Tutorial: Creating Titles With Pizzazz in Sony Vegas Pro

Tutorial: Creating Titles With Pizzazz in Sony Vegas Pro 12 from Steve Nathans-Kelly on Vimeo.

Here's a quick, easy way to generate sharp-looking titles for your Vegas Pro projects that requires no additional plugins, based on a recent McKnight Video project, but applicable to all kinds of situations that call for a title with some extra kick.

First, a little background. I was cataloging some stock FX we had recently bought; these were both compositing filters and After Effects project files. You've all seen these types of offerings from Rampant Design, FootageFirm, VideoBlocks, and Digital Juice. The files in question contained After Effects project files, all of the graphics and footage needed in using the template, and a sample video of what the results can look like. I had actually forgotten that we bought these After Effects templates.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: After Effects is one of those programs that I wouldn’t mind learning but just have never have made the time for it. Curious, I popped in one of the discs and I launched the preview video to ogle at the wonderful results that are still out of my grasp, and realized that with the nifty background they provided, I could use Vegas to accomplish something very similar. And I could do it quickly and repeatedly, and on the project I'm currently working on. Profit!

The video included with this article will walk you through how to do this step by step, and I've also included this text as a reference. The video goes into great detail, but once you get the hang of it, it doesn’t take very long.

Adding Text to Your Background Loop

You will need the following items: Vegas Pro, and a background loop or image available from many sources, such as Rampant Design, FootageFirm, VideoBlocks, or DigitalJuice.

Place the background loop on a video track. In the one I'm using in this example, shown in Figure 1 (below), there are particle emitters producing sparks against a blue background. They scroll by the screen every so often and explode. We will be flying text in to coincide with these explosions.

Figure 1. The background loop I’ll use in this example, which includes particle emitters producing sparks against a blue background.

On a track above the background track create a text event. Vegas Pro comes with several title generators by default; for this exercise we are using the Titles & Text module (Figure 2, below), and there we’ll choose the font, size, and the text we want to display.

Figure 2. Vegas Pro’s Titles & Text module.