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Creating 1970’s Chyron-Style Character Text
I’m working on a project that simulates a lost late 1970’s/early 1980’s videotape with talking heads on it and I need to generate lower thirds in the style of the character generators of the day. I notice the old units were using some kind of peaking to create halation around the edges. The edges are kinda uneven, and the text is somewhat irregularly distorted. Here is one example from some 1970’s footage:
Is this effect something I can do with the title editor in PP, or is it easier just to hack this up in Photoshop and import? Thanks.
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9 Replies
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You can get a lot of this in the title tool — add inner and outer strokes, add and adjust a white shadow, adjust X and Y distortion — but it will all be pretty regular.
Another all-Premiere approach might be to make the title (white type, black inner and outer strokes), then apply some third-party damage effects to it.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
I think what you are seeing is DV codec artifacts instead of a clean font.
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Adobe Certified Expert Premiere Pro CS6
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Actual Chyron brand character generators never looked as primative as your example. The CG I remember with characters like that was a Knox. Actually it looked worse because it didn’t have the black surround edge. The post house I worked for used it as a titler around 1981 and after that it was only used for supering reel numbers on burn-in dubs.
There are many ways to approach your task, but one way would be to use a functioning character from that era. Knox is still in business here in Maryland near Washington, DC. Maybe there is an old-timer there, or they know of one, who keeps a collection of their early devices and you could borrow or rent one.
If you did that you would probably have to output your video as composite and send it through the CG because it likely only works as self-keyer. But the smearing you get by going composite will help achieve your look. Recording it thru a couple of generations of 3/4″ is a must too.
Excuse me if I’m making your task overly complicated but it sounds like you are up for doing it authentically. 😉
Best of luck.
– Larry Asbell
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[Larry Asbell] “If you did that you would probably have to output your video as composite and send it through the CG because it likely only works as self-keyer. But the smearing you get by going composite will help achieve your look. Recording it thru a couple of generations of 3/4” is a must too. “
No TBC? No worries! Subtle drifts in line timing only enhance the experience.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
No, the CG that made Phil’s sample preceded DV codecs by about 30 years! That character generator would not have had a single bit of digital circuity in the video signal path. Think ASCII-only “green screen” displays. Like the analog chips that drove those displays, CGs of that era had no graphics, only one non-proportionally spaced “font” in only one size. The innovative thing was that it had a black surround shadow, but even that was created by analog delay circuitry.
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[Walter Soyka] “[Larry Asbell] “If you did that you would probably have to output your video as composite and send it through the CG because it likely only works as self-keyer. But the smearing you get by going composite will help achieve your look. Recording it thru a couple of generations of 3/4″ is a must too. ”
No TBC? No worries! Subtle drifts in line timing only enhance the experience.”
Right you are! TBC needed. I was thinking of a CG I used that was white text only and could self-key on a non-TBC’d signal. But subsequent models with colored text like Phil’s example would need a TBC’d input.
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Meant to say 20 years, but even that is high, maybe 15.
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Thanks for all your replies. I’ll try it out first in PP to see what I get. I don’t have access to old high-end decks, but I still have an old VHS recorder I plan to send the footage through and bounce it back, perhaps knocking the tracking off a bit. I shot the footage with a late 90’s Sony TRV-900 Mini-DV camera to have the footage in 4:3 SD. I originally wanted to shoot it with an old analog camera, but I didn’t have access to one. I’m hoping bouncing it once or twice through the VHS deck will give me the analog look I want. Are there any effects filters in PP that can do this?
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I doubt there is any digital filter or effect that you can use to imitate composite video color bleed and contrast edge halo…
I think I used an ancient entry-level Laird CG at my first job in the mid 80’s that had that font…as I recall there were two…that one is “large and ugly” and I believe the other one was “small and unreadable”…
…life was simple back in those days.
I doubt you’ll need more than one trip through a VHS recording process to make your video look suitably awful.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
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