[geeks] overlaying text onto video

[Lionel Peterson]

> From: Bill Bradford <mrbill at mrbill.net>
> Date: 2004/11/29 Mon AM 01:45:05 GMT
> To: geeks at sunhelp.org
> Subject: [geeks] overlaying text onto video
> 
> I need to overlay a copyright notice on some video footage of a yet-to-be-
> released film.  I can get the film into any format desired (right now its 
> MPEG-1 ripped from VCD, ripped from VHS), but I can do raw AVI, MPEG-2, 
> Quicktime, etc).
> 
> Output needs to look somewhat like this (copyright notice in middle of screen):
> 
> http://www.mrbill.net/movie/copyright-middle.jpg
> 
> Any suggestions?  There's the "logo" filter in VirtualDub (Windows), but
> I've tried for 2 hours and can't get it working properly.  ULead Video
> Studio (30-day demo, Windows) has the ability to do a text crawl - but
> its downloading at 20K/sec and will take another hour to finish.
> 
> Discreet Cleaner 6 will do it, but the demo is limited to 15 seconds and
> adds additional watermarks.  I can't afford the full non-demo version;
> this needs to be done with freely-available software.
> 
> I've got a WinXP-SP2 machine and an iMac G5 1.8Ghz available.  Ideas?

Windows Movie Maker is capable of such an effect, based on a quick scan of the help file (search for "overlay")...

Windows Movie Maker is pretty good, I've used it when I didn't have my PowerBook with me - for my needs (assemble pieces from a camcorder), it is comparable to iMovie.

HTH,

Lionel