Better titling - any good templates available?

[maxfrost01]

Hi, All

I'm working on a diary of family events in 2010. It will be a pretty-much continuous collection of clips taken of the last 12 months.
As the scene changes I want to add brief titling as a reminder of what and where. Sometimes the titling will be over footage, sometimes over black.
I've used most of the templates provided with X3 which generally work fine but I was looking for "something more". I'm not looking for glitzy, Metro Goldwyn Mayer credits, I am looking for the sort of thing you might see on a news report which quickly and neatly tells the viewer what's going on.
Based on my previous experience of this forum, someone out there has already designed templates that do exactly what I'm looking for, or maybe there is somewhere I can buy and download what I need.
Any ideas?

[BrianCee]

I very rarely use any of the supplied templates for my titles as I find you can create so many different variations of your own - all within VideoStudio. Having typed in your textr there are a myriad things you can do with it - and the titling templates supplied with VS only use these effects anyrate.

Apart from the obvious like changing font and text colour you can apply just about any form of animation you like to it, it can fly in , or fly out going up down left or right. It can fade in as a text block or appear letter by letter like a typewriter - it can scroll a very long list going up down left or right like a ticker tape. It can wiggle around . it can zoom out towards you or zoom away to nothing, it can rotate on itself - it can have a backdrop, a shadow, a border - all occuring in any position on the screen and over any background (still pattern/logo /photo/colour block/video)

Have you played with the animation of text in titles - there is so much to acheive I have never even looked for somebody elses 'template'

[Ron P.]

I think what you're looking for is various Lower Thirds templates. News broadcasts are known for this. All that stuff in the lower-third of your screen. These can be composed of several layers of text, along with some type of background. VS does have numerous templates that can be used as is. However what you can do is then start customizing and changing the appearance of those, to come up with something totally new.

There are some specialty titling programs, like Bluff Titler, Xara 3D, Digital Juice and Heroglyph. You can have the glitzy look, or just flat. If you have a graphics program like PhotoImpact, Paintshop Pro Photo, Corel Draw, you can design your own backgrounds for your lower-third titles/text. I tend to go for a 3D look for my titles that are at the start of a clip, and the more traditional flat lower-third that overlays the clip.

Examine the templates to see how they are constructed, and just use similar methods to create your own, something that fits with your scenes.

[maxfrost01]

Ron - that's exactly right. Lower Third templates is exactly what I'm looking for. I'll dig around and see what I can find.

Brian - I've tried a few times to create something professional looking (Lower Third news-style) using VS and never managed to do it. Fro a start, I've struggled to created a coloured background to the text that will fade-in and fade-out with the text. If you know how I can do that it would be useful to know!

[Black Lab]

What kind of lower thirds are you looking for - simple or fancy? Of course buying them from Digital Juice or some other third party will get you the fancy ones. But if you just want a simple colored background for your titles you have everything you need in VS.

Have you tried the Text Backdrop (on the Title edit tab)? It will automatically put a colored background behind your text. You can customize the shape, colors, gradiant, and transparency. The size though, is dependent on the title.

To have more control over the size you can simply drag a color clip to an overlay track and resize it to a "lower thirds" size. You of course still have control over the colors and transparency of the color clip.

[Trevor Andrew]

Hi Max

And if you wish create your own background

Place a colour clip in the overlay track, resize to match the Title/Text size
Select the Options to open the Edit and Attributes panel
Choose Mask and Chroma Key, use the transparency and or apply a mask.
Close Mask panel then apply Fades from Direction and Styles,
Set fade/Pause durations from slider below preview screen.

Use the same sliders to customise title animations.

[maxfrost01]

Hi, Trevor

That sounds like a good way of getting the background to fade in/fade out with the text.
I'm still not convinced that VS will give me what I want. The option on colour/transparency are pretty basic.
And I'd be very interested to see any Lower Third titling that others have managed to produce.

I did find a couple of freebies on the internet - members may want to take a look here http://www.intheviewfinder.blogspot.com ... ch-results
They're are still not the best but they're pretty good!

[BrianCee]

Well I don't know if this is the sort of thing you require
.


Any colour block in the overlay track set to size - set to fade in and out - set transparency to any level you want it.

Any colour any font text you like set to fade in and out

when I run the project colour block and text fade in together - then fade out together

All done in VideoStudio

[maxfrost01]

Hi, Brian

If you take a look at the link I posted you'll see that (although it's not earth-moving) the titling is using multiple colours and shapes. Still a relatively simple overall effect but in my view much more powerful than a single text box.

Have a look and see what you think.

[BrianCee]

I had a look at your link and I cannot see any lower third titles there at all - do you mean the main title in the central video - thats just moving text over a multi-colour video background - even easier in VS than the lower thirds title.

[Black Lab]

At the 31 second mark you will see an example of a lower third: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHpExSkNSYs

[Ron P.]

Which one of the clips on the page you provided the link to are you referring to? Some of those use a simple lower-third that can be done in VS. There's some that require using a 3D titling program.

For example the clip located at the bottom of that blog page, at about the 40 sec mark, the lower third is nothing but text on a background. The background can be created in about any graphics program, I think Windows Paint could even handle it. Now the Conundrums title is created in a 3D program, and even looks like he used Bluff Titler. It's usage is not a lower-third, it is being used as a bumper/wipe. A bumper or wipe is actually a type of transition between cuts. It hides a hard-cut, which happens "behind" the text. The viewer focuses on the bumper which generally will fly at you, and the change in scenes occur at the same time.

If you can provide an example more specific to what you're looking for, we can probably come up with a solution.

[maxfrost01]

Sorry, guys, the link was not as simple as I thought it was. You have to go to that webpage and then enter a search.

If you enter "Lower Third" in the "Search ITV" box on the left hand side of the webpage it will bring up three or four free downloads of Lower Thirds.
The first one gives you 12 free templates including png files.
These are very simple and visually reasonable. Take a look at BGLT6.
If these shapes can be created in VS then I (yet again) have a lot to learn!

[Ron P.]

Ok, I didn't notice until now that blog is from Jay Michael, who's big on Magix products (Movie Edit Pro and I think Video Pro). Magix also owns Xara 3D, which is a 3D titling program. They provide several samples with their video editors. However you can't modify many of them, unless you also purchase Xara 3D.

Next if you'll notice on several of his tutorials, or the free lower-third graphics he provides, he states that they were created using Adobe PhotoShop. Like I stated earlier if you have another graphics program you can create this. They are nothing more than images, and should be in a format that has a alpha channel, which is the transparent layer. They are also known as 32-bit images. The more common are PNG, TIFF or TGA, or GIFF (GIFF is sort of out-dated).

The one major limitation of VS, you can not create gradient color blocks. Well you can sort of, by stacking color blocks and changing the transparency, but the results in my opinion are not that good. You can however use a solid color on one track, then place an image on a track above (which actually is a lower track in VS) the color. The image of course needs to be in a format like PNG, that has a transparent background. Then you place your text on the lower-third graphic. Look in the Samples>Decoration folder under C:\Program Files\Corel\Corel VideoStudio Pro X3\, and you'll see that they are all PNG image files.

All those lower-third templates in VS, are created using Corel/Ulead PhotoImpact. In PhotoImpact, there is a module called Component Designer. It provided many of those lower-third graphics templates that are in VS. You could then customize them in the Component Designer module, and then further customize them in PhotoImpact. Sadly Corel dumped PhotoImpact, which was a Ulead creation. If you don't have PhotoImpact, you can still get PI X3 for about $30 (US).
http://store1.corel.com/corel/product/i ... PK_PI13ESD

Just noticed that it is not available on Corel's UK store web page. I don't know if you'll be able to purchase it through the US page.

[maxfrost01]

Hi, Ron

Thanks for taking the time and the trouble to help me out here.
In short, it sounds like I need a separate piece of software to create the lower third graphics which I could then drop into VS.

However, a big plus for me is that you have pointed me to the Lower Third graphics that already exist in Decorations. I simply did not know they were there and some of them are really pretty good!! I guess I've missed out on these because they don't seem to appear in the User Interface - I've got "Photo" and "Video" but can't see any of the "Decorations" templates. Should I be able to access them in some standard way or do I need to import them?

Well done, Ron. Once again there is more lurking beneath the surface of VS than we think...............