Custom Lower Thirds

[Joey Foreman]

This may help.

Joey Foreman
Editor/Animator
Nowhere Productions, Athens, GA

[Hunter Christy]

one thing that really helps me when i have to design thirds is to first look at the overall production elements.

are there graphical segues?
what makes up the intro sequence if there is one?

then i play around in photoshop. the great thing about the adobe suites is the seamless ability to create something in one app, and then import, tweak, modify, or rework something. and after effects/ photoshop are no exceptions.

if youre familiar with photoshop, i’d suggest this method. then in after effects import the psd as a composition, and then you can work with the layers individually, rather than just as a flat layer.

THE BiG HONKIN’
“The Defenders Of Stan”-lots of after effects

[Paul Bertham]

create a new project with only one comp and desing your elements for the lower third and finally save this project in a templates folder on your harddisk.
if it comes to work, open a new project and import your “template” project into the newly created project. if you just want to render it out for FCP (or Motion), you only can use:

A.) an image sequence that use alpha, then you have to create a matte too (complicated for FCP because it still can´t handle still image sequences without the hassle.

B.) render it out as a qt-movie with animation codec set to Alpha+RGB, straight unnmatted and set the composit mode in FCP (right click in timeline)

but don´t forget you cannot work in “real time” with animation codec in FCP. depends on your hardware, especially your HDD´s. A RAID will do.

cheers