Captions and Title Images

[tacman1123]

I'm new to AviSynth, and am trying to use it to automate the display of some video clips (actually, the creation of a short video). I'm stuck on how to put a nice caption on top of an avi. I see that there's a Subtitle() filter (is that the right word, filter? method? function?), but that's fairly limited. Also, I can't seem to have it apply to only one part of the avi. What I'm really trying for is to have 2+ clips, captioned with name of the person speaking, fading out between them. So basically

peter = DirectShowSource("peter.avi")
peter.Subtitle("Peter") <--- this doesn't exist
paul = DirectShowSource("paul.avi")
paul.Subtitle("Paul");
content = Dissolve(peter, paul, 40);
title + content + closing_credits <- defined elsewhere

I'm also trying to figure out how to put a title screen at the beginning of all this ("Speaking Out...Starring Peter and Paul"), not sure how to do that either.

It's possible, of course, that Avisynth is not the tool to do this, since really what I'm trying to do is put a bunch of clips together, maybe VirtualDub or something else is a better solution. If that's true, could someone point me in the right direction?

Thanks!

Tac

[gzarkadas]

You have to use variables to assign the intermediate results

peter = DirectShowSource("peter.avi")
c1 = peter.Subtitle("Peter")
paul = DirectShowSource("paul.avi")
c2 = paul.Subtitle("Paul");
content = Dissolve(c1, c2, 40);
title + content + closing_credits

If you want to create nicer subtitles you will need to use masks and some bluring; see for example this thread (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=121433).
Also the 6th example (http://avslib.sourceforge.net/examples/example-006.html) in AVSLib documentation shows the creation of a title screen with nice (blur+mask) fade-in and -out subtitles.