otherwise it does the trick.
You could also have many cameras attached (shooting) to many text objects, and use the camera switcher in the VSE to swap between them as required.
@3point interesting idea, never thought of that. Blender never ceases to amaze me! It’s certainly more promising that creating one text object per scene but I don’t know how practical that is if you have multiple texts objects per scence. Gonna give it a shot and find out though.
@AdrianF: what you’re suggesting is also interesting but considering that there are only 20 layers what do you do if you have more than 20 text objects?
Ideally, a text layer (in the form of an addon or whatever) available directly from the sequencer only would be the optimal solution. I was experimenting with kdenlive the other day and it was so easy and fast to overlay text that it was mind blowing. One can do all sorts of advanced and fancy stuff with text in Blender but it appears that doing simple stuff is currently more difficult that it should be. Maybe pildanova’s script will be a long term solution.
With the camera switcher idea, I would have an outliner window open next to the 3D view so i could switch cameras easily to edit the next text object. Timing them out on the timeline would be as easy as moving markers. But fading in and out may be more troublesome.