gerard,
I worked on a related question the other day, and was very surprised when I concluded that there was no way. But since I posted nothing, I'll post my experiments here, and perhaps they'll get someone thinking.
I have NOT experimented with nesting for this purpose. And I don't understand why you are so concerned with the bounding box filling the frame. I can imagine reasons, but don't understand yours yet. In any event, my focus was on understanding what happens when you use the "Upgrade Caption to Graphics." And, in any event, the bad news was I see no way to fix these without modifying each graphics element one at a time. You can’t select multiple graphics and access the Effect Controls (nor the Align and Transform section of the EGP). And the usual method of pasting attributes DOES NOT WORK for EGP items. And creating a Style does not carry the position nor anchor point setting. I assume that your nesting is an attempt to overcome this, and perhaps it will.
Here's my comments about the general issues:
When “Upgrading captions to graphics”, we have no default control over the position or size of the text bounding box, nor of the position of the Text anchor point. We can overcome the position/size by standardizing this in the captions before upgrading them. And we can then know the position of the anchor point because it is set by the conversion to be the same as the left/top position of the bounding box.
This is in fact the default behavior when creating “paragraph” text using the regular Text tool/Graphics text by dragging a bounding box before typing text. When creating “point text” (by clicking once and typing with the Text tool), the Text/Transform position is the bottom left of the TEXT, not the bounding box. The Anchor Point is the same (a zero, zero adjustment from position). And Caption text is “paragraph” text, and naturally inherits that characteristic.
Once converted to graphics text, there are 3 anchor points in the effect controls. But the Transform sections of Vector Motion and Video apply to the whole frame (and by default are centered), and, for the current issues, we are only concerned with the Text/Transform settings. So when setting these or testing, be sure not to set Anchor Point in Text/Transform, and then zoom/scale in the Video/Motion section.
Some users that are using the upgrade captions process are doing it to animate captions. Some of them are wanting very short caption segments. I suggest experimenting with the “Create Captions” settings to make the caption segments shorter. It is possible to get close to only one or two words per caption. This may be important for standardizing the size of the bounding box. A bigger box will be required for longer captions, and multi-line captions may present problems we can’t yet anticipate.
I would duplicate the caption track at the very beginning, so you can go back to square one as needed. Right click in the caption track header area; pick “Add track.” Create a track of the same type (probably Subtitle.) Place the CTI at the beginning of the first caption. Drag-select all captions. Alt-drag to copy all captions to the new track.
In the caption track, set all captions to the same bounding box size and position. (See comment above about caption segment length.) Changing one caption bounding box does not change all the boxes. Set one as desired, and then save it as a Caption Track Style. This will automatically apply it to the whole track.
I would keep it simple. Position in the bottom-middle Zone, only about one line in height, and only as wide as necessary for the longest caption. In the end, a) it depends on your particular texts and b) this should be coordinated with the template/animation preset you plan to use.
Determine the pixel position of the bounding box right side and bottom. Double click on the caption text so the bounding box is visible. This is NOT the background nor the highlighting behind the text. It is a thin red line around the entire caption area. We do not need the left and top, which will be indicated as the “position” after the conversion to graphics text. Zoom in to make this easier. Drag a Guide to the bottom of the red bounding box, and note the pixel dimension that is visible on the screen as you drag. Repeat for the right edge.
Select all and “Upgrade caption to graphic.”
Modify one text graphic to set the standard position/anchor point.
If we were doing these one at a time, we could just use the Ctrl+Drag of the text anchor point to see the marks centering it in the bounding box. This method adjusts not only the text anchor point, but also the text position to compensate for the anchor point change. And to go back to my spoiler alert, I don’t have a method that really makes this any easier than one at a time.
If we had a way to later paste the settings from this first item, here is a method to calculate that setting. From the EGP or Effects controls panel (Test/Transform), we get the “position” which is the left, top pixel setting. From our measurement above, we got the right, bottom setting. The anchor point numbers are adjusted from zero, so we just need to calculate the difference between right – left and bottom - top. And the change in “position” matches this by adding back the original left/top number. So for example, if the position reads 440, 902 and the right/bottom was measured as 1480, 1029, half of right– left is: 1480-440 = 1040/2 = 520. Half of bottom – top is: 1029-902 = 127/2 = 64. We enter those as the anchor point, and then adjust the position, which is the original position plus the adjustment. So 440 + 520 = 960, and 902 + 64 = 966.
And that's where I discovered the bad news referred to above.
Stan
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