I am trying to make a long video with a lot of text, something about the history of one country, actually I want an entire series, but I don’t want it to look like a 12 year old made it as a school assignment in Power point and for it to look too bland. I know how to use different features of Sony Vegas, how alpha images work, I’m maybe on medium level with Photoshop, so I have the knowledge, but I just don’t have the imagination.
For example what are the fonts that I should use and what are the fonts that I should not use? Also, what about character size, should I make it smaller and fit more text in one section and make it longer, or should I cut longer texts into multiple sections and show each one separately? What percent of the screen should be covered with text and what with images,etc?
If you know a Youtube video that does something like this, you can send that too.
In the future I may even switch to voiced videos, but the language I’m making them in is not my native, so my pronunciation is awful and my voice is also not that great for this type of videos, but I’ll see about that later, for now I’m all about text videos.
Aim for no more than one sentence of text on the screen at any one time - up to two lines of text seems to work, in my experience.
Sans serif fonts are typically easier on the eye. Size it by eye, previewing at the size you expect your audience to view it
Whatever text colour you choose, outline the letters with a contrasting colour or black, to prevent accidental bleed into the video behind (nothing more annoying than white titles over a video with white objects in it).
Consider placing a semi transparent lozenge shape behind your text, if your video editor permits it, as this helps further with readability. (here’s an example of what I use and I think it works) if possible, fade in the lozenge background just a quarter second before showing the text, as this provides a visual cue for the viewer to prepare to read
If you feel you need more than a sentence/two lines of text on the screen, consider either:
[ul]
[li]Narrating it instead[/li][li]Pause/cut the video - Fade to a plain black or solid dark colour and display a page of text, of sufficient font size for easy reading and leave it on screen for long enough to read all the way through; fade back to the resuming video[/li][/ul]
ETA: on re-reading your question… Are you talking about a purely text video (no footage, just a slideshow of text)? If so, those can be tough watching - there really needs to be some sort of other visual content, or narration.
For now I only have a text, but there’s a lot of potential images and videos I can add, so that’s not that big of an issue, the problem is that there’s just too much you have to say for people to really understand, especially since this is about a less known coutry’s history, some wars, their causes and all that and it’s complicated topic. I cut out any text that is not needed from the original text I wrote, but there’s still a lot of it, around 15, 20 longish sentences.
I never heard the term lozenge shape, but by the video you provided, I guess you mean like a darkened background video that runs while you’re reading the text? If so, I think I tried something like that previously, although I think I mostly used HQ images in the background that zoomed in/out slowly, so it’s kinda like a background video, but less things going on.
Yeah, the darkened background for the text is only a ‘lozenge’ because it has rounded ends. It’s just a background.
Main points to consider are:
Do everything you can to keep your text comfortable to read - that means:
Use a simple font (but not one that everyone hates e.g. Comic Sans)
Make the text a decent size, with good contrast against background, but not a clashing colour contrast (so not green text on red, for example)
Allow sufficient time for the text to be read at an average reading speed (remember you will be able to read it faster than your audience because you are familiar with the content)
and:
Do things to try to keep your audience interested - so you can have whole pages of text, but maybe alternate them with pan or zoom across a high resolution photo, with less text on top of that (or no text on those scenes)