__________________________________________________________ ZVP SpeedText v1.0 __________________________________________________________ IMPORTANT !! If A500 see notes on machine variations at end DESCRIPTION A Text-file-driven Automatic Layout multipage titling system... to be precise... and before you ask. SpeedText could be regarded as a 'SCRIPT DRIVER' in its simplest and most easy-to-understand form, but the 'language' to learn involves only two commands, (#) and (^)..! The principle is similar to the extremely powerful VideoStudio PROFESSIONAL's 'zScript', but SpeedText's relative simplicity is much more appropriate to new users, and the limitations imposed by running titling software on 1Mb A500s, most widely used where expenditure is to be kept to an absolute minimum. The type of scroll this program uses is a BITMAP scroll, which, unlike earlier versions of VideoStudio, is smoother, but demands much more memory. The total length of scroll therefore is now conditional on the memory available. (The former program was an 'endless drum type', not limited in this way. We have made this change in philosophy in response from demand from customers (presumably with the memory) but if other users (with less RAM available) find this unworkable, then the former 'endless drum' program is still available upon request. RUNNING THE DEMOS The program comes up in SEQUENCE mode. If you want SUBTITLES or SCROLL, simply click the corresponding button at the top of the screen. Click on the JOB of your choice. Click on RUN. NEW USER ? A TITLE IN TWO MINUTES Having run all of the demos, and selected a title type you would like to use yourself, click REPLICA. Type in a JOB name of your choice. Note that you should not use punctuation or spaces in this, but to set words apart, the underscore (_) is usually used. When you press the new job will be generated. You can now immediately set about any change to the words you wish. Click on EDIT TEXT and move the cursor using the arrow keys to any point you wish to change. You can delete text with the BACK-ARROW key (main keyboard group) or the DELETE KEY. If you want to change the number of pages, just remember that each page is separated from the next with the (#) symbol. When you have finished your edits, exit from the editor by pressing the ESCAPE key. Then press either S (to Save) U (to Use but not save) or A (to abandon and reload former text). The JOB is now ready to run. As you get more ambitious, you can begin to experiment with the other parameters, like the font choice, colours and transitions. MORE ABOUT SPEEDTEXT Although this program is new to 'VideoStudio', users of earlier versions of the software will quickly recognise the combined functions of the former programs SEQ SUBT and SCROLL, each of which were pioneering automatic-layout programs distinguished by their speed and ease of use. However, while broadly similar in operation, SpeedText offers a large number of important new features. SPEEDTEXT covers all of the former functions, adding greater flexibility, while simplifying further the user-interface. Because of the ease of use and minimal work involved in creating multipage sequences using this method, new users can quickly modify existing title examples (using the REPLICA feature), and have their own titles running literally in a few minutes. Regular users will find the speed of use indispensible, as this method of working can perform a large proportion of standard title tasks without recourse to time consuming manual layout, and offers the maximum potential for productivity. Only when greater flexiblity is required is it then necessary to use a manual layout method (e.g. Captor). To guide you in your selection of the best suited program to a given task, here is a summary of the differences. STRENGTHS Very fast operation, minimal work editing, maximum disk space economy. Script driven, and all pages are edited together in one text-file. In this way a multi-page sequence can be seen and edited as a whole. Text may be imported from a word-processor, and control-codes added. SpeedText is optimally suited to subtitling, also leading and trailing credits. RESTRICTIONS The 8-colour palette, the page layout, the chosen three fonts, three different rendering types, and three colour combinations, the background picture or included logo, all remain as initially set throughout all pages of a job. None of constraints apply to CAPTOR, but as you will see from the demos provided these restrictions certainly do not provide any great hindrance in a wide variety of examples. Indeed, our research indicates that an 'Auto-Layout' method is almost universally preferred, wherever possible, by experienced users. PRINCIPLE OF OPERATION - GROUPS The FONT, STYLE, RENDERING and COLOUR of the text af any given line is selected using a single 'prefix' numeral at the beginning of that line. This character (a number 1-3, selecting GROUP) is not displayed when the job is run. Instead one of the three 'ATTRIBUTE GROUPS' you have set up from the main menu ie engaged. (An Attribute is a 'qualifier' for the text, Latin: 'qualis'-of what sort) meaning your own choice of font, style, rendering etc. for all of the text appearing in that selected GROUP. Some title types (e.g. language subtitles) may need less than 3 groups. If a group is unused (in this case groups 2 and 3), you are advised to leave the fonts of any unused groups undefined. This speeds loading and saves RAM memory. Group 1 however, will always be used. To summarise then, all of the text lines within a job will appear in one or other of the three attribute groups. The fonts, styles and renderings do not all have to be different, you can set these up as you wish, and the groups may be selected in any order in the script. Each line of the script that represents text to be displayed therefore is prefixed with this GROUP SELECTOR. SEPARATING PAGES Pages are SEPARATED by a single HASH character (#), and this must appear on its own line. (This differs from former software... so previous users N.B. Eeek... more Latin...!) With the exception of text for horizontal scrolling, all other text lines of a script begin with either a GROUP SELECTOR (a number 1-3) or a HASH (#). Any other character will be reported as an error. Note that there will therefore be one less hash in a job than the total number of pages. In sequence and subtitle modes, the hash denotes the space inseted to separate pages. For Vertical scroll, the hash is used to insert a gap between blocks of text, when required. For horizontal scrolling, no control characters are used. SPLITTING TEXT LINES Cetain types of page layout require tabulation in two columns, these are usually used for end credits type applications. There are three types of PAGE FORMAT that make use of this feature, namely CENTRE SPLIT LEFT-RIGHT SPLIT, and LEFT-CENTRE SPLIT. If one of these forms of layout are selected, AND the text line contains the SPLIT SYMBOL (^), then this dual tabulation will be activated. (If the line omits the (^) then the layout defaults to CENTRE) It is much easier to understand this by examination of a JOB example that uses this type of page layout. MARGINS AND TEXT LAYOUT Each of the layout types (PAGE LAYOUT) selected can be shifted using the margins. There are four margins, LEFT, RIGHT, CENTRE and V-CENTRE. The current margin settings for the first three are indicated by the three small coloured rectangles on the slider near the top of the the menu page. The vertical centring is indicated on the sliders at the extreme left and right. To adjust any one of these, click on either the GREEN (left) BLUE (centre) RED (right) knob, and move it to the new position and click the LH button again. These settings are all saved when the JOB is saved, and apply throughout the duration of the job, when it is run. Note that the V-CENTRE margin position fixes the centre of the text (irrespective of the number of lines) in a vertical direction. That is to say the text covers an equal area above and below the margin. In the case of subtitles, where the margin is set towards the bottom of the screen, should the computed V-CENTRE result in lines that would be positioned off-screen, then the margin is temporarily nudged upward automatically for that page only. Otherwise the symmetry of sucessive pages is maintained. SETTING THE COLOURS You can set the 8 colours to what you require by clicking SET COLOURS and selecting the colour number to adjust at the top, then using the red green and blue sliders. Colour 0 is always the colour of the background and screen borders. For foreground keying you must set this to a value to suit your genlock, usually R=0 G=0 B=5. The buttons below are the three group text colours (T1,T2 and T3) and the three group text rendering colours (R1 R2 and R3). When in SCROLL MODE only the number of available colours decreases from the nomal eight, depending on the number of planes/speed you select. 3 Planes corresponds to the full eight, 2 planes to the first four colours (0-3), and with 1 plane the available colours are 2 (0 and 1). However, the speed increases, the fewer planes you decide to use. EXAMPLE: SETTING THE COLOURS (all modes) For example, if the sliders are full up on colour 1, then it is white. If you set T1 to 1, then all the text in group 1 is white. If colour 7 is black, and you have set SHADOW as rendering, and R1 is set to 7, then the shadows will be black. The page rendering selector defines the colour from the palette in which the cut-out mask or page box will appear. ADDING A BACKGROUND PICTURE OR LOGO Click the LIST (left arrow) button alongside the BGND box. Click on the picture you want. You can now display it using SHOW BACKGROUND if you want to inspect it first. The colour palette will probably now need resetting, so select CHANGE COLOURS and click PIC PAL. To remove a background, just list backgrounds and the BGND box is cleared. The procedure for a logo is similar, except you will have to position the logo on the screen once selected. Click on POSITION LOGO and click it where you require. The margins will be displayed at this time to assist you. The Backgrounds and Logos behave differently when the JOB is run. Specifying a background picture implies that this is to be continuously displayed throughout the job. A logo however is attatched to a page, and this may however appear continuously if DB CUT TO is used. Otherwise it is erased with the text for each page. The distinction will be clear by comparing the behaviour of JOB 'subtitle withlogo' and that of 'wedding3'. TRANSITION TYPES For a detailed explanation of the working of these, please see the manual section on CAPTOR. MAXIMUM LENGTH OF SCROLL Because VideoStudio now scrolls a BITMAP this means that the maximun length of scroll depends very much on the combined CHIP and FAST RAM that your computer has access to. The weakest Amiga seems to be the A500/1.3 in this respect, the A500/1.2 the best, and the A500-plus (and all other machines) can be (if not already) readily expanded (see notes on machine variations). A Four-colour scroll uses TWICE the memory of a two-colour one, for the same length, an eight colour scroll uses three times the memory. To minimise CHIP mem demands therefore, reduce number of colours to a minimum, and keep the scroll short. INCREASING MEMORY FOR LONG SCROLLS ON 1Mb A500s (esp. 1.3 & 2.0) If you are reluctant to seek a hardware solution to ChipMem shoratges, then the cheapest way to maximise CHIP is to avoid WorkBench. This won't cost you a penny, and allows you to improve RAM efficency. This applies especially to WB1.3, and even more so to WB2.0. (1.2 is so efficient that little improvement is made). Do this by making a VSboot disk using LINK. Better still, edit the startup to conclude with 'go speedtext', or even manually start this from the CLI. (see notes on maximising memory). Conversely, the eficiency deteriorates by fitting extra peripherals. PLEASE NOTE Do not attempt to control the layout by using spaces at the beginning or end of a line. This will not work. You can adjust the line spacing using a 'blank' line, providing the group character is still present. (in V-Scoll though, avoid this, because it consumes a lot of memory). LAYOUT TRICKS 1. Mixed layout mode. Selecting any split mode will remain hidden (and the title centred) until a (^) is included in the text line. (see job 'about') Another example is to select LEFT-RIGHT SPLIT. A line such as 1Hello there will be centred A line such as 1Hello there^ will be flush L-margin A line such as 1^Hello there will be flush R-margin A line such as 1Hello^there will be split centred (see JOB 'filmintro' for an example of this) 2. Spaces between lines. A line with no text (but MUST still contain a GROUP SELECTOR (1-3)) will displace the text below by the font height plus 5 pixels, i.e. as if the line were blank. Choosing a group selector corresponding to fonts of different heights will vary the spacing. (see job 'about') Take care when using this method with V-Scroll, however. Each line absorbs a lot of CHIP memory, whether there is text on it or not. Use the HASH (see below). With Vertical scroll, the hash character represents the text BLOCK spacing, i.e. setting apart blocks of lines. Normally 100 TV lines. Hashes must not appear consecutively in a script. Instead, you can vary the VALUE (or distance in TV lines) that this corresponds to if you press 'B' and enter a new value (up to 500 lines). This also varies the duration, so you can fine-tune your timing using this. PREPARING BACKGROUNDS AND LOGOS Deluxe Paint is suitable for generating the High Resolution 8-Colour IFF files required. The backgrounds are all 8-Colour standard size Hi-Res (640X512) pages. The logos must be saved as BRUSHES and should not exceed 255X255. (use COORDS ON when you lift a brush to check its size). THE AMIGA VARIATIONS (Nothing to do with Elgar) THE A500 (Kickstart 1.2) An A501 brings RAM to 1Mb. (Provising no superfluous drive fitted). Loadsa RAM (900K+ at boot), unlike the later 'improved' versions, you won't need LowChipFix unless you are using backgrounds, or an especially large logo. Few problems. Good machine, but 0.5Mb chip of course. THE A500 (Kickstart 1.3, pre Sep 91) Additional memory (the 0.5 Mb A501 expansion) is required. Total 1Mb. Irrespective of how much further RAM you add, the maximum of 0.5Mb CHIP Memory is fixed, so the LowChipFix button again must be used to permit the display of backgrounds. (Transitions then must be selected from the Single-Buffered types). Unlike the K/S 1.2 A500's these have about 100K LESS RAM at boot, and some, but not all (?), cannot open the editor screen on this program without using LowChipFix. They have also less headroom than the 1.2 machines, and so will report 'low chip mem' sooner. THE A500-PLUS (kickstart 2.0) You are advised to enter this program directly (only via depts). Full operation (without recourse to LowChipFix) is available if (wait for it...) you add a 0.5Mb expansion! We recommend this. Especially since the 'improved' kickstart 2.0 now gobbles up an astonishing 250K for no good reason before you can start! As the saying goes... you win some, you lose some... We have 'deglitched' this software as best we can to cope with the K/S 2.0 screen spoiler bugs (please Mr. Commodore can you fix this) but intermittent flashes at the top of the screen will still appear. Due to the awkward screen-centreing of WB 2.0, use of 1.3 prefs is recommended (and far more comprehensible). You are advised to set workbench backgrounds to darker colours (like WB 1.3 was) to avoid premature monitor tube burnout, and difficult-to-read text (due to defocussing) on conventional TVs... all of which are peaked to produce best clarity on WHITE text on a darker background. I know video users are a small minority, but please Commodore take note. Keyboard cueing (as an alternative to the mouse-click) is now available so that the K/S 2.0 bug that corrupts the display with each new screen mouseclick can be avoided by using the keyboard. Many users are now having A500+'s 'upgraded' to 1.3 in order to run older software (and minus the screen bugs). Switchable systems are now becoming available. THE A1500/2000 The software has been compromised somewhat to run on machines (A500s) with slower drawing speeds (esp A500-plus!) and with little memory. If there is enough demand for the slicker version of this program that assumes a 1500/2000 then we may make this separately available. These remain the best choice for video use. (Until that is Mr. C puts the buggy new chips in them...) iss 0 Jan 04 1992 iss 1 Jan 10 1992