ProType: Starting to get the "hang" of it . .

Grazie wrote on 1/19/2008, 1:13 AM
In a further attempt to finally ween myself off of our SONY "Text", yesterday I had a bit of a Road to Damascus revelation/experience, smartly followed by some need for me to manage my expectations of a new interface wants, wishes and, well, irritations.

Firstly - I truly appreciate that I can now place/make changes without the need to make changes to all those k/f diamonds I had to do with the older system. PLUS the letter/word navigation improvements. Madison have listened - thanks!

Secondly - major gripe! I want to have syncing with the timeline. I know we have asked for this and it must be a real PITA to achieve. But now to have such an advanced and developing interface as ProType - it is most surely becoming such - and not have a syncing interface, is ,IMO, weird.

Thirdly - If I want to change the duration of the PT Event I need to type in the numbers into the "Length" adjust window. My way of thinking would be to create a NEW Loop region/selection, go to the "Selection Length" window - bottom right corner, do a double-click copy>paste into the PT "Length" window - DONE! - And yes, I do know this was ALSO the case with the old Text GenMed, but really . . . ? - And you know what? I CAN do the opposite of this. I can Copy a Length FROM TEXT or PT and Paste that into the Looping/Selection window!! - Just checked it again, I have to zoom in and out, but it IS carried over.

4th-ly. I'd like the PATH tool to indicate just WHERE my text has zoooomed off to - at least an indication as to which direction I should be exploring. Yesterday I gave myself a whole heap of trouble trying to "tame" my more creative excesses, just to get-back/lasso/retrieve some errant text that had whizzed off to "Planet No-Text" in the constellation "NoWord".

But yes, I love it. I can see there is a whole heap of options coming our way.

Grazie

Comments

apit34356 wrote on 1/19/2008, 1:49 AM
Congrats Grazie! But I think Protype is a lot more primitive than we all were hoping for. Its just a new baby, so it needs to grow with more control options. I'm feel that Sony will advance this feature more or at least improvement IO interface for 3nd party software apps if they are really thinking "pro".

I think the development teams needs more temporary help but this can be a problem in their location. Plus it can be very expense to bring people up to speed on a project.
farss wrote on 1/19/2008, 3:51 AM
I agree with what Grazie is saying. I've only used PT briefly as I have another text animator and am not that keen on animated text anyway. I didn't get far enough into PT to hit too many of the limitations but the whole window seems too dang small or can you make it bigger?
And yeah, in the 'other' app I use you can see the text outside the frame.
Regarding the sync to cursor thing and being able to see the whole composite as you work. Obviously using something outside of Vegas I have no chance of any of that. So what I've learned to do is to animate each chunk of text separately with a reasonable idea of how it's all going to work in the final comp. I render them out separately and bring each into its own track. Then it's very easy to move the text around to fine tune the final comp. Maybe working this way with PT would make life easier too.

Bob.
Derm wrote on 1/19/2008, 3:53 PM
I'm pretty new to Vegas but as PT is a new feature I suppose we are all in the same boat. I also find it difficult to deal with and also have a lot of problems seeing what I am doing despite a lot of window stretching. I dont think it needs to be this difficult.
eyethoughtso wrote on 1/19/2008, 6:01 PM
Where are the tutorials or help areas for PT?
Jeff
Laurence wrote on 1/19/2008, 8:35 PM
PT is still pretty confusing for me. I find Heroglyph much easier for now at least.