Giving Credit with Titles in Your Digital Video

In their rush to get to the pictures, folks who are new to video editing often overlook the importance of titles. Titles — the words that appear on-screen during a movie — are critically important in many different kinds of projects. Titles tell your audience the name of your movie, who made it, who starred in it, who paid for it, and who baked cookies for the cast. Titles can also clue the audience in to vital details — where the story takes place, what time it is, even what year it is — with minimum fuss. And of course, titles can reveal what the characters are saying if they're speaking a different language.

Creating titles for your movies

You may think of titles as just words on the screen. But think of the effects, both forceful and subtle, that well-designed titles can have. Consider the Star Wars movies, which all begin with a black screen and the phrase "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away . . ." The simple title screen quickly and effectively sets the tone and tells the audience that the story is beginning.

You can generally put titles into two basic categories: full-screen and overlays. You most often use full-screen titles at the beginning and end of a movie, where the title appears over a background image or a solid color (such as a plain black screen). The full-screen title functions as its own element in the movie, as does any video clip. An overlay title makes words appear right over a video image.

Making effective titles

When using titles in your movies, you should follow some basic guidelines to make them more effective. After all, funny or informative titles don't do much good if your audience can't read them.

Follow these general rules when creating titles for your movies:

• Less is more. Try to keep your titles as brief and simple as possible.

• White on black looks best. You can more easily read black letters on white paper. This rule does not carry over to video, however. In video images, you can usually read light characters over a dark background more easily. But you can get away with dark characters if you already have a relatively light background.

A darker-colored title may work well over a snow-covered background. But what if that same title appears over some dark trees in the background? As an alternative, you can create a small, dark background shape behind lighter-colored text.

• Avoid very thin lines. In an interlaced display (such as a TV), every other horizontal resolution line of the video image is drawn in a separate pass or field. If the video image includes very thin lines — especially lines that are only 1 pixel thick — interlacing can cause the lines to flicker noticeably, giving your viewers a migraine headache in short order. To avoid this, choose fonts that have thicker lines.

Think big. Remember that the resolution on your computer screen is a lot finer than what you get on a typical TV screen. Also, TV viewers typically watch video from longer distances than do computer users — say, across the room while plopped on the sofa, compared to sitting just a few inches away in an office chair. Never be afraid to increase the size of your titles.

• Think safety. Most TVs suffer from a malady called overscan, which happens when some of the video image is cut off at the edges of the screen. You can think of TVs as being kind of like most computer printers. Most TVs can't display the far edges of the video image, just as most printers can't print all the way to the very edges of the paper.

When you're working on a word processing document, your page has margins to account for the shortcomings of printers as well as to make the page more readable. The same applies to video images, which have title-safe margins. To ensure that your titles show up on-screen and aren't cut off at the edges, put your titles within this margin (also sometimes called the title-safe boundary).

Apple iMovie doesn't show these margins on-screen; instead, it automatically keeps your titles inside the margins. Pinnacle Studio's Title Editor works like most video-editing programs: The margins are displayed on-screen, and you have to remember to keep your titles inside them. The margins appear in the Title Editor window as dotted lines, as you can see in Figure 1.

• Play, play, play. Play your timeline after adding titles to see how they look. Make sure that the title is readable, positioned well on-screen, and visible long enough for viewers to read it. If possible, preview the titles on an external video monitor.

You can use transitions between full-screen titles and other video clips. Dissolves often look nice when you use them to transition from a full-screen title to the video.