thats great ill use it, but what if i have a stagnant text file, lets say i inserted a text media in vegas is there any way i can change that through an effect so that it will write it on the screen

I haven't seen any plugins just yet to animate generated text in Vegas so as to appear handwritten. You'll probably have to create the text as a graphic. I put together a tutorial that shows how to do this. I have a couple .veg files at SMG demonstrating this both with and without the use of SpiceMASTER.

Thanks very much for this tutorial Jason - I wanted to do this a little while ago and your tutorial saved me from having to work it out for myself.

For those too cheap to afford SpiceMaster or PhotoShop (e.g. myself) I'll just mention that it's possible to achieve the same effect using Paint Shop Pro 8 to create the gradient mask (this new version of PSP finally has a brush that can draw a gradient) and using Scott Moore's excellent free SMLuminance plugin (http://www.endor.demon.co.uk) to do the gradient transition in place of SpiceMaster.

This is not exactly what you were after, but it is some sort of gradient writing done entirely in Vegas 3, even before the Satish era.
Example 1
Example 2

Tor

> ...it's possible to achieve the same effect using Paint Shop Pro 8 to create the gradient mask (this new version of PSP finally has a brush that can draw a gradient)

I know this is a bit off topic but I just got PSP8 this week. How do you create a gradient brush? I can see how to create a gradient mask but that will just fade the image smoothly in one direction. I could do that with Vegas alone.

What I want is a brush that really draws a gradient regardless of which direction it turns. Is this really possible with PSP8? If so, can you explain how to create it?

~jr

http://www.satoripaint.com/

Don't hear as much on this now - was much more relevant with slower/weaker PCs, offering a process something like Macromedia's XRES, recording what you did to a file and then performing those tasks on a version with much higher resolution. Functioning also somewhat like Fireworks, it records your painting as vector based instructions.

Put together with a focus on video editing of individual frames as images, it had a built in rotoscoping effect that does just the effect asked about. Just checked their site to make sure it's still there, and it looks like they've got some decent pricing avail. currently.

I'm still working with the pre-release beta version of PSP8 until it times out, but I presume the recently released final version will be the same.

Select a brush and then open the Brush Variance Pallette (F11). For the "Opacity" option choose "Fade In" and then set "Fade Rate (pixels)" to a suitable number. You'll have to experiment with the "Fade Rate (pixels)" value to get a gradient that is just long enough to suit the length of the path you want to draw.