Lyric Pro Effects
by Lee Auter
on
Dec 12, 2008 at 1:46:01 pm
Unfortunately our station did not do any all out training, the couple of people who got it don't know much about this either other than to "play with it" when it comes to these types of effects.
I am trying to learn how to use the particle based effects such as fire&smoke, glitter, magic trail, etc. I am used to 3d Studio Max or After Effects and I am frustrated by the fact that my "emitter" seems to be the bottom edge of my text box. How can I make my emitter in such a way that I can position it wherever I like? As a workaround I have tried creating a dummy text box and scaling it down in size. But there seems to be an odd problem with the "pivot point" of the emitter. If the text box is in teh center of teh canvas it's more or less alright. As soon as I move the text box to either side the pivot point seems to almost slide on an exaggerated X axis the closer to either side I get the more exaggerated the distance. What the heck?
Here is ultimately what I want to do with the effect. I want the text to wipe on in such a way that it is immeadiately proceeded by the particle trail so that it appears that the particle trails is actually wiping the text on screen. How would I do this? Use a type on effect first, take a dummy text box key frame position and maybe animate some opacity or something? I could slap this together in after effects in like 5 minutes, but in Lyric Pro I am stumped. I want to use my Lyric for more than just a glorified version of Microsoift Word, but there are no tutorials out there for what to do and the station doesn't want to expand it's training to pay for learning how to do such "fancy" things.
Re: Lyric Pro Effects by kurt murphy on Dec 13, 2008 at 12:19:58 am
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Chyron expects you to be experts after a 3 day training - perhaps for operators this makes sense, but not for the designers. The simple action of typing text on screen is not exactly intuitive. I've had calls at home by angry users at work asking how to type out a simple full page graphic. The 'manual' (there is no physical manual) is over 1200 pages long and was obviously written by an engineer - it's not very helpful at times. If you CAN get some training, try to, because the Lyric is the least intuitive, buggiest, most infuriating software I've ever used (and I've used a lot - I SWEAR it's taken 5 years off my life). But hey, it's the industry standard (you;ll hear that a lot).
I'm afraid that you're in for a few frustrating months ahead of you. Chyron lyric takes me easily 10 times longer to create something than it would in After Effects. After Effects is the best software that I've ever used and Lyric is the worst. There are many good ideas attached to Chyron, but unfortunately there's a complete pig wrapped around it. And Chyron doesn't seem to be in any hurry to fix or update this software for the 21st century. After all, it's the industry standard.
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I haven't played with the particle effects in Lyric yet, I've tried using other effects and the page wipe - neither of which really work. I could use the page wipe almost daily, but i was told that it doesn't work on movies. Then i find that it doesn't really work on still images either. I've been told that it'll be fixed on each build - I'm still waiting after about 5 builds.
Is your pivot point where you want it? Have you checked the Z depth pivot spot? You might have to Control click the the text box and check "Use Scene Camera."
After many weeks of frustration, I created all my supers in After Effects. I created a 7:15 super movie. The first :15 frames wipe the super in and from :15 to 7:15 it loops seamlessly. You might have to do your particles in AE this way.
The one guy who really knows Lyric is Marty Dormany - He can probably help you with this issue. You can call me at 716-879-4965 at work to discuss using AE with Chyron.
Re: Lyric Pro Effects by Douglas Warouw on Feb 6, 2009 at 12:25:34 pm
Hi Lee, I'm new to the CC forums but I've had a pretty heavy amount of experience with Lyric. I agree that Lyric is the most horrible interface of all graphic soft/hardware but it is pretty cheap for what it does and if you perservere it's pretty powerfull.
Anyways RE: revealing text with a particle effect, I would use an image as the emmitter you can rotate it on its side and resize/animate it to do whatever you like. Then just make the emmiter not visible in your scene tree.
To actually reveal the text I would use a mask, although the masks are hard edge then you can group your mask and emmitter together for the reveal.
