Sorry, but I bought bluff titler and it is pure crap. It doesn't render, it takes "screen shots" and the quality of the final product, IMHO, is crap.
I know a lot of people on here like to champion it, and in theory it seems really nice, but try to make yourself a really good looking HD motion title sequence. Garbage.

Their customer service is also crap. I think it consists of "IGNORE".

50 bucks seems cheap, but not here.

Michiel den Outer of Bluff Titler has provided excellent responses to any questions I have had.

I hope every program I purchase is as outstanding a value to me as Bluff Titler is.

Frankly, I like the program because it’s so much fun to use. That they have provided (7) seven no-cost upgrades since 2004 just adds to the enjoyment.

For me, it is amazingly comprehensive, intuitive, and well documented for so little money. In addition to its formal documentation, Bluff provides many, many “predigested shows” or templates, plus they have a “gallery” of user created shows. These can serve as creative prompts, as de facto tutorials for how various effects are achieved, and can be easily modified to achieve an unending range of results.

I have no illusion that it is the ultimate, Hollywood production titling program, but its fine for me for rendering to 720P (1280 x 720).

Well I bought it this morning. Can you get it to render to Cineform? I can't. It seems to me like rendering to 1440 x 810 29.97 uncompressed is the way to go for 1080i HDV projects. Is anyone else doing this?

In defence of Bluff Titler

I've always had a response within 24 hours, the service has always been excellent.

It does take screen grabs, but that's why it renders 3D with masks in almost real time.

If you wamt HQ then don't use any codec at all, or at least a lossless YUV

Ditto on the support from michiel - always a quick personal reply to any questions - have not had any issues though. One day I commented on the appearance of the latest update and he even turned around a new skin for me in one day. Who does that? Sony? Adobe? Not likely - talk about ignore.

1288x990 seems to be the highest resolution I can get to stick. not sure if it's a function of my graphics card or what (GForce 7800GTX). Anyhow, it's fine for my purposes and I work in HD as a hobby.

The 1440 x 810 seems to work really well when imported into a regular 1080i HDV project. I did my first animated title with it today and to my eyes at least, it looks just great. It's fun to use, really fast because of it's GPU use, and it's intuitive enough that you don't really need to refer back to the help pages much. Yeah, it was well worth the $50!

Glad to hear you got it working. I don't use Cineform, but I use Bluff for most of my video intros.

And yeah, some of the effects are very "cheesy", but many look very nice, and I love the pre-made examples you can download to modify for your own needs.

Edit: and I think we all realize that for $50 you're not going to get all the power of a $1000 application, but, for $50 you sure do get a lot! Free lifetime upgrades as someone else mentioned. Where else do you see that? The first version I bought was 4, I got 5 and 6 for free as well as a ton of mid-level patches almost every other month.

Following on from this thread I went and had another look at Bluff, I mean for $50 how far can you go wrong. Sorry to say but a lot. I don't mind that it's 90% cheese, a bit of talent should be able to fix that but the quality of the rendered image is appalling, it all looks like cheap plastic.
I know you get a lot for $50 but I can get a lot of anything for $50, like 50 imitation Rolexs from eBay. $500 for one real Rolex might be a bargain, $50 for 50 look alikes isn't.

Bob.

Bluff Titler really is good value for money. Just like the Rolex, if you want the quality, you have to pay for it.

I use Bluff all the time and it saves me hours.

For good quality, use Grafitti or Red but you will spend days rather than hours creating 3D titles.

Ulead 3D Production Studio has similar features to Bluff, creates good video but can be slow to use and is extremely slow to render.

Forgot to mention that Chroma Blur set to 1, is good for smoothing jaggies on BT video

Here are Bluff Titler's responses regarding setting the project size for HDV (in pixels), using Cineform, and the best method for use within NLEs.

>What controls the upper limit of the project size?

This has everything to do with hardware antialiasing. On most graphics cards only the visible front buffer is hardware antialiased. For this reason BluffTitler makes screengrabs when exporting. The advantage is image quality, the disadvantage is that you can't create resolutions bigger than your desktop.

More info about antialiasing can be found here:
http://www.outerspace-software.com/antialiasing.html

Maybe in a future version we will add software antialiasing so that you can use any resolution you want (as long as it fits into the memory of your graphics card). As you will understand this will be a lot slower.

>2. Is the Cineform HD codec available in Bluff Titler ?

BluffTitler simply lists any video encoder filter it finds on your machine. The only way to find out if an encoder actually allows BluffTitler to use it is to try it.


Note that using uncompressed AVI is the best option when creating temporary files for further processing in NLEs.

I'm getting really good quality renders. Since it uses your GPU, there might be differences in output quality due to the differences in graphics cards. In any case, my renders look pristine. Yeah some of the samples are cheesy, but that doesn't have anything to do with the results I'm getting when starting from scratch. They look wonderful.

The way I see it, this is just a temporary fix until Vegas adds a decent titler anyway (hopefully with the next revision).

I hope Sony don't add a decent titler, I've spent hundreds on other ones now ;-)

Looks like the future has arrived...

BluffTitler version 7 is out today and it adds a bunch of cool features including HD output (i.e., output larger than your screen size) and software anti-aliasing (no more jaggies!).

Snag the new verison by visiting:

http://www.blufftitler.us

I'll try to put up a new tutorial about BluffTitler 7.0 soon at my site at http://www.mediablitzed.com, too.

Best Regards,
Keith

Bluff rules!

Is your opinion of Bluff Titler specific to HD or does it include SD also?

I was just able to upgrade to Bluff 7 last night. It requires an update to DirectX, which generated an error when I attempted the web installer from Windows. Something about a d3dx9_34.dll file not found. Go to http://www.outerspace-software.com/gallery/viewarticle.php?ArticleID=385Bluff Gallery Article[/link] and read it all the way through. Using Firefox I had to follow the instructions on installing directx_jun2007_redist.exe which finally allowed the Bluff upgrade.

Read the features list. For the money you can't beat it HD or SD.

Darryl