The ABCs of Character Generators

The words scrawled across the blackboard, pronouncing the name of the show in bold, slightly smeared lettering: "The Case of the Missing Headphones!" Thus began one of the many video projects that wash across my desk in a semester long torrent. The students were using their imagination just as many of you do, finding unique and artistic ways to add titles to the finished production. From words drawn in letters made up of rose petals and then lightly blown away, to simple typed titles on a piece of white paper, we've all found unique and non-technical ways to enliven our productions with titles and other forms of graphics.

Sometimes these simple titles add a flare to the production that would not be possible with a cold hard computer. More often than not though, simple typing paper titles just add an air of unprofessionalism to most productions. Today's videomakers need not depend on these old and time consuming titling techniques. There are a growing number of affordable, professional titling options to choose from. This article will guide you through the forest of titlers or character generator systems (CG) and explain the functions of the CG and the different types available.

Before buying a character generator, you must be familiar with the options and different functions that you may find. The following should help you understand the various terms and "jargon" that sales brochures and catalogs use.

The character generator organizes text that you type through a keyboard onto an electronic page. The amount of information that you can put on each page depends on the size and type of letters that you use. Most CG's enable you to work with a number of type sizes per page or even the same line. The number of pages available to you expands as the systems become more sophisticated.

Various typeface family's make up the character generator's lettering. These family's are a collection of styles of a particular type. You're reading a member of the Courier family, Courier 12-point. The point designation indicates the size of the font in relation to the page. Each family is usually composed of a number of typefaces. Helvetica and Helvetica Black are two typefaces in the Helvetica family. A font is a very specific typeface. For example, Helvetica 12-point and Helvetica 14-point are two distinct fonts. In lower priced titling systems you may find just a few fonts with the ability to change the font's height, width and spacing (also called kerning). In the more advanced systems, Helvetica, Times Roman and Euro Bold are but three of the thousands of fonts you may find. You'll also find font sizes that range from 5-point to over 2000-point.

CG's may offer a variety of styles that will enhance your fonts. Drop shadows are one of the most popular styles. A small shadow appears below and to one side of the letter, simulating the effects of a light source on a three dimensional object. Most models that have drop shadows will also enable you to increase the shadow size and move the shadow by repositioning the simulated light around the letter. Another popular type style is the outline. Each letter will appear to have an outline of a different color enabling you to separate it from the background video. Other type styles may include italic variations, bold, underline and flashing.

Font color is another important option. Simple systems offer eight colors; black, white, yellow, red, magenta, blue, cyan and green. More sophisticated systems offer millions of colors.

One of the advantages of the CG over manual titling methods is the ability to move. Scrolling or roll pages, enable you to create a smooth continuous stream of titles. This is similar to the titles found at the end of most feature films. Crawling enables you to add a continuous line of text horizontally across the screen. Your local television channel uses this technique to announce weather warnings or news updates. You may want to display text, one page after another in a sequence. The opening credits in a film or television production usually employs this technique.

One thing to keep in mind when using moving and sequence options, find a system that allows for easy editing within the sequence. After you have retyped a roll page on a simple system a few times, you'll wish that you had investigated the ease of editing before your purchase.

Finally, there are two terms that you need to be familiar with if you plan on broadcasting projects that use titles: resolution and anti-aliasing. We've all heard the sales pitches of dealers hawking their wares, pronouncing that their system produces "broadcast quality" titles and pictures. What does this mean? It all deals with the resolution of the titler. A CG has good resolution if it is able to produce clear, precise text over video. Without getting into the gory details, they (the engineers) measure the resolution in nanoseconds (a billionth of a second), the lower the number, the better the resolution. Broadcast quality is considered anything below 35 nanoseconds. The typical professional CG's usually have resolutions lower than 10 nanoseconds. Most stand-alone CG's fall between 50 and 75 nanoseconds.

Anti-aliasing is a function found on most computer-based CG's. One drawback of good resolution is that letters often appear to have the "jaggies"; jagged edges caused by pixelized lettering. Anti-aliasing blends the outer edges of the letters with the background to produce smooth edges on the curves and diagonal lines. This smoothing gives the titles a more professional look.

There are basically three ways to electronically add titles to your projects: a camcorder CG, a stand alone titler, and a computer-based CG. The camcorder CG's, have two major drawbacks that prevent them from being serious contenders in the titler market. They have a very limited storage capacity (one or two pages or even lines), and you have to add the titles as you shoot, thus adding the titles permanently to the raw footage. You can creatively get around these limitations but the process is usually very tedious and seldom gives you the result you're looking for. Because of this, we'll concentrate on the latter two types of character generators: the stand-alone titler and the computer based CG. We'll also describe the various features included in some example models and provide a wide range of examples that should meet any videomakers needs and budget.

A stand-alone titler is made up of a unit that uses a video input from your editing system and uses that video for a background on which to superimpose titles. Some units may also provide various color backgrounds for title pages. The unit then outputs the combined images to your video recorder. This type of character generator is relatively simple and inexpensive for those of you that do not have a computer system to complement your editing facilities. Keep in mind that even though some of the prices stated may seem a bit high compared to the computer-based systems reviewed later on, these systems do not need any other equipment or software to enable them to work with your editing setup.

For your basic titling needs, Ambico's V-6350($300) is an inexpensive but versatile member of the basic CG field. It is compatible with all video formats including Hi-8 and S-VHS and offers ten pages of memory with eight lines per page and twenty-four characters per line. It will superimpose your titles over live video or colored backgrounds. This system offers a great deal of movement options for the money. Titles can flash, wipe and cut in and out, scroll up or down and crawl, all with three speeds to choose from. The character options include 2 fonts, 4 sizes, 3 borders, and eight colors.

The Sima Products Colorwriter ($300) boasts a twelve page memory bank with fourteen special effects. Titles can crawl across the screen line by line or converge with titles from the opposite side of the screen. They can also pop up typewriter style, letter by letter. You may zoom in or out, fade the titles or scroll them at one of four speeds. They also have included a headline feature that keeps a stationary title combined with other titles scrolling down the page. One other effect is the reverse key button. Push the reverse button, the page becomes the letter color and the live video fills in the letters. This model offers four fonts in up to eight colors including black and white.

For a little more money, last years Videomaker Innovative Product Award winner may be just fill your needs. The JVC JX-T88($450) is S-VHS compatible and offers four font sizes in eight colors and the ability to add outlines or boxed characters. This model has scroll page capability with five different speeds. It also has a 10 page memory; up to eight pages of still titles and two scroll pages. If you have a need to type foreign languages, the JX-T88 has alphabets for 7 languages including: German, French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Danish accented letters.

A further step up at this level of CG's is Videonics TitleMaker 2000($600). This affordable and versatile CG features over ninety font and size combinations including a script font, calligraphy and accented characters for over 16 languages. You can also use millions of colors and an array of patterns including animated patterns to create backgrounds, letters, outlines and borders. For enhancing the characters, you can add drop-shadows, and outlines.

Memory is no problem for the 2000; it can hold over eight thousand characters and hundreds of pages with a lithium battery backup.

Sometimes, you need the ability to control scroll speed and movement. The TitleMaker 2000 enables you to set a pause point and direction change anywhere in the scroll page. A title can scroll up to a certain point on the page, pause for five seconds (or whatever time you set) and fade away or scroll in a different direction.

One very important feature that the 2000 has adopted from the professional CG's is the preview output. This additional output enables you to preview, correct and build new titles while the main output carries the video in signal. This allows changes without the audience watching your "impressive" typing skills. It is very useful if you shoot and broadcast live sporting events.

One drawback to the character generators mentioned is their character resolution. The TitleMaker 2000 has an effective character resolution of 70ns. As noted above, "broadcast quality" is considered to be 35ns or lower. If your programs require high resolution titles, you may need to look at the over $1000 range of CG's. Unfortunately, higher resolution at a lower price usually means fewer options. If you look through a broadcast equipment catalog you will find stand-alone CG's that range in price from $1800 to over $30,000. Until you get above the $5000 range you usually find very limited numbers of typefaces and fonts, basic title movement and limited memory.

One fairly inexpensive and very bright star in this group of broadcast quality stand-alone systems is a new product from Videonics, the PowerScript Character Generator. This stand-alone or computer-networkable CG will begin shipping this fall and has a suggested US retail price of $2500. The PowerScript is a broadcast quality (17.5ns effective pixel resolution) system with thirty-five anti-aliased fonts and supports Adobe PostScript type 1 fonts that you can add from your desktop computer. The character styles include variable bold and italic, underline and shadow. You can assign each character its own style separately. With PowerScript, characters can be rotated, stretched horizontally or vertically, or skewed at any angle. You can also render the characters transparent in relation to the background colors, video or other characters. If you like a vast range of color, PowerScript's four million plus colors should do the trick.

This versatile CG has variable speed scrolls and crawls as well as flash words, color changes, spinning letters across the screen, and other animation feature. The PowerScript has an object-based graphics tool that enables you to animate text, graphics and logos individually.

The PowerScript also has internally generated graphics (lines, squares, rectangles, ovals and circles)which you can place anywhere on the page. One feature that should expand your creativity, is PowerScript's ability to display graphics created with Macintosh, Windows, DOS, Amiga and UNIX-based graphics programs such as Illustrator, Photoshop or Corel Draw. It will also support any PostScript and PCX graphics.

Finally, this system will grow with you. You can network on an Ethernet (with the addition of a network card in one of its two PC card slots) and it has an RS-232 serial port for simple connection to a desktop computer. This is just a few of the features of Videonics PowerScript.

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