I'm using version Media Studio Pro 7.0. I was really surprised to find that I can't use non-English characters when doing Title Clips - especially since the program credits seem to consist entirely of Chinese names!
I'm actually trying to use Japanese.
Whether I copy/paste or use the Windows inbuilt IME directly, the characters always turn to garbage-characters when rendered.
Interestingly enough, they actually print properly in the Editor of the "Insert Title Clip" dialog. Although once I press 'OK' in the dialog, I pretty much kiss my Japanese characters goodbye. Opening the dialog again shows garbage characters again.
I'm using an appropriate (capable) font too. That is to say, I've been dealing with japanese fonts on my system for nearly two years and know what 'should' work... MediaStudio Pro's Title Clip dialog just doesn't work at all with non-English characters.
Is there any work-around or ideas about how this might work? Is it possible?
Last edited by spurrymoses on Sat Nov 05, 2005 9:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
While beta testing, I have pressed hard for non-Latin character support in both MSPand DVD WS. I have not tried Oriental characters though, only Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew alphabets.
I believe there is a Japanese version of MSP 7, so I presume the Japanese and Chinese characters are supported there. The question is how to have them supported in, I suppose, the English version. I don't know.
In MSP8, I haven't yet tested it in the release version, but efforts have been made to support, at least partially, non-Latin alphabets. In the last beta build I tested for this, it was possible to use Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, but Arabic and Hebrew would not type right-to-left and some of the finer functionality was not usable. Of course, the number of valid fonts was limited, as well. Any mistake had a tendency to irreversably turn the non-Latin scripts into gobbledegook.
I must test what happens in the release version, which is 16 builds later than the version I tested: it is quite possible it has been improved in the meanwhile. I'll report on this thread what I find. I don't have support in my OS for oriental characters, so I cannot test for this.
In MSP7, the titler is not brilliant and I used it only for short Latin-character titles. When I wanted non-Latin titles, I used Corel Draw! with a 720 pixel page width and length to suit, exported to TGA format. This overlaid the background video perfectly and scrolling etc. was done with a Moving Path. For long titles, I used this technique even for Latin characters, to shorten rendering times. You could also use Ulead PhotoImpact 11 for this with, perhaps, better integration, although I haven't tested this for non-Latin characters.
[b][i][color=red]Devil[/color][/i][/b]
[size=84]P4 Core 2 Duo 2.6 GHz/Elite NVidia NF650iSLIT-A/2 Gb dual channel FSB 1333 MHz/Gainward NVidia 7300/2 x 80 Gb, 1 x 300 Gb, 1 x 200 Gb/DVCAM DRV-1000P drive/ Pan NV-DX1&-DX100/MSP8/WS2/PI11/C3D etc.[/size]
OK, I've done a few quick tests. I can type in Greek and Cyrillic (Russian) characters just fine, into MSP8.
Trying to type in Arabic and Hebrew charaters, they come up fine, but they read L>R and not R>L (yes, I have that box in the OS checked and it works OK in Word).
Importing an RTF file in English, Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Greek and French came up fine in all languages except Arabic and Hebrew, which were reading L>R, the equivalent to that would be as if 'Ulead' were written as 'daelU' in English
Changing from Arial to Arial Black was OK for English, French and Greek, the other three transforming to gobbledegook. Changing to TNR did the same except that Greek also became double-dutch. Courier New did the same as Arial Black.
This is exactly the same behaviour as I reported during beta testing.
[b][i][color=red]Devil[/color][/i][/b]
[size=84]P4 Core 2 Duo 2.6 GHz/Elite NVidia NF650iSLIT-A/2 Gb dual channel FSB 1333 MHz/Gainward NVidia 7300/2 x 80 Gb, 1 x 300 Gb, 1 x 200 Gb/DVCAM DRV-1000P drive/ Pan NV-DX1&-DX100/MSP8/WS2/PI11/C3D etc.[/size]
heinz-oz wrote:I guess that's why they have different language versions
Yeah, I might have thought that before I learnt Japanese
However it's not uncommon that people speak 2 languages. And that we might want to communicate with someone other than Americans Without the need to buy separate software packages.
What I'm really asking I suppose, is, will/can the software support unicode. Most of the other software on my machine handles it fine.
Devil wrote:This is exactly the same behaviour as I reported during beta testing.
Thanks for that research, much appreciated. I can imagine the situation will be the same for Japanese characters.
Looks like I'll have to start opening up Photoshop for Title Clips - whether upgrading to 8 or not.
All of the Ulead software that I have is in the localized Japanese versions. The reason for that is because when Ulead in Japan decides they want to clean out their warehouse, they release the old versions at upwards of 90% off.
If you can, get on their mailing list and you'll get notified of the specials every month. You can see the latest ones on this web page:
With a new version of MSP coming out, I'm expecting to see MSP7 on sale very soon. At least, I'm hoping so.
I agree with you that MSP should be Unicode-enabled. It used to be that programs that could handle Unicode were a rarity, but now it's the other way around. I'm surprised that a Taiwanese company would be a laggard.
With MSP8 I could enter greek letter in the title. So far so good. But as I saved the title to a file and opened that file it contained only questionmarks. That means Ulead has forgotten to save the file as unicode instead of as ASCII.
Greek is available only with Arial and TNR typefaces and you should use the Greek keyboard settings, not use Greek letters from a character mapping. That having been said, as I've explained to Ulead during beta testing and summarised above, all non-Latin character sets are hairy, some worse than others. Living in a Greek culture, this is important for me and I've been hot on this problem during beta testing of diverse softwares for years, but I feel I hit my head against a brick wall at the start of each one and only half-measures are taken. As it is, I tend to do non-Latin titling using Corel Draw! and exporting them as overlays. One day, it may occur to Ulead that half the world does NOT use Latin characters and that this weakness may be losing them sales covering most of Asia, parts of Africa and even parts of Europe, notably Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Byelrus, ex-Yugoslavia, as well as Greece and this little island.
[b][i][color=red]Devil[/color][/i][/b]
[size=84]P4 Core 2 Duo 2.6 GHz/Elite NVidia NF650iSLIT-A/2 Gb dual channel FSB 1333 MHz/Gainward NVidia 7300/2 x 80 Gb, 1 x 300 Gb, 1 x 200 Gb/DVCAM DRV-1000P drive/ Pan NV-DX1&-DX100/MSP8/WS2/PI11/C3D etc.[/size]
I agree. The only way is to use unicode and not language specific programms, since I usually want to have more than one language (charset) at once. It is simply a very silly bug to save unicode text to an ASCII file and I hope ULEAD will this fix quickly.
There are some more unicode fonts (courier new, verdana).
DWS2 is meanwhile better in handling unicode, but it does not support language units. Not even DVDlab pro supports them (currently). The only tools I know that fully support them are ifoedit and pgcedit.
