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Video Editing from Start to Finish, Part 3 of 4

Broadcast quality titlers were expensive and hard to operate. Less expensive stand-alone titlers often had severe stylistic limitations. Today, video titling is much, much easier. Any quality software is likely to have built-in graphics and titling capabilities that would have been the envy of even a network TV station only a decade ago.

You may be tempted to think of your software's titling program as nothing more than a glorified word processor. Don't. The techniques necessary for putting words on a TV screen have only the most basic principals in common with the design and layout of printed documents. The video editor's goal is to get legible text to display on the comparatively rough resolution of a video raster, which is, in many ways, much harder than print on paper. It's a whole 'nother ballgame.

The term "raster" is just tech-speak for the pattern of dots, organized into lines that make up a visual display of information on a computer or TV screen. Your computer typically uses a display with a progressive scan raster. In this kind of system, the display image is written as a series of lines that are generated left to right, top to bottom one line after another until the picture is complete.

When the TV standards were set back in the 1950s, they specified that our televisions would work on an interlaced scan system. Thirty frames of video are generated each second, divided into two interlaced fields. Each field consists of every other line of information.

In practical terms, the effective resolution of most household color TV sets typically hovers around 260 lines. So what does this all mean to someone wanting to do something simple and practical like putting a title on the video screen?

Trying to put small stuff with fine details, like text, on a TV screen can be an exercise in frustration. There simply isn't enough effective screen resolution to work with the size of type that works just fine on paper. So the first rule for video title creation is this: big and bold usually works better than small and delicate.

Video type designers have another challenge: movement. Unlike the print designer who has an even background once the paper type and color are selected, the video designer sometimes faces the need to layer text over moving video. This process means the type designer must work with a background that changes from moment to moment.

Imagine that you've decided to do a title over a shot of a street scene. The wall of the building opposite is dark, so you've selected a light type color. Things look great as you're building your type. Then you watch your program and, much to your surprise, after just a couple of seconds, a white truck pulls up in the frame. The light colored type that you specified to match the dark building suddenly disappears.

The experienced video type designer will understand that it's usually better to build titles in a way that they can withstand the challenge of this kind of changing background. Try adding a drop shadow to your text, preferably in a sharply contrasting color and brightness. This can help keep a title readable even when the background shifts or when the title overlaps two areas with different colors. Or you can set a background mask behind the type that dims or completely blocks the background in just the area where the type occupies the screen. Or you could throw a geometric colored shape behind the title. This doesn't have to be an emergency fix for a problem, either, but these ideas can and should be an intimate part of the creative design and layout of a good title.