Titles without After Effects

[some-stars.livejournal.com]

I'm getting to that point on a vid where I start work on the titles/credits (ie, the point where I'm almost done with the first draft except for the really frustrating bits and want to comfort myself with ego-stroking *g*) and I'm wondering how other people approach titles. I've seen quite a few vids lately do awesome titles using what appears to be After Effects or a similar compositing program, and that's pretty out of the question for me, but I know there's got to be cool stuff I can do with Premiere Pro 2 and Photoshop CS3, which is what I'm working with.

All the titles I've done in the past have just been static text, over black or a short clip, sometimes with more text appearing on the beat, but not in any interesting ways. I sort of have vague ideas of keyframing the position of titles so that they can move into and out of the frame with irregular motions (rather than just rolling on and off) but I don't know where to start, and when I try to figure this stuff out from scratch I usually end up making it way, way harder than it needs to be.

So! How do you do interesting titles/credits without using an image compositing program or dozens upon dozens of tracks and nested sequences? (Like, I'm trying to avoid having a separate layer for each letter, because my computer would cry. 10-15 tracks max would be a good range, perhaps.) Are there titles you've done in past vids that you particularly like or think are good examples? I know I'm not being very specific here but that's because I'm so unclear on the software's capabilities in this regard that I'm not sure where to start having ideas.

(I hope this is the right tag to use--it's not *video* editing exactly but, uh, I do it in Premiere when making a vid, so I don't know what else to call it.)

Comments

[sugarfree03.livejournal.com]

in Sony Vegas Pro 8 is this very cool feature called ProType Titler.
here's a lil bit of info and some examples of what you can do with it:
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/news/article.asp?articleid=37&keycode=3504
it's a really cool thing!

[frivolity65.livejournal.com]

I can't say I make particularly fancy texty stuff but text is something I use a lot.

I use Adobe Photoshop & Premiere and I don't think I've ever used the titler that comes with Premiere. I like to make my text stuff in Photoshop and stick it in Premiere and simply use what's in Premiere to do what I like. The vid I'm most known for, Violetly, had all the texty stuff done in Photoshop: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok5yUxMrAzk

You can do lots of frame by frame stuff in photoshop, save them as .png. It can be a tad tedious but I've had some nice effects done with that method and I'm completely in control.


What is it about your computer that's not liking you using a lot of sequences/layers? Until recently I had APP 1.5 on a 1GB/2.5GHz machine with next to no HDD space and that coped very well with me throwing all what I do at it. But it didn't like APP 2.0

[some-stars.livejournal.com]

oooh, the text there is quite interesting. thanks for the example/suggestions!

[frivolity65.livejournal.com]

I used to use .psds but I got fed up with the weird shadow effect. I find .pngs are cleaner and you can still edit the file in Photoshop and have the altered version update in Premiere without re-importing. :)

[frivolity65.livejournal.com]

I really don't have a clue ( I am so stupid with anything technical ) why it was happening, but it was Jake (Powermonkey) that came to my rescue and suggested .pngs. :) and the difference was huge.


*takes the opportunity to say how much I love what you do with visuals* ♥

[some-stars.livejournal.com]

oh that's so exactly the kind of thing i was thinking of! :D :D :D :D :D thank yoooooooou