11/11/2008 4:26:21 PM

I know that this isn't a forum for advertising other products, but I just purchased BluffTitler and have been blown away by the potential using with SSP and Movie Maker. I may be the last guy on the block finding about this product, so if some of the rest of you have used it I'd like to know. I just played around with adding various weird moving titles to slide shows and can't wait to really get into it seriously. If you are not familiar with it take a look at the 6 minute promo or the 24 minute tutorial at

http://www.blufftitler.us/

Seems like you get a lot for $49. The exported files are AVI so can be used easily in SSP.

11/12/2008 8:11:44 AM

Are you running this program in Vista? I don't see that Vista is a supported OS. Looks intresting though. Post some things that you done and let us see how a typical user can do.

11/12/2008 8:22:54 AM

I'm running XP. I haven't done much yet but playing around and following the tutorial. The videos on the website give a very good idea of what can be done. The tutorial shows the (relative) ease of use. Once I get time to actually use it for a Sunday service, I will post it.

11/12/2008 12:24:17 PM

thanks

12/14/2008 9:10:50 PM

Their website does list Vista on the downloads page.

12/15/2008 7:58:52 AM

I've had mixed results with this -- mainly due to lack of time and experience.

• First, I find that the movies that are exported are unusually large -- 120Mb for 20 sec. AVI. I can understand that the program requires a lot of horsepower to produce all the myriad of movements, etc., but it seems to me that a movie is a movie no matter the complexity of the subject matter.

• Second, as to use in SSB, I have found that the imported movies work as expected if used as a background, but, when used as an imported item (coming up like text or a picture), I have to start the movie using the > button in the top panel, that is, I can't get it to start up using the + key like with other items. If I don't hit > at the proper time, it won't run. This may be (and I suspect is) due to some ignorance of SSP on my part.

That said, I have found the possibilities of putting text, etc. out on the screen in various ways pretty amazing. So far, I have only modified some of thier numereous examples and haven't yet tried building a program from the ground up. The few times I have used it, I received "rave" reviews like, "wow, how did you do that?" and "that looks like something I'd see on TV." Yes, this may be a case where "the media is the message!"

More as I figure it all out.

12/15/2008 8:19:45 AM

AVI's are in general very large. Have you tried putting your AVI through an AVI to WMV cconverter? My PCs have a tendency to glitch a bit when running a large AVI.

12/15/2008 1:27:07 PM

I tried converting to WMV and, yes, the file went from 144Mb down to 0.5Mb. However, the background went from transparent to black and the animation still would not start on its own. Still don't know the solution to either problem.

12/19/2008 7:56:27 AM

Well, I found out that only AVI supports transparency, so I'm stuck with large files, but that doesn't seem to be a handicap, performance-wise.

As for getting it running at the right time (or at all), that is the same old problem that has been discussed several times. The solution seems to be not to use the video object, but, to use a shape object and fill with the video. That seems to work as expected.

So now on with some fairly incredible animated text. I would show an example, but I'm don't know how to put a 150Mb slide show on the forum.