[rec.video] Design your own character generator & titling system

mwm@eris.berkeley.edu (Mike (I'll think of something yet) Meyer) (12/15/88)

I'm using an Amiga to generate graphcs & etc. as overlays home video
production. I've found software to do the graphics & animation I want,
and software to generate lettering in more eye-catching styles than I
want to think about.

However, what I don't have is a nice, simple system for generating
characters that do something interesting - scroll upwards on the
screen, or across the crawl space, or appear slowly in fixed
positions, or other methods of making them appear.

So I'm thinking about writing my own software to do these things.
What I'm not sure of is what kind of features does it need? So I'm
looking for input from the rec.videos & comp.sys.amiga crowd.

If you use a character generator or titling system, what features from
it do you like & use? What do you use, but don't like the user
interface for? What features do you wish you had?

If you don't use one, but would like one, what would it do? And how do
you tell it to do it?

Finally, if you use an Amiga with software that does some of those
things, could you tell me what it is?

	Thanx,
	<mike
--
When all our dreams lay deformed and dead		Mike Meyer
We'll be two radioactive dancers			mwm@berkeley.edu
Spinning in different directions			ucbvax!mwm
And my love for you will be reduced to powder		mwm@ucbjade.BITNET

koreth@ssyx.ucsc.edu (Steven Grimm) (12/15/88)

In article <18338@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> mwm@eris.berkeley.edu (Mike (I'll think of something yet) Meyer) writes:
>However, what I don't have is a nice, simple system for generating
>characters that do something interesting - scroll upwards on the
>screen, or across the crawl space, or appear slowly in fixed
>positions, or other methods of making them appear.

My final project for a computer graphics class was a receding text
display a la the "Star Wars" title sequence.  I wrote it on an Atari
ST.  It works pretty well, though since an 8MHz 68000 isn't exactly
a speed demon, the fonts are pretty simple.  My system allows for
other special effects with simple modifications to the program; I
toyed around with having the text move across the surface of a
sphere, for example, which looked pretty neat.  If anyone's interested,
I can E-Mail the source code; it's mostly in C, with a smidgeon of
assembly language in the time-critical spots.

---
These are my opinions, and in no way reflect those of UCSC, which are wrong.
Steven Grimm		Moderator, comp.{sources,binaries}.atari.st
koreth@ssyx.ucsc.edu	uunet!ucbvax!ucscc!ssyx!koreth