############################################################################# # # # V V III DDDD EEEEE OO TTTTT III TTTTT L EEEEE RRRR # # V V I D D E O O T I T L E R R # # V V I D D E O O T I T L E R R # # V V I D D EEE O O III T I T L EEE RRRR # # V V I D D E O O T I T L E R R # # V III DDDD EEEEE OO T III T LLLLL EEEEE R R # # # # V V 11 11 # # V V 1 1 1 1 x x # # V V 1 1 1 1 x x # # V V 1 1 1 1 x # # V V 1 1 x x # # V 1 o 1 x x # # # # © 1993,94 by Andreas Ackermann # # # ############################################################################# o Copyright: VideoTitler is SHAREWARE. THIS UNLIMITED VERSION MAY NOT BE DISTRIBUTED IN ANY RESPECT. IF IT SHOULD APPEAR ON ANY PD-SERIES OR IN A MAILBOX I'LL TAKE JURIDICAL STEPS. I DONT'T TAKE ANY WARRANTY FOR ANY LOSS OF DATA RESULTING FROM USING THIS PROGRAMM. I CANNOT GUARANTEE THAT THIS PROGRAMM IS ENTIRELY BUG-FREE. ANY USAGE IS AT YOUR OWN RISK !!! NO EXCHANGE !!! o What is VideoTitler V1.15 ? VideoTitler V1.15 ( from now on referred as Vtt ) is a simple program to generate professional looking TV end titles and credits. Vtt allows you to scroll ANY font you like ( even colorfonts are suppor- ted !) from the bottom to the top of a 736*560 pixels sized screen. You may choose between four speeds. Unfortunately scrolling of brushes is not supported yet. o How are the titles defined ? In the ScriptEditor you enter your text to be scrolled line per line. Besides you may define the centering for each line ( left, middle, right ). In the StyleEditor you define your font, font attributes ( outline, shadow, normal ) and the color palette. Having defined such a 'style' you may assign it to any number of textlines you like. o Which system configuration is required ? Vtt runs on ANY Amiga, equipped at least with Kickstart 1.2. If you won't use colorfonts even 512k of memory will do. The more chip-ram you have the more fonts you may use within a script. ( With 1 MB you shouldn't have any problems ! ) After this quick survey, here is the complete reference: o any numbers that have to be typed in are taken as pixels. The display has got a width of 736 and a height of 560 pixels ( approximately 450 on NTSC- Amigas); as the overscan-mode is used, the 20 leftmost and rightmost and 5 pixels on the top and at the bottom are invisible, so if a textline should just fit onto the screen this won't necessarily mean that it will be entirely visible on the TV-screen. I. Loading, saving and executing scripts With the menu item 'Load...' you may load one of the provided scripts, ( located in the drawer 'scripts' ) and with 'Save...' you may save your scripts. Already when loading your script, Vtt tries to load the fonts used within it, so this will take some time ( especially with floppy drives ). If Vtt should fail to load a font, a requester will inform you about this. Klicking on the 'Play' gadget pops up a requester that allows you to specify the scrolling speed ( 50, 100, 200 and 300 pixels per second. After that your screen will show the background color defined in your script. All you have to do is to press the left mouse button and your text will be scrolled in. Pressing the right mouse button will cause the script to hold. Another mouse click (right button ) will restart it. By clicking the left button you'll return to the script editor. 'Play current' works similar to 'Play'; however scrolling starts at the current textline and your script will be scrolled in an endless loop. If your Amiga shouldn't be fast enough to generate a line of text , Vtt automatically inserts some free lines ( happens mainly when you scroll at a speed of more than 100 pixels/sec, with outlined fonts or with colorfonts ) If there's not enough memory Vtt will inform you about this. In this case you only can try to make it with less fonts, as especially colorfonts eat very much memory. II. Editing scripts On the left of Vtt's window you've got a box where you may select each line of your title. When starting Vtt there aren't any lines yet. You may change this by klicking on 'Add Text'. On the right, there will appear additional gadgets: curr. line: here you may edit your line of text at pleasure o x-position: Centering is | LEFT | RIGHT | MIDDLE distance of | left border | right border | ignored o y-Distance: specifies the number of blank lines to be scrolled, before the next text line appears o cur. Style: defines the 'Style' of this line; may be changed by selecting 'Edit Style'. Beyond the stringgadget there is some information about the dimensions of the textline; if it is printed blue, there either is no font loaded or this line won't fit onto the screen. [Values for YPos etc. don't have any meaning in his version.] Beyond the select box there is another number of gadgets, that allow you to modify the sequence of the textlines: o Copy after activating 'Copy' Vtt waits for another line to be chosen. The current line will be copied BEHIND this line, but still will be preserved at its former position. The copy will become the new current line. o Move behind works the same as 'Copy', but the original line will be deleted o Move front works the same as 'Move behind', but the copy will be inserted IN FRONT of its destination. Selecting any of these gadgets a second time after activating it will abort the action. o Delete deletes the current textline; the next line becomes current line o Add Text inserts a new line of text AFTER the current line Some words about the menus: o Bubble (de)activates wavy scrolling mode o Copperbars Vtt won't show the background-color defined. Therefore it shows a black screen with two copperbars scrolling up and down. Very remarkable ! o Coppercycle produces a rainbow-like color slide in the background. How- ever it does only look good in combination with huge fonts ! o Add Text does the same as 'Add Text' Gadget o Select next selects the following line o Select back selects the previous line III. The Style-Editor To enter the style-editor simply click on 'Edit-Style'. In the select-box the styles already defined will appear ( when no script is loaded, there won't be any styles ! ) Clicking on 'Add Style' defines a new style. On the right there will appear a couple of gadgets: o Stylename here you may enter a name for your style ( it's unsignificant for Vtt; it's just for better survey; its first character will be displayed in the script-editor right after the textline ) o Style the font's style is defined by this gadget: - 'Normal': neither outline nor shadow the following three gadgets are meaningless in this case - 'Shadow': the textline appears with a shadow (bottom-right) 'X-OFFSET' defines displacement to the right in pixels 'Y-OFFSET' defines displacement downwards in pixels 'DEPTH OF SHADOW' defines how often this action has to be repeated Example: D.o.S.: 1, x-O: 12, y-O: 12 Result: cast shadow, its displacements down and right are equal ( one pixel in y-direction is nearly as much as one pixel in x-direction ) D.o.S.: 5, x-O: 2, y-O: 2 3-D-effect D.o.S.: 5, x-O: 0, y-O: 2 shadow only towards the bottom The best thing to get a feeling how these values work is to try out !!! ( negative inputs are unfotunately ignored !!! ) - 'Outline' the font appears outlined 'X-OFFSET' once more defines the displacement to the right [ however only 2 makes sense !] 'Y-OFFSET' the same, just to the bottom [ mainly set to 2]] 'FATNESS OF OUTLINE' tells Vtt how often this action should be repeated [ values from 1 to 3 make sense; IMPORTANT: a 68000er Amiga isn't fast enough for values > 1 ; with scrolling speed set at more than 100pix/sec you even might get problems with 1 ! ] Hint: If you desire the outline, but the font itself should be transparent, simply choose the first colour of the palette as textcolor. o Character Space: space between two characters; mainly 0 but especially with 'Outline' and 'Shadow' bigger values make sense. o Pattern: activating this gadget causes Vtt to use a pattern for the font, so that the original video will shine right through the font. However this switch won't affect shadows, outlines and color-fonts. o Font: that's the name of the font used in this style. When printed blue, there's either no font selected or no font loaded. o Load Font: used to select a font o Color-Editor: makes you enter into the palette-editor, allowing you to define a 8-colour palette JUST FOR THIS STYLE ! o With 'Ok' you return to the script-editor. The current style will be attributed to the current textline. IV. The Color-Editor You edit an 8 color palette as usual by modifying the rgb portions of the color. The first color of the palette represents the background; changing it will affect this color in each other style. Since V1.1 it's even possible to de- fine a slide for this color. If the style attached to this palette shouldn't include a colorfont, please use ONLY THE FIRST FOUR colors of the palette, as the other ones are ignored and the textline won't be shown correctly. Foreground color and background color are defined by first clicking on the desired color and then clicking on the gadget on the left of 'Textfarbe'. o Slade: allows you to define a color as slide from one color to another. Activating it, a new gadget will appear allowing you to switch between start and endcolor. [ Slades from red to blue or red to yellow look best ! ] With your font being higher than 30 pixels you'll notice some stripes in the result, as the old graphic-chips don't provide enough colors. NEW: This 'stripyness' won't appear when you're one of the proud owners of an Amiga 1200 or 4000 which is equipped with the new AGA-Chipset. o ColorFonts-Colors: If the font defined for this style should be a colorfont, you'll get its palette by clicking on this gadget. o With 'Ok' you return to the Style-Editor. Some words about the fonts: The fonts included were downloaded from a mailbox that only provides freely distributable stuff. However, there was no copyright notice found, neither as file accompanying the fonts nor inside the font-files. So the author BELIEVES that these fonts are freely distributable but however he cannot guarantee it. Known BUGS: o Select next/back won't scroll the viewable textlist o with some colorfonts, outlines and shadows won't be displayed correctly Help: simply type in one or two spaces at the end and in front of this textline ( required when using ChiselScript.font ) o using a font in several styles will cause the font to be loaded in memory several times. This is waste ! !o! sometimes inexplicable system crashes o when scrolling at 100 pix/sec, Vtt probably will insert additional lines of space, as a normal Amiga is too slow. !o! if you run out of memory while loading a script your system might crash !o! NEVER use more than 120 lines of text or more than 20 styles ! Otherwise: Crash ( don't tell me I didn't warn you ! ) o *any* music replay will be stopped, while Vtt is playing as it requires *all* the power of an MC68000. Maybe I'll include my own replay for MED and SoundtrackerModules one day. o While Vtt is playing a script it takes over the whole machine. Any trans- action with peripheral devices ( Modem, Printer, etc.) will stop. Ideas for future versions: o 16 colors or maybe even more (only AGA-Amigas !!!) o New styleguide-like user interface o scrolling of brushes o TV-station logo support - The new version will require Kickstart 2.0 or higher, no matter whether you use AA-Chips or not ! About the program: I focussed on the result of this programm - a great looking result - and I belive I achieved this goal. However this piece of software isn't free of bugs and the user interface is not one of the best, I know. ****************************** IMPORTANT ************************************* * * ************************* Changes since V1.0c ******************************** o Vtt now uses a 736*560 pixels large hires-interlace screen, to get the best quality possible for genlocking on an Amiga. The flickering of the image on your monitor doesn't affect the result finally saved on your video tape. o Vtt now supports the new color palette of the AGA-Amigas, which means that *any* color slide may be shown without stripes as Vtt uses the full 24Bit palette. o You now may define color slides even for the background color. However this only makes sense with AGA-Amigas. o Vektor fonts are now supported. o a bug in the fontmanagement has been removed: font-files larger than 65535 bytes now are handled correctly. o the problem with the 'fast' mouseclicks to start a script on turbo-Amigas now has been fixed once and forever. o an english user-interface to make Vtt available for ALL users. ( Later I intend to lokalize the whole package.) o the 'Bubble' menu item. Provides some kind of wavy scrolling, which does look fine when being used with large fonts at a scrolling speed of 100 Pixels/sec. NEW for V1.11 o Copperbar background o Coppercycle background New bugs and things that aren't the way they should be : o occasionally Vtt happend to crash on my old A500 when returning from the scrolling routine. However I haven't had *any* crash when using Vtt on my new A4000. o Memory management now is done dynamically. Memory won't be allocated until the textline really is to be shown. For this reason it's not easy to cal- culate the maximum amount of memory needed, so Vtt only makes a guess whether there is enough memory or not. If Vtt should run out of memory while running, it simply tries to generate the line after the line making trouble. Unfortunatly there isn't a way (yet) to inform the user which line hasn't been displayed. o When using non-color-fonts you may edit 8 colors in the color editor, although only the first 4 colors are taken into account by the scroll- routine. So be careful to define only the first 4 colors as text or shadow color. o Vtt *must* be run on an PAL or NTSC screen. However it's only the Color- Editor which is making trouble, so if you won't use it you won't meet any problems. Note: The Color-Editor doesn't even support Superhires ! o The rgb components of the colors only may take values from 0 to 15; AGA support does 'only' comprise the generating of 24-bit colorslides. o Colorslides only are possible for the first three colors; a specification of a slide for any other color will be ignored. o The screenmode under which your script is played depends on a flag set by the graphics system on bootup.( Power frequency: 60 Hz = USA => NTSC; 50 Hz = Europa => PAL) OS3.0 users may change this flag in the bootup menu. All the others can use Nico François' NTSC-PAL ( Fish 387 ). Having an NTSC-screen opened on an PAL-Amiga or vice versa won't keep Vtt from taking the correct mode ( i.e. the one specified on bootup or or by NTSC-PAL ). ****************************************************************************** Vtt is (still) written in Assembler at 100% ( Devpac 2.0 ) on an A500 1.2 with 1 MB ram. ( Latest parts on A4000/EC 030) It uses the reqtools.library which is ©opyrighted by Nico François. The author is registered as developper. And now greetings to some people who made it possible to create Vtt: Franz Langheinrich of AmiTech Systems Hof/Bavaria (Testruns on A1200, technical and material support ) J.M. Forgeas ( Editor AZ 1.5 ) Joe Siebenmann ( EZAsm 1.7 ) ( Where is V1.8 you promised me long ago ?! ) Nico François ( reqtools.library, NTSC-PAL ) Jan van den Baard ( PowerSource ) Uwe Colditz ( Ironmaster of Attack; ideas for fixing a major bug ) History: V1.0b 7.4.'93 first release as limited demoversion after half a year of *BUSY* work V1.0c 14.4.'93 Fontrequest: the palette won't be changed any more with colorfonts on turbo-Amigas Vtt sometimes refused to start the script; this bug has been solved ( at least I hope !!! ) V1.1 AGA-Amiga-support and usage of an interlaced display for better output quality; Bubble-Effect. V1.11 during october 1993: some bug fixes; copper-background support V1.12 20.11.93 now you really may use left and right centered texts V1.13 27.11.93 added possibility to stop scrolling with right mouse button V1.14 during 1/94 some bug fixes V1.15 6.2.94 some more bug fixes; now the right mouse button works like a switch when the script is scrolled: one click will stop the script, another will restart it. Oberkotzau, 9.2.94