Speech bubble How-to?

[zaphodikus]

I am pretty sure I saw someone use after-effects (which I cannot hope to afford) to do speech bubble type text effects, the kind that you might see in a cellphone chat app, but as overlays in a video.

I am hoping someone has already got an easy way to do this, if not I might write a game-engine script to make some compositable overlays to do it, but that will take a load of time, a load. Is learning and using Blender an option perhaps? I really miss that 3D editor we used to have about 8 years ago, it could do this kind of thing. I'm thinking of the speech bubble kind of thing with rounded corners, I'm less fussed about it having that tiny little "speech entry" little divot hanging off the corner, just the rounded corners box is what I'm wanting to get.

[rwernyei]

Old tutorial but might help.
https://youtu.be/H8Rp3MiqJtw

[Davidk]

Not sure what sort of "speech bubble" you want, but you could try variations of a graphic in an overlay track plus text in the text track matched to events in the main time line clip.

[zaphodikus]

The trouble with using a graphic, is that the graphic stretches when you have loads fo speech bubbles you start to see the stretching or aspect ratio differences in the graphic corner , and end up having to make a graphic for each speech bubble.

My final workaround is to use the text background feature, and choose text background - usually as if you were doing a lower thirds, then make the "background box" corners round, and the distance enough to make it look like you are typing into a box - does not look to amateur in the end. so happy with that as a result.