Digital Video Editing I | Titles and Output

Titles and Output

Every video piece needs a title!

Now that we have explored the ins and outs of video editing, we can use the final two lectures of the course to discuss some important final components that give your movies polish. One of those is audio editing, which we'll cover in detail in Lecture Six, and the others are titles and output, which we'll discuss now.

Film title sequences are an art form in and of themselves. Titles are the audience's first introduction to a movie and can really set the mood. They're also a great outlet for your visual creativity, enabling you to work with still images, typography, and animation techniques.

We'll start this lecture off with a discussion of titles, text graphics, and text animation for your videos. Then we'll address important output and compression approaches so you can start to show off your beautifully titled projects!

 

Film titles serve many purposes. They are used at the beginning of a movie to display the name of a film and major credits and at the end for the full credits. Here's a classic title treatment from the opening of The Terminator:

Excerpt from The Terminator (1984) opening title sequence

Titles are also used to reinforce concepts, to paraphrase a narration, to provide instructions, to specify a time and place, and to identify a subject or presenter. These types of titles, which you see often on the news, are called lower thirds because they typically appear in the lower third of the screen (mainly to avoid covering faces).

Every video editing program has a tool or application that can generate text files for titling. These title utilities have different features, but they are all capable of creating basic titles for video.

More elaborate titles can be also imported from other software applications like Photoshop and After Effects. The former imaging program is like a right hand for most graphic designers. The latter is mostly used for motion graphics. Apple's Final Cut has its own integrated software for animated titles and motion graphics called LiveType. For Premiere and Final Cut, there is a very popular motion graphics plug-in called Boris RED by Boris FX. Some of these programs allow you to create ever-popular 3D animations: titles that swirl around, rotate, or appear in voluminous 3D letters.

Example of a 3D title animation

As you can see, title sequences are a visual world of their own, which may be especially exciting to those of you who are graphic designers. In this lecture, we are leaping from editing into type composition, so we will stick to the basics and look how to create simple 2D titles.

Imported Graphic Titles Versus Vector-Based Titles

Every major NLE gives you the ability to import graphics as titles or create them inside the software environment. Many types of file formats can be imported; the most popular ones are JPEGs and TIFFs. But be warned, with the 72 ppi resolution that video requires, you'll need to leave plenty of room for resizing so you don't end up with any pixelated edges.

It's for this reason that the vector-based text tools within Premiere Premiere and other NLEs are a safer way to go than importing graphic titles. The built-in text tools enable you to create infinitely resizable text for your titles that is easy to manipulate and animate. Additionally, this gives you the ability to edit your text any time (beats running back to Photoshop, editing an imaging, and re-importing it!).

We're going to look at Premiere Pro's Titler feature in just a moment, but first, some tips and inspiration.

Title Techniques

Planning effective titles and credits is part of the video editing process. The font that you choose, the size, the color, the background on which you place your text... every detail says something about your movie.

You can make titles as complicated or as simple as you like as long as you follow certain guidelines:

	Keep titles on screen at least long enough to read them aloud twice. Remember that you may know your text by heart, but this is the first time the audience is seeing it. If you are working in interlaced video (that is, anything other than 1.0 pixel aspect ratio), avoid text that has very narrow lines like certain script or serif fonts or any narrow/light font. One-pixel lines flicker unacceptably as the field on which they appear alternates on and off. This results in text that appears to "buzz" and is difficult to read. Usually, the text size shouldn't be smaller than about 1/25 of the video height. A font size of 24 points (or 20 scan lines) is about as low as most editors will go. Choose the size depending where your video will be primarily shown. For the Web, text should be bigger in proportion to the frame than for videos intended to be shown on TV or projected.

Though feature films sometimes use titles that extend to the edges of the wide screen image, it is best to stay in what is called the "title safe area." The title safe area is the part of the video image that is guaranteed to be visible on all television screens. The title safe area is the inner 80 percent of the frame. To prevent the text in your video from being hidden by the edge of a TV screen, you should restrict any titles or text to the title safe area. We'll look at this in Premiere Pro in just a moment.

Now let's get inspired by two of the most famous title animations in movie history. Both use quite ordinary techniques that can mostly be achieved in your NLE.

The first title sequence we'll look at was created by Saul Bass in 1959. Bass is most famous for the opening titles of Hitchcock's Psycho and North By Northwest. His film titles were the first step for opening sequences to become an art form of their own.

North By Northwest (1959) title sequence by Saul Bass

Notice how Bass's title almost looks like it's done in 3D! That would have been a challenge, especially with 1959 tools, but instead it was created by overlaying text on a grid that evokes the windows on a skyscraper. You might think of combining similar graphic features with text in your own title sequences.

The title sequence below is more contemporary, but like Saul Bass's work, it is a milestone in movies. It is the title sequence of Kyle Cooper's Seven:

Seven (1995) title sequence by Imaginary Forces

The Seven sequence is as sophisticated a piece of video editing as it is an effective title sequence. All techniques used in its frame animations (scratches, jitter, overexposed images, flicker) are references to the cinematic medium itself. You can create some similar edgy or nervous-looking animations by preparing them frame by frame in Photoshop, then importing them as individual graphics into Premiere.

Overlaying a Title on a Video

Let's overlay a text-based title onto some video. Open up any video of your choice in Premiere Pro to follow along. If you're in a different NLE, search for similar type and titling tools to the ones we'll describe here.

To superimpose text on our video, we'll need to create a new track just for the title. This track should be layered on top of the video track that contains the section of the video that you want as a background. To begin this process, move the playhead to the video frame that you want to use as a starting point.

Let's create that track and start our title now. Go to Title > New Title to open the Premiere Pro Titler. In the dialog that appears, name your title and choose an animation style: rolling, crawling, or still. (Don't worry, you can change your mind later.) The Titler will open when you click OK.

The Titler has its own Title Tools in the upper-left, which will look familiar to the vector tools you may have used in Photoshop, Illustrator, or Flash. Title Properties are found on the right side of the Titler and the main video area is shown in the middle. Yours should show just the frame of the video you've selected.

Click the icon just above the timecode in the upper-middle to toggle your video on or off.

Notice that the Titler displays two outlined boxes to use as guidelines. The inner box is the title safe area we discussed earlier. You'll want to keep all of your text inside this box. The outer box is the action safe area for video display. Any essential video action should be here, as anything beyond this area could be cropped depending on the screen.

Choose the Type tool in the Title Tools (represented by a T), click in the main video area, and start typing some title text.

Fill Type, Stroke, and Shadow settings in the Title Properties panel.

You can create multiple layers of text per title and within each layer you can conveniently change the font and size. Change the stacking order of layers by selecting your type with the Selection tool and choosing an option under Title > Arrange. Change the font size, style, color, opacity, and more in the Title Properties panel. You also might want to align your text to the center of the frame. Do this in the Title Actions panel in the lower-left with the Center controls:

At the bottom of the Title Properties panel you have controls for creating special type effects. You can set a custom shadow, inner and outer strokes, and other features. Combine these with the shape and Pen tool drawing options afforded in the Title Tools panel and you have endless creative opportunities with something as seemingly simple as a 2D title. And that's before we set things into motion...

Ready to animate? Premiere offers rolling and crawling title animations as default settings. Click the Roll/Crawl Options button in the upper-left of the Titler to open a dialog of choices. If you have selected a roll, for example, you can set the start and end position (Preroll and Postroll) and rate of movement at the beginning and ending of the title (Ease-In and Ease-Out).

Once you are happy with your title, close the Titler and Premiere will create a clip of the title in the Project panel. This clip can be used and edited like any other clip in the Timeline (this includes the application of effects and transitions). To edit the title within the Titler again, double-click its icon in the Project panel.

Introduction to Keyframes

Rolling and crawling within the Titler are the most basic types of animations you can apply to your titles. But you can get more complex if you add keyframes to the mix.

Keyframes are the backbone to all digital animations, motion graphics, and visual effects. Conceptually, they are simply points in time that hold information or properties of a given element. Say I want to animate a word from the upper-left corner of the screen to the lower-right over the span of three seconds. My first keyframe would be at the 0 second mark with the word sitting in the upper-left. My second keyframe would be at three seconds and in the lower-right. With these instructions, the software figures out what's in between and constructs the animation.

Let's take a look at how we could apply this concept to create a simple fly-in title. Follow along with your current video or a new one.

1. Create a still (not rolling or crawling) title in the Titler. Exit the Titler so that your title is in the Project panel, then drag your title from the Project panel to the Timeline.

2. With the title selected in the Timeline, go to the Effect Controls panel to view its properties (Window > Effect Controls). This is where we'll do all of the animating.

3. Click Motion to open up all of the title's motion properties, which include its position, scale, rotation, and other settings. On the right, our title has its very own timeline that we can work in. All of what we do here can also be done in the main Timeline, but it's easier to work in this isolated area.

4. Drag the playhead to the middle of your title timeline in the Effect Controls panel. Click the stopwatch icon next to the Position property to create your first keyframe on the timeline. What you have now should look something like this:

Entering a Position keyframe on the Effect Controls timeline. Note that my position is 197, 112. Yours may be different.

What does that little keyframe mean? It simply means "At this point in time, make my position x=197, y=112." In other words, the registration point for the title is 197 pixels from the left and 112 pixels from the top of the video edge (or whatever position you placed your title in).

In order to make our title actually move, we have to tell it to be somewhere else at a different point in time.

5. Let's go back in time. Drag the playhead back a few seconds and click the keyframe icon to add a new keyframe. (Don't click the stopwatch icon this time, as that would deactivate keyframing for the Position property.) Now we've created another keyframe that we can give different position properties to.

6. Click and drag the first Position property (the x property number) to the right. You'll see that as the value increases, your title moves to the right of the frame. Keep going until the title is out of view. Alternatively, you can also click the property and enter a numerical value.

Creating a second Position keyframe on the timeline

Playing this back, you can see we now have a very simple fly-in animation, where the title glides in from the right.

Want to make it glide in faster? With our keyframes already created, changing the speed is a cinch! Just click and drag one keyframe closer to the other. By making them closer, you are simply telling Premiere to animate from point A to point B in a shorter amount of time. The starting and ending positions remain the same. Here's what we have now:

First stage of the title animation

A little crude, maybe? Let's add a little more slickness to it. How about adding a fly-by in the opposite direction first? If we scale it down on the first fly-by, it would give the illusion the title is flying across the screen and toward us.

7. Go a little further back on the timeline and keyframe another Position property. Leave the actual position (x and y) as is, and move further back again to create a fourth Position keyframe. Reduce this property's x value until the title is off the screen to the left. You'll likely need to go into negative values here.

Our four Positions move the title left-to-right, then right-to-left

8. We've got our positions all set, so now we want to work on the scaling effect. With the playhead on your first keyframe (you can always tell if you are on a keyframe because the keyframe icon will be darkened), click the stopwatch next to Scale property. Enter around 30 as the value, which means 30% of the original size.

9. Using the keyframe arrows on the Position property, navigate forward one keyframe. You'll see that these arrows are a handy way of getting around. Now bring the Scale property up to 100%. You'll also notice that as soon as you change a property, a new keyframe is added for you.

10. Playing it back, you'll see the title increase in size as it moves from left to right. Now let's say we wanted the title to instead to remain at 30% scale across the duration. To do this, make the first Scale keyframe a "hold keyframe" by right-clicking it (PC) or Control-clicking it (Mac) and selecting Hold. You'll see the icon change shape.

"Hold keyframe" on the Scale property

The typical keyframes, like those we originally used for position and scale, are called linear keyframes, which transition a property from point A to B in a linear fashion. Hold keyframes maintain the property until the next keyframe.

11. Let's try another common keyframe type called ease, which creates a more gradual transition. Right-click/Control-click the last Position keyframe and select Ease In. Now instead of moving linearly toward this keyframe, we will be easing into it, or gradually slowing down as we approach it.

So after adjusting your keyframes a bit, you could have something like this:

Final title animation

Manual Easing

If you've already got a good handle on animation, you may want to go beyond the automatic options and manually adjust easing for various properties. You certainly aren't limited to just the options you've seen so far!

If you click the arrow to the left of the Position property it will reveal a temporal graph that gives you free reign over the interpolation, that is, the type of motion between keyframes. Here you can see how our "eased in" keyframe looks in the world of time. The graph represents the rate in which we approach the next keyframe property value, in this case gradually slowing down into our last position looks like a downward slope. The motion between our linear (not eased) keyframes is a straight horizontal line.

Temporal graph showing the keyframe interpolations

Clicking on these lines in the temporal graph will give you the option to push and pull the end points to create curves much in the manner of a Pen tool. Just be careful with these adjustments and always preview each edit you make.

This is just a small sampling of how you can use keyframes to create much more intricate movements. To open up the can of worms further, in Premiere Pro, every video and audio effect and their associated properties can also be controlled with keyframes in the same manner. You are truly only limited by your imagination!

Notes on Output

When you're at the point in your movie that you're animating titles, you're probably getting close to finishing up and showing off your final piece. And that's where the output comes in.

When everything has been laid out in the Timeline and rendered properly, Premiere, by way of Adobe Media Encoder, renders a new video file that contains the result. I'd like to go over some of the options you have when outputting your piece now.

How does output work? Recall that an NLE doesn't change files, but rather creates instructions on how to present those files. The original files are not altered on output. Instead, the computer combines information from the files, transitions, effects, and overlays, and computes a new file. Depending on the complexity of the project, this can require large amounts of computing power, resulting in a long rendering time (sometimes more than 10 times the running time of the video). The faster the CPU, the faster this process runs. Luckily for us, producing compressed videos for the Web is usually pretty quick and easy.

If the result is intended for recording to DV tape (or any other tape for that matter), the rendered file must be played on the computer and an output taken to a DV deck or recording camcorder. The output is the FireWire connection, allowing the pure digital data to be recorded onto tape. If a camcorder is to be used as the external recorder, its FireWire connection must be able to record input as well as replay output. This capability is called DV-In, and not every camcorder supports it.

Color Bars and Tone

If you plan to output a file to a master tape, you should consider including color bars and tone. When your tape will be copied on different master formats such as Betacam SP, Digital Betacam, and others, it is standard to incorporate color bars and tone on the video for reference. These assure that the TV set or other broadcast device they will be played on is calibrated correctly for color and sound.

SMPTE color bars

To check the color for your TV set or broadcast device, you must look for two things:

	• If you turn down the color saturation, all bars should show up in those equal ascending gray levels as shown in the right image above. • In the lower row there are the small gray bars. They are called the pluge bars. You should set the contrast/black level of your monitor so that only the right one is visible (see below).

Pluge bars

How do you incorporate these color bars in your video? They can be created quite simply in Premiere by going to File > New > Bars and Tone. Click OK and the item appears in your Project panel, ready for you to drop in the Timeline. The -14 db tone that comes along with the bars is an industry standard. You can stretch or shrink the bars and tone generator to any length you need.

DVD Output

Now let's look at a common type of output for your digital videos: DVD. All you need to do is go to File > Export as you have for other types of projects and select MPEG2-DVD. This will create a movie file with the same settings as your project, which can then be imported to a DVD authoring program like iDVD, DVD Studio Pro, and many others.

Settings for a DVD

In this process, you are making a self-contained movie, in which you essentially make a copy of what is used in the sequence. It will take a few minutes to write and occupies the same amount of disk space it would take if you were to capture the same length from a tape.

When you are finished with a movie and want to discard the original files, this is the way to make a digital copy.

A Note On Codecs

Many video editing programs will provide you with a dizzying array of options for export. One reason for the wide range of choices is the variety of codecs that exist.

OK, so what is a codec? The word codec comes from the even clunkier term: "compressor/decompressor," a bit of software or hardware that takes raw video and compresses it, then can take the compressed video and decompress it back to raw video. Whew!

Codecs exist for all kinds of compressed video, including DV, motion-JPEG, MPEG, Indeo, Cinepak, Sorensen, On2 VP6, wavelet, fractal, RealVideo, vXtreme, and many others. You will find some of them under the Export option Adobe Media Encoder.

To make your options even more diverse, there are also so-called "hard" and "soft" codecs. Hard codecs are hardware codecs: You supply power and raw video at one end, and compressed video comes out the other end in real time. Flip a switch and pump in compressed video, and raw, uncompressed video comes out.

Soft codecs are software modules that do the same thing, such as the DV codecs we use here, supplied by QuickTime or Adobe. But software needs to be rendered and the transformation does not happen in real-time. Luckily, modern computers are fast enough that soft codecs can compress or decompress a small sized video much faster than real-time.

The artist duo MTAA produced an interactive piece that gives you a sense of the crudeness of compression. Move the slider and see what compression does to an image at its most extreme!

MTAA demonstrating compression

And with that, we've capped off a look at titling and outputting techniques for finishing off a movie. You'll practice working with titles in the exercise, and then it's off to the final lecture in which we tackle the world of audio editing.

Discussion Share your thoughts on the final results with your fellow students. Exercise Create a mini movie based entirely on text.