creating an image with colored text and transparent background?

ok, I am a novice at both photoshop and vegas video.

I am on a little project that I have already started. Let me fill you in on the details, as maybe it will help me explain what I need to do. I have obtained several pr0n videos from usenet, which were posted by pr0n websites. They are typical of the genre and have video and sound tracks and also often have promotional images advertising their websites superimposed over the video.

I have spliced together several of the video and audio tracks of several of these promotional pr0n videos onto single audio and video tracks, These two tracks are children of a parent track onto which I am trying to display typed words. I have had some success with credits rolls placed onto that top, parent track. I used the transparent background because I want the viewer to be able to view the pr0n action while at the same time, my typed text message scrolls up from bottom to top. The viewer is able to see both the pr0n action AND my text message at the same time. The text message is meant to scroll from bottom to top while the pr0n video is viewable underneath the text because of its transparent background.

To finish off the project, I will record an audio track reading the text message and mix that in with the pr0n audio track. The text message is of a political nature. I then plan to share it (and other similar projects) on the p2p networks. I doubt that the pr0n owners would be upset, as i plan to leave visible their promotional graphics, and may even add a credit for them at the end. This is not a commercial project on my part, and is strictly political/experimental.

However, as the video will be about 6 minutes long, and I want to have text scrolling the entire time, I will therefore have a rather lengthy text message of perhaps a couple hundred words or more. So therefore the generated meda "roll credits" facility that is already provided with Vegas 5 is inadequate because it is cumbersome and does not lend itself well to such a long text message.

So, I searched this forum and found a message from someone who advocated using an image created by photoshop for the roll credits, which could then be scrolled across the screen using pan and crop facilties. The recommended pixel size was 400 by 2000. The background of the image should be transparent and the text is colored.

OK, I have only read a bit about pan and crop, but it seems that this could be a valid technique for me to use for my purposes.

I do have photoshop, but am a novice with it. I have created several trial images with colored text in them, and have imported them into my top track in vegas video, but the effect was definitely not what I was looking for. For one, even though I believe I created images with a transparent background, when I ran the preview, the background of the image was white, not transparent.

Also, even though the video itself is about 400 px wide (I think), the effect generated is just that of a very thin, white, opaque image running down the middle of the screen with the video footage of both sides of it. Strange! The image is so thin that the words are barely even visible. It looks like the image is maybe only 40 pixels wide or something in that range. Note that I have not done anything with the pan and crop yet at this stage. I am just trying to get an adequate image to start working with on the pan and crop.

So, this is a rather upsetting development!

Does anyone have any advice on how to proceed from here? I doubt I can make the image background transparent from within Vegas 5. It seems I have to do that in Photoshop. But how?

And also how do I resolve the pix width problem?

Thanks for any comments or suggestions.
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