The Art of Titling

There you are, sitting in a theater, shoving bits of popcorn into your mouth, slurping an ice-cold cola and trying to decipher those pre-movie trivia questions. When the lights dim, the thunderous voice of the movie preview narrator comes on and an amazing shower of ultra-high-tech titles fly by on the silver screen, nearly blowing you out of your seat. "Why don't my titles look that good?," you ask yourself.
Compositing (layering) packages like After Effects, Maya Fusion, or Alias|Wavefront Composer can vastly expand your palette of effects and allow multiple layer rendering, but they can cost big bucks and carry a steep learning curve. But, contrary to popular belief, you don't have to buy expensive compositing software to make good-looking titles like those you've seen in the movies and on television. Video editing programs like Adobe Premiere, Apple Final Cut Pro and Ulead Media Studio Pro can create some pretty impressive titles on their own. All you need to know to start making professional-looking TV-style titles are just a few principals. This article will teach you some techniques you can try next time you build a title.

A Little Background
Your title's background, contrary to common thought, should not be the focus of your title. That is why backgrounds are often blurred, have their color set off-balance, are highly contrasted, show signs of apparent film damage (scratches and dust effects) or merely fade in and out between titles.
When building titles, don't draw too much attention to the background. Think of your background in terms of music. When a band is playing, the singer leads and the volume is higher on the singer than the rest of the instruments. Those instruments are important, but must not detract attention from the singer. Think of the title as the singer and the background as the singer's supporting musicians.
Creating a background can be one of the most fun steps in building a title, and can make your ordinary title look more professional very quickly. This is the one section of your video that can have multiple effects piled on top of each other and still look good. There are three basic types of effects, use them in any combination to create a title background.