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.)