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| Creating
high quality digital video titles with the Wild
FX Pro Video Titler & Text Animator |
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| Contents |
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| Introduction |
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| There
are many factors involved in creating good looking
video titles. This tutorial covers some of the
issues involved and makes many suggestions on
how to get the best quality video titles. You
will find that you will get different quality
output depending on the font, effect, framerate
and output video codec that you select. You will
need to experiment a bit to get the best results. |
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| Shutting
down applications |
| When
you are creating your video titles with Wild
FX Pro, you may find that you will get the
best results if you shut down any other applications
that are running and any open windows because
of the processor intensive nature of the title
generation process. |
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| Fast
processor and lots of hard drive space |
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| When
creating your video titles use the best computer
that you have access to. The more powerful your
computer’s processor the better your encoding
process will be. In addition, you will want to
make sure that you have plenty of hard drive
space available so you can use uncompressed video
files or video with very high bitrate. |
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| Selecting
your type size |
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| The
general rule in broadcast is that all type should
be at least 18 points in size. But keep in mind
your original frame size. If you are scaling
your movie up 200% to get it onto video, you
can have 9 point type. If you are reducing it
to 50%, you should use 36 point type or greater. |
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| Line weight: A single
frame of video is actually made up of 2 sets
of scan lines. Because of this, a horizontal
line 1 point thick or less will flicker on
video. It is visible as the first set of
lines scan, then disappears as the next set
scans. So all horizontal lines should be
2 points thick or greater to show up correctly
on video. |
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| Selecting
your font |
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| In
general, the simpler the font the better the
output will look. We recommend using
a font without serifs (such as arial). This does not mean that you
cannot use complex and/or serif fonts. It just means that you need
to be aware that the results may not be exactly what you wanted and
you may have to experiment a bit more to achieve the results you want. |
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| Selecting
your effect |
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| Depending
on the font and amount of text you may find that
certain effects work better than others. Some
of the effects which contain images may suffer
from quality issues depending on the settings
you choose. |
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| Selecting
your effect framerate |
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| If
you are outputting a video the effect fps represents
the number of distinct frames per second in your
output. So if you have an effect fps of 15fps
and your video framerate is 30fps you will have
15 distinct frames per second, or one distinct
effect frame will be displayed for 2 video frames.
(NOTE: If you're outputting a .swf then the effect
fps is the .swf framerate of your output.) |
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| You
can use any effect fps that you want, however,
it is highly recommended that you make sure your
effect framerate (Main tab) is a factor of the
output video framerate. In other words if your
output video framerate is 30, set your effect
framerate to a number that can be divided into
30 without a remainder: such as 10, 15 or 30
fps. As a convenience there are two preprogrammed
options that will automatically set the effect
framerate to 15 fps for video set to export at
30 fps (NTSC standard) and 12 fps for video set
to export at 25 fps (PAL standard). If your video
output uses a fractional framerate (such as 29.97)
for the purposes of determining the appropriate
effect framerate just round it up to the nearest
whole number. |
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| Selecting
your effect dimensions |
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| Make
sure to make your effect dimensions the same
as the dimensions of your video output. Since
Wild FX Pro text effects can scale to any size
without distortion (not including imported raster
background images) you will get the best quality
by making the effect dimensions identical to
the video dimensions. |
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| Selecting
your video codec |
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| Select
the best possible video codec you have installed.
The better the video codec you use and the higher
your bitrate, the better your output will look.
For broadcast purposes you may find that uncompressed
video works the best, however, it can generate
very large file sizes. As with every other aspect
of video titling, experimentation is the key. |
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| Working
within the title safe area |
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| In
video there is an area of the screen known as
the “title safe" area: This is the
area in which all type must be placed if you
want to ensure that it will display on all monitors. |
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| The
visible image on a computer monitor does not
extend fully to the edge of the monitor screen,
so even when a movie is played full screen, the
entire image is visible. On a television set,
however, the image extends beyond the edge of
the screen, making a certain portion of the image
not visible. While this amount varies from TV
to TV, the general rule is that title safe represents
80% of the image from the center to the edge.
Wild FX Pro has an automatic title safe preview
option that you can use to see the border of
the title safe area while previewing your output. |
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| Using
broadcast color safe colors |
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Broadcast
video imposes its own limitations on color, which
are tied to the limits set by the NTSC video
standard (that is used in the US) which is unable
to handle some colors, especially very saturated
ones. Colors that fall outside these limits are
considered not broadcast safe, or "illegal" colors.
They will typically look bad on TV. Wild FX Pro
offers a built-in color safe option that you
can use. (NOTE: you cannot preview the effects
using the color safe option, so the only way
to see it is to export the video.)
However, the only way to be completely certain a video image contains only broadcast
safe colors is to run it through a broadcast waveform monitor, a device designed
for this purpose. Advanced non-linear editing software programs such as Final
Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere include a software version of waveform monitors. While
this is not 100% as dependable as hardware scopes, it should give you a pretty
close idea of whether your colors are NTSC legal or not. You can also color correct
a video after it's done using this type of software. |
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| Conclusion |
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There
are many factors involved in creating high quality
digital video titles with Wild FX Pro. This tutorial
has covered some of them. The key to finding
what works best for a particular effect is to
experiment. The more you work with video the
more you learn about how different effects will
be affected by compression and the easier it
gets to make a good looking video titles. This
tutorial is intended to get you started in the
right direction. Happy title and effect making.
For further information on use Wild FX Pro, please see our How
to make the background transparent in your Wild FX Pro video titles
tutorial. |
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