Pulling my hair out over SIMPLE task-edit text in a title

[Vincent Rosati]

Video ain’t easy. To offer you the best help, you’d need to define your output. Is this for DVD, NTSC or PAL, full screen or widescreen?

If you’re in Photoshop CS, create a new project and click the drop-down at the Preset options. Towards the bottom of the list are the presets for different video formats, choose the appropriate one. This will ensure a correct pixel aspect ratio and they have safe guides built right into the templates so you don’t put your titles too close to the edges.

Regarding full screen or widescreen, both use a different pixel aspect ratio (PAR). When you are creating images for video in Photoshop you should take this into account.

Photos should be pre-processed to correct the PAR, before imported into a video project. Let us know what format you’re in and we can elaborate.

As far as how to create the titles, Premiere has acceptable titling and it’s flexible within the project. If you need the power that Photoshop offers, than that is also good. After Effects is even better. But, for speed, maybe just do them in Premiere.
Try adding Video Effect/Blur or Gaussian Blur to titles, set the amount to zero. That usually does the trick.

I use Premiere Pro 1.5. When I create premiere titles it opens the Titler interface, once I create the title it is saved as a title file. To edit the title, I open the title file in the project bin.

Hope this gets you started.

Vince

[Joe Garcia]

Hi Holly,

It is as Vince said, Video is not all that easy it just looks easy,,, so many variables where do we start.

Not sure what you know so please bear with me,,,

* as Vince mentioned, the presets need to be set to video because there is noticable difference between square and rectangular pixels.

* consider that Vector graphics will keep it’s pristine appearance and sharp edges no matter how much you enlarge or decrease it’s size so check to see that you are set for vector graphics in photoshop.

* while in photoshop resize your photos to DV size before you do anything else to them.
you can go with 720 x 480, but 800 x 600 allows for ‘zoom’ so I use that size allot.

* last, I much prefer to title within Premiere’s title tool, but that’s just me. I find that if I need to work around change and rearrange my text the title tool that created it should not get all iffy with me and just let me have my way on the fly.
If I need to be more artistic than the titler allows then, of course, photoshop of illustrator makes better sense.

Hope we helped at least a little.

cheers
joe

JOE
X-Porter

[Holly Nester]

Thank you to both of you. You have given me something to think about. I know it is more complex than I’d hoped.

So, after literally hours I figured out what my friend clicked on to get the text to be editable. On the bottom of the window is the purple bar that shows how long that frame is supposed to last. If you click on the window a blue line pops up underneath it,it says “title” and a number. Evidently that is the trick…trust me it is NOT easily found in help…I stil have not found where it explains that you have to click on the BLUE BAR before you can then click on the text and actually be able to edit it instead of yell at your computer.

So, my coworkers (they all use Final Cut Pro) informed me to use 720 x 480 at 72 dpi. And, one of them told me about the presets in Photoshop.

So, what am I doing. I figured I’d save it onto a DVD, then play it through a laptop or DVD player which will be connected to a large flat TV screen (not HD format or screen size.)

I originally started making my frames by going to photoshop, clicking new document of a video file type in NTSC. I did about 10 saved them both as .pst (I thought) and saved for import to premiere as .jpg. But when I sat down to work on the .pst’s later that evening suddenly NONE of the .psts would open. It said unsupported file type. Since the NTSC trick was the only unusual thing I’d done I had to re-do them all and this time I just did 720 x 480 at 72 w/out telling it about the video thing.

So, any idea why it saved it as I think a PDD or a PSD, I don’t even know what that format is?! And, do you think I need to start over yet again? Or save the ones I’ve done different?

I’ve been able to add the text and have done some test renderings as AVIs.

Thanks for humoring a newbie!

Holly

[Holly Nester]

I forgot to add, now that I’ve explained my output goal, do I need to stay inside both safe lines or only the outer one? Or both?

I’ve been keeping text inside the outer. sometimes if falls between the two lines but not often.

Thanks again.

Holly

[Vincent Rosati]

I’m not sure of the export options in Elements, but if you can, use Adobe Media Encoder or otherwise export as a ‘multiplexed DVD-Video MPEG-2 with PCM audio’ – Or, you can export as an uncompressed AVI and let your DVD authoring software do the transcoding.

The safe guides are at 90% and 80% of the frame size (I think). The larger guides define the Action Safe Area and the smaller guides define the Text Safe Area.

For best image quality, save your images as PSD (Photoshop) or TIFF with LZW compression, both are lossless image formats.

There are other issues with using square pixel images in video, maybe you don’t want to worry about right now.
But if you do, you might want to correct the aspect ratio of the images.
If you are creating an NTSC full screen DVD you should open the images into a 720×540 file, than resample the images to 720×480. The image will appear to be vertically squished, but will display correctly when viewed as a DVD.
Also, if the video will ever be displayed on a CRT you should ‘deflicker’ the images…
https://www.handcranked.newinelabs.com/assets/Adobe_Photoshop_Action_-_Encore_Menu_Deflickerator.zip
Finally, you might want to add the Broadcast Color filter to the entire sequence, but this would also only be necessary if it will be displayed on a CRT.

Vince

[Holly Nester]

Wow, this is over my head. I’ll print this out and run it by my coworkers. Thanks for your time and effort in helping!

By the way, I figured out how to save my file (so far) for my blog! It took me a while because .wmv is not an option from the export menu. In retrospect I guess it is supposed to be obvious…you go to the “share tab”. Surely you can do it from the file menu too. I didn’t see it.

Anyway, this is only 1/10th of the way finished, but I put it on my blog in case anyone wants to see what a newbie accomplished first time out of the gate w/ Premiere Elements.

Photobucket would not let me upload w/ music, so it isn’t much more than a slide show!

https://blog.scrapallier.com/2008/08/06/busy-with-a-huge-video-project/

Tx,
Holly