Outstanding post, Janusz!
"There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who only consider the price are this man's lawful prey." - John Ruskin (1819-1900)
Carl Amoscato | Freelance Film & Video Editor | London, UK
Thanks to Janusz for taking the time to create such a comprehensive review of the problems with Titler+.
Well Avid? What's your response?
Excellent post Janusz. I am definitely holding off upgrading our systems from 2018.12 until this is fixed and I would very much like to be using the new Mac hardware too.
I am astonished by this whole scenario. I would welcome an announcement from Avid holding their hands up and saying they have stopped developement of this version of Titler+ and are starting from scratch. It's called flogging a dead horse.
Andi
ripvanmarlowe: Excellent post Janusz. I am definitely holding off upgrading our systems from 2018.12 until this is fixed and I would very much like to be using the new Mac hardware too. I am astonished by this whole scenario. I would welcome an announcement from Avid holding their hands up and saying they have stopped developement of this version of Titler+ and are starting from scratch. It's called flogging a dead horse. Andi
We are not stopping development of Titler + and starting from scratch. However, as I said before the information at the beginning of this post is excellent. We've engaged the product design team with the feedback. We've also been working with a few beta testers with feedback for the last few releases and you can see some of the improvements that have been made. I think we have a lot of excellent feedback and will continue to improve Titler + and we acknowledge your frustration and are dedicated to make it better.
Dave
Dave Avid PM: ripvanmarlowe: Excellent post Janusz. I am definitely holding off upgrading our systems from 2018.12 until this is fixed and I would very much like to be using the new Mac hardware too. I am astonished by this whole scenario. I would welcome an announcement from Avid holding their hands up and saying they have stopped developement of this version of Titler+ and are starting from scratch. It's called flogging a dead horse. Andi We are not stopping development of Titler + and starting from scratch. However, as I said before the information at the beginning of this post is excellent. We've engaged the product design team with the feedback. We've also been working with a few beta testers with feedback for the last few releases and you can see some of the improvements that have been made. I think we have a lot of excellent feedback and will continue to improve Titler + and we acknowledge your frustration and are dedicated to make it better. Dave
Spot on and Dave is jumping out here to acknowledge that we are aware and the feedback is in and being addressed... the feedback is awesome and the team is churning on it and incrementally making it better. Keep the feedback coming as both dave and I have this on our radar and are making sure that the team is aware as well of any new information/feedback it read and if there is any additional info needed, I will reahc out individually.
Thanks for eerything as this thread is great and helps..... tremendously.
Marianna
marianna.montague@avid.com
Had to do some slates yesterday in T+ and oh my god it is so frustrating. I wanted to catalogue everything that sucked about using it but I couldn't even get it to replicate the problems I was having from slate to slate.
I had to make seven slates. Five lines of text. I've given up on typing text in T+ (too often the formatting gets screwed up for no reason). So instead I type the slates out in TextEdit then paste them. Since all the titles were the same format just with different text in them I copied/pasted one title in my sequence to just paste the text into for slate as I went.
ISSUES:
-When I pasted, the text that was preveiously centered vertically jumped up to the top of the frame.
-Good ol' Title Tool would remember what was bold and what wasn't if you pasted something that had some simple formatting. T+ sometimes made everything bold, sometimes didn't. Never followed the formatting I'd set in TextEdit
-Adjusting the font size (both in Effect Editor and in T+ box) doesn't work on a regular basis for me. I'm using Arial, btw, not some weird bootleg font.
-How about cmd-A for select-all when you are editing text? Thank god triple click works.
-It's just too easy to do things like skew the text vertically (grabbing the top of the text area and dragging up). What person ever wants to stretch out their text so it's tall on a regular basis? This shouldn't be something that happens all the time when you are doing basic text adjustments. You should have to hold down option or something.
So to close...why is making a simple slate so frustrating and hard (and buggy)? I could understand maybe for a very complex lower third or a fancier title, but a simple snap-in slate? T+ seems to have ignored the conventions of working with text and shapes that have been in place for decades and come up with this obscure system that makes no sense to anyone who has used photoshop/avid/whatever for years.
janusz: I have never used inscriber, it sounds great – a few caveats to be aware of in my opinion. Having a one-size fits all titler is possibly a little ambitious.
I have never used inscriber, it sounds great – a few caveats to be aware of in my opinion. Having a one-size fits all titler is possibly a little ambitious.
You are absolutely right. But dreaming cannot hurt. Can it? was a huge fan of the Inscriber titler back in those days. So I can tell you that it not only sounds great, but also has been working great.
Of course I know that Inscriber CG, TitleMotion, etc... is not going to replace the standard Title Tool in Avid. It all isn't as simple as we like to believe. Certainly after all the years that have past. Technology and software coding hasn't been standing still all these years. It's not like taking some code that is used today, paste it somewhere between the old Inscriber code and there we go. For most tasks it would be even complete overkill. But it would be nice if we could get it back as a seperate plug-in, an add-on to Media Composer. I would surely pay for it to get it back. It's a shame that such a wonderful title application has been trowhed away. And for what? There is nothing out there that comes close in my eyes.
As for Titler+ you nailed it completely! Great post.
"Technology and software coding hasn't been standing still all these years. It's not like taking some code that is used today, paste it somewhere between the old Inscriber code and there we go."
All it would take is a port to AVX2 from the old Inscriber. Who owns it now? I think it's in Edious. Is that even made any more.
Yeah their statement made it pretty clear they are not going to bail on T+. They are 100% commited to futzing around with it trying to get it to kinda work. I wonder who their beta testers are? Are they real editors? They can't be real editors.
Dan Powell - Take One Digital Media
Ciné and Fazz...would you guys mind making a separate Inscriber fan club thread so this one can stay focused on Titler+ feedback?
Fazz Powell:All it would take is a port to AVX2 from the old Inscriber. Who owns it now? I think it's in Edious. Is that even made any more.
Unfortunattely I am not a programmer, so I have absolutely no clue about it how this works.
Yes, Grass Valley EDIUS had it as an option. Even after it was discontinued on Avid. My cousin had an EDIUS workstation aroud 2009 and from time to time he asked me some help with Inscriber TitleMotion. But as far as I know it isn't available anymore on EDIUS today. They promote NewBlueFX Titler Pro and VisDOM VisTitle as third party titlers.
jcmcnamee: Ciné and Fazz...would you guys mind making a separate Inscriber fan club thread so this one can stay focused on Titler+ feedback?
OK, no problem!
Yep no prob. With reverse engineeering I just thought someone might want to check out as a guide to improve T+ and introduce a manual to NewBlue. I thought their beta testers might want to see what a real character generator looks like and should behaive, but that was some 20 years ago.
To me Inscriber seems to correlate more with Marqee, which is something I've never needed in my daily work. Avid just needs to at least have a simple titler that works at least as well as the Title Tool did and they have not done that.
I said I'd keep out of this, but nothing could be further from the truth. Marquee was a render pig back in the day and seemed more towards 3D which was rather useless. (It's been a while since I trashed thousands of licenesse on Marquee and Type Deko. I thought Marquee was discontinued) I'm a lowly indutrial/corporate editor and we live and die on a good character generator, and Marquee was a well intentioned good attempt, but far far behind Inscriber. For those of us who don't cut movies/tv a good CG is critical. Thats why we bought 4 Discreet Edit seats in 1998. I was going to drop $120K per workstation on Avid Symphony or $56K for Discreet w/Inscriber. I think Avid still has the same title tool from 1998 in use with no development.
I'm just flummoxed reading your well thought out post earlier where you're simply trying to paste a text file into T+. Is that acceptable? Random bolding of text. With Inscriber you can inport a text file into it and guess what... do a credit roll...that works. Granted you have to futz with palyback rate, but it works and you can inport TXT all day long and it will adopt the behaivior of the top line. And that line can be assigned to a "loca properties" item or "global". So if I just want to bold the first line I make it a local object and edit away. If I want to globally change the credit roll or any other title page I can make my font global. OK now I'll shut up, but Marquee was no where near Inscriber. You should try to get your hands on a copy, you'll be blown away. :)
Cheers!
OK - a couple of things. When I first encountered Marquee ('Marquis' is something else!), I was apalled by how slugigsh it was. But computers have got faster. I'd happily use it all day long but for the fact that we can't go beyond 1080 HD. Moving on, pasting text into T+ is fine. If anyone wants my get-started guide, email me at rogershuff@fastmail.fm ... I even have a Marquee guide for us old sub-2K farts.
With best wishes, Roger Shufflebottom
ACI, Dorset, UK. www.avid-companion.co.uk
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