DIS - SID: 1340545/1

Note – Most of the images used on the DVD label were the same ones used on the DVD inlay. The exception being the template from which I based my logo from.

http://static8.depositphotos.com/1000164/945/v/950/depositphotos_9455442-Nuclear-explosion.jpg

[accessed 18/04/14]

Trailer:-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVuuyRGB_BA

[Accessed 28/04/14]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8NaZZa54cs

[Accessed 28/04/14]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orUu0fQJee0

[Accessed 28/04/14]

Gameplay footage was all recorded by myself. Details of how this footage was recorded can be found in my blog post, number 23.

Wednesday, 23 April 2014

Photoshop - Retweaking the DVD Inlay

One of the things I was least happy about with the DVD inlay was my attempts at compositing Duke Nukem into the Doom picture. Duke always stood out from the rest of the image and it therefore lacked believability.

One of the reasons was due to the reflections from light sources which were very apparent on the Doom figure but totally absent from Duke. Also Duke has slightly more saturated colours whereas the Doom scene in general was lacking in colour depth.

I set about trying to make some changes to see if I could improve things at all.

Here is the original version:

Here is the amended version:

There were two main things that I changed. The first was upping the saturation amount on both the main front picture and then the rear picture so that the colour tones were more evenly matched.

This makes the picture seem warmer and I think the colour difference between Doom and Duke is less pronounced on the amended version however some of the fine detail has been lost or reduced slightly. Overall a tradeoff I think it is worth making, especially given as how the brighter more saturated colours grab your attention more forcefully, useful on a game cover to attract prospective buyers.

The other effect was to add some red light reflections to Duke so he looks more like he is actually part of the scene than in the original. The main areas where Doom guy has these red light reflections are on his legs so this was the area that I wanted to add them to Duke.

As I keep copies of all the stages on the project it was easy for me to go back to my original image with all the layers still available to manipulate. I therefore added another layer on top of all the others and set to work adding the red highlights.

To do this I used the eyedropper tool to match the colour of a reflection on Doom guy's legs and then using the paint tool and a small paint brush size, around 6 pixels and fading from the inside to the outside, I started to apply the red colouration to Duke's lower legs up to the knee area, Then I added extra layers to the inside of his thighs, again trying to match the reflections on Doom guy.

In order to still retain the underneath detail of Duke's outfit I then adjusted the transparency (opacity) of the layer on which I had painted the red highlights from 100% down to around 35%. This gives the impression of a red tinge without losing the underlying detail. It's not perfect but I think it is an improvement and does help to make Duke look more like he belongs in his surroundings.

I'm still getting feedback from people as to whether they thing the changes are an improvement or not and whether there is anything else I should be tweaking, possibly the saturation down a touch or two.

I'll update with any further changes and to confirm which version I will present as the final one.

[Update: After receiving feedback from multiple people it appears as though everybody prefers the amended version citing better colour and a more believable front image. Whilst I think matching the hue / saturation levels between the front and back images makes the text on the rear slightly harder to read nobody else seemed to find this an issue. I will therefore be submitting the second version as it currently is.]

Monday, 21 April 2014

Summary Of My Work & Things To Improve On

Having basically finished my 3 pieces of work for my assignment I wanted to discuss how well things have gone and what I would (or will) spend time on to improve them further.

First up my DVD Inlay.

Overall I was pretty happy with the way that the concept worked. Whilst my initial idea was to have both protagonists facing each other getting high res versions of these was too difficult and so opting for both of them fighting off demons with Duke transposed into the image works well. The fact that Duke is posed very similarly to Doom guy makes it seem more plausible that they are there together.

My actual implementation of adding Duke though could use quite a bit more work. Duke still looks too bright and his right foot doesn't really seem to be standing on the demon's hand behind him. He also lacks the red reflections that are visible on Doom Guy's legs. I'm pretty sure there are things I could tweak to make this scene more believable. Possibly even increasing the saturation of the colours from the Doom picture and attempting to add some red reflections to Duke, probably using a transparency layer with red sprayed on top and at 20 to 30% opacity.

I was happy with how the Space Marine and Kittens turned out. I like the clipping masks and the oval border works well. A more defined border would have been an improvement but it is ok as it is. I would have liked a more metallic and steel effect lettering for the "Is For Edition". The greyish lettering with the embossed effect works ok in it's place but could be improved.

I was very happy with how the Doom Vs Duke Nukem title worked. Finding the Vs and then changing it to red looks really good in my opinion. My initial idea was to have a spray painted logo in yellow / gold to match more closely the colours of the Duke & Doom titles but the paint effect works really well and after experimenting with yellow and a few other colours I settled on red as it makes a stark contrast to the other parts of the title and draws your eye to it. I think it works well.

The spine was relatively easy to decide how I wanted it to look. Nearly all my PC games tend to follow the same convention of a logo saying it's a PC game, the game name and then a BBFC rating if one is applicable. The black background works nicely as the top of the front cover fades to black anyway and it appears as though the spine is a continuation of this which then in turn is continued to the back cover.

The back cover was also quite tricky. My initial idea was to have 3 screenshots with some description next to them as to what is going on in them and to emphasise different features of the game. Once I had devised the short President's soliloquy I really wanted to have it on the case which meant having enough space available for this to fit on. My design was based loosely on the back cover of the XCOM Enemy Unknown which had a similar large picture with 3 screenshots at the bottom breaking up the back of the case from a story to the game information at the bottom like the barcode, disclaimer, system requirements & BBFC rating. It also had a headline piece at the top.

I had decided early on that the headline would be "Hail To The Kings" as "Hail To The King" is a famous quote from the previous Duke Nukem games an since there are now two protagonists pluralising this quote seems particularly poignant. I liked the picture of the demon surrounded by fire and it works well with the theme of demons and hell from the front cover. The only issue with it was due to the colouring of it getting text in the colours I wanted was slightly difficult. However upon experimenting with a few options I was able to get it looking reasonably nice and still relatively legible.

The three screenshots were designed to show parts of the game with as much cross interaction of the characters and weapons as possible. Hence the first picture has the Doom guy grinning as he hands a stripper money - a famous bit from Duke Nukem 3D in level 2 of that game. The Doom grin is normally reserved for when you find a particularly powerful weapon but I was able to capture it and use the HUD at that moment superimposed onto the Duke 3D sequence. The other two screenshots were similar in concept and design. The second picture was designed around a scene in Doom where the Doom guy was firing a rocket launcher into humanoid enemies with particularly grisly results. I therefore erased the central Doom rocket launcher from the picture and substituted the Duke RPG launcher instead. Both guns have similar effects, ie they both shoot rockets / RPG's and so the effect in the Doom game is believable with the Duke weapon. The last screenshot was actually all from Brutal Doom. The familiar one finger salute from Duke is actually an option in Brutal Doom so adding it in whilst facing a particularly powerful enemy gives the impression that it is Duke fighting the enemy not Doom guy. To add to this effect I originally had the Duke HUD however on feedback from others I changed the HUD to look more similar to the Doom one, substituting in Duke's head. However given that the gameplay in my trailer shows two different HUD's this now seems a bit odd to me to have it like this. Also one of the features of my game is the ability to play as Duke or Doom so having two HUD's is feasible given that both protagonists have their own style. I might change it back to the original HUD if I feel that makes more sense.

The rest of the information on the case was relatively easy to design. The barcode always tends to be bottom right. On top of that is the BBFC certificate and information (providing the game has been rated by the BBFC) - due to legal requirements the BBFC logo had to be the size it currently is, I would have chosen to have both the barcode and BBFC box to be the same size but it works ok as is and complies with the legal requirements more importantly. The system specifications tend to be at the top of this area and I utilised a few different colours to highlight these. I think they stand out nicely against the black background and I'm happy with how these look. The company and other trademarks fill in any space between the system specifications and the legal disclaimer which take up the rest of the back cover nicely. I didn't feel like there were too many decisions to make here - the white lettering of the disclaimer on a background ensures easy legibility for anybody who actually bothers to read a disclaimer. The logo's and trademarks are already lifted from black backgrounds so they fit in nicely.

The DVD Label.

The idea behind my DVD label was to recreate the Duke Nukem Forever disc which is a stylised Atomic symbol with titles and logo's trademarks overlaying this.

Given how Doom-centric the DVD inlay is I felt focusing more on a Duke Nukem theme for the game DVD made sense. Whilst the Duke Nukem Forever background looks more 3D and metallic than mine I was relatively happy with the overall effect. It is definitely recognisable as the atomic symbol and the contrast between the gold outer ring fading to a lighter yellow in the centre and the black outer border and three thick arms work well.

Happy with the background I then had to decide what to do for a logo. Given the atomic nature of the disc a mushroom cloud with a face in it seemed to complement the theme of the disc and also references back to the president's soliloquy about Duke & Doom guy doing a lot of damage!

I didn't want to put too much on the disc itself so I just went with what were the essentials. The BBFC rating, the DVD ROM trademark, the game title, the game logo, the developers' logos and a legal disclaimer around the outer edge of the disc.

The game title was placed at the top and centred. I made it as large as I could whilst keeping the same size ratio and broke the black outer layer slightly each side which I think looks good, to see it overlayed over it.

I put the BBFC logo in line with the centre of the hub and then the DVD ROM trademark to the right of it. I decided to make the DVD ROM logo red to match the predominant colour of the BBFC logo.

On the right hand side of the disk I put the two developers' logos and underneath then the game logo. I put the developers' logos in the top black section as the logo's have a black background themselves and so they look best on a uniform black background. As I am also putting two things ,ie the developers' logos and the games logo compared to one on the other side I think offsetting one above and one below the BBFC certificate and DVD ROM trademark the other side works well and makes a better use of the available space on the disc. The games logo looks fine on the yellow part of the disc as the black outlines are visible.

The last part was to put a disclaimer around the outside of the disc. I didn't want this to be too big or go too close to the game title as the two would almost overlap one another. For this reason I kept the disclaimer to just the bottom half of the disc. I chose white as the colour as it is still legible without being too noticeable. I don't want peoples eyes to be drawn to the disclaimer over other parts of the disc.

As far as improving things goes - other than adjusting the background to make it look more 3D there is not too much I would want to change. There does appear to be some dead space on the disk, particularly bottom left and centre. It might be worth experimenting to see if there is anything that could be placed here without looking like the disc is getting too cluttered.

The Trailer.

Using Handbrake I was able to convert the movie to mp4 and the file size went from 224MB to around 15MB - suitable for uploading. Quality does suffer from the original somewhat but this will give you an idea of the trailer. It also appears to have added black bars top and bottom not present in the Quicktime version.

Whilst my initial ideas for my trailer were pretty undefined I did want to include gameplay footage and a power-up called Dekka-damage. Upon performing research on video game trailers in the series it became obvious that the trailers tend to focus on a story aspect and a gameplay aspect. I decided to also split my trailer up into two sections with the first part being the story (what has happened prior to the game) and the second part showing gameplay and release information. Whilst I really liked the idea of the Dekka-damage time constraints forced me not to include it. If I had another 30 to 60 seconds it would definitely have a section of the trailer detailing various gameplay elements and this power-up would get a mention along with the balancing (or lack thereof) information.

In order to come up with a plausible reason for both Duke and Doom guy to be in the same game together I had to incorporate story elements from both games, ie an alien attack to which Duke would respond to and a hordes of hell attack that Doom guy would respond to.

My trailer and the blurb on the back of the DVD inlay refer to both of these events happening on the same day. The trailer goes a step further and gives the date of August 29th, 1997 - Judgement Day from the Terminator universe. This date also works quite nicely as it would be a year or two after the release of Doom and Duke Nukem 3D.

Following on from the opening titles showing this date I have the video sections showing a clip from Independence Day where aliens destroy a building in a city followed by part of the Doom 3 opening sequence where a portal to hell is opened and the ensuing chaos. After this I have a three part piece which starts with the reasons that Doom and Duke get involved. Duke historically gets involved by aliens harming or stealing the "hot" women of Earth. I used a bit of the Duke Nukem Forever trailer which already showed this happening in the setup to that game. Doom guy tends to be a "wrong place, wrong time" type of story so to give it a bit of a humorous twist I portray him as an animal lover and utilise part of the end sequence of the first game where a cute bunny is decapitated. This allows me to play off this in a later gameplay sequence.

The last "reason" revolves around a famous Duke Nukem quote, "It's time to kick ass and chew bubblegum....and I'm all out of gum". I display a title during the voice over of Duke saying this line with "They stole our gum"!

Immediately following this I launch into gameplay footage showing intense firefights and the backing track changes from a sombre piece to a dance track with a powerful beat. This section highlights the gameplay aspects. I used newer 3D engines for the games so that higher resolution textures and screen resolutions can be used than were originally available at the games release. This at least gives the impression that they are "newer" games than the originals.

Lastly I close by showing a shot of a phrase "You want it" to emphasise this is a game fans will want to own followed up by the game name and the release information. As this is a fictitious game I went with a completely nonsensical date of the 14/14/14. This is intended to let people know in a round about way that this game doesn't really exist in a tongue-in-cheek way similar to the humour throughout the trailer. I could easily change this to a real date if required.

I think that they story elements and the setup work reasonably well - having more time would allow me to tell a better one and to have slightly longer edits which would improve the flow of the trailer somewhat but I feel that I do succeed in setting up the back story from the trailer. I like the transition from the sombre music to the frenetic dance music when the gameplay footage starts. Overall I am happy with how the trailer works.

I believe that some of the audio transitions could be improved - mostly from the first Duke monologue to the bunny scene where the original music fades in and out. I would have liked to have gotten the original music from the ending of Doom in there with the bunny scene but it didn't seem to fit well given the short amount of time allocated to that clip. I was happy with how the dance music fades out at the end - that coincided with a dip in the tempo and the volume of the track at that point and seems to work well.

I would have liked to have found a way to remove the IGN logo from two earlier clips although due to the scene type and the moving camera I was unable to use a garbage matte on these scenes whereas this effect worked well on the static "You want it" clip. I'm sure there would be a way to blur this out somehow.

Overall I am happy with how the trailer works and do not envision too many changes to it short of maybe adding some extra scene transition effects if feedback recommends them.

Friday, 18 April 2014

Premiere - Video & Effects

I touched on how to add video clips to the timeline already in a previous blog. In this blog I want to run through how I ordered my video clips and the few different effects that I used to enhance the trailer.

When I set up my project in Premiere I chose to have 5 video and audio tracks available. I probably only really needed 3 in the end but having the extra couple did allow me to space out the types of video quite nicely, even if I didn't use the fifth track at all.

Layer 4 was all my titles - these were the uppermost layer as I would always want these to overlay anything else on the screen.

Layer 3 was for my mattes.

Layer 2 was only really used in one place at about the 50 second mark where I used it for a matte I created to go with a single bit of video. The video was actually placed on layer 3 and the matte on layer 2 - I'll explain why in the blog later.

Layer 1 was for all my main video clips, ie trailer footage and gameplay capture.

Hopefully you can see in the above screenshot the layout of the video. The purple blocks are titles and mattes. The blue blocks are the video clips. You can probably see a pattern in that where there is a title and a matte there is no video clip. Video clips do often have a title though, especially at the beginning when the story is still being told and due to time constraints the story needs to be told at the same time as the video clip is going on.

There are two beige blocks attached to 3 of the blue video clips, one at the end of the first video clip and one between the third and fourth clip. These are transition effects that were used. The first one faded out (or dipped to black) the Independence Day clip so it transitions into the black matte more smoothly. The second one does a similar job except this one was a cross dissolve.

I used a Dip to Black effect for the first transition since the following matte was actually black anyway so I didn't feel the need to use a cross dissolve. A cross dissolve fades from one scene into black and then from black into the new scene. For two different clips a cross dissolve tends to soften the transition and make it less jarring. This was important when going from one clip into a totally different one. Hopefully you can understand why I chose to use these two transitions.

I certainly could have used more transition effects between the gameplay clips at the end but after trying them with and without I decided I quite liked the way that they snapped quickly from one to another without the transition. It seemed to promote the frenetic style of the trailer at this point so I left them as is.

The other effect that I used came about because of a clip I wanted to use at the end of the video where "You Want It" is displayed. This seemed quite apt to end the video with suggesting to prospective buyers watching the trailer that they did indeed want the game! However the only place I could find the trailer was off a video clip on IGN where they have an IGN watermark on the video. This was annoying so I wanted to find a way to get rid of it. Whilst in another clip I use this watermark / logo is on a lighter background whilst the scene moves it is much less noticeable on this specific bit on an unmoving black background it is far more prevalent and distracting.

The way that I went about removing this logo was to introduce an effect called a 16 point garbage matte.

To add this to a video clip you need to select the Effects tab in the bottom left window where your project bins are located. This will give you a list of various effects that can be used.

In the picture above I have expanded the video transition options although for audio effects and other effects you would follow the same procedure. Simply select an effect and then drag and drop it onto your video or audio clip on your timeline. Whilst it won't immediately appear any different you can access the effects options in the top left window under Effect Controls in the same way I talked previously about when adding key frames to the opacity in titles.

The 16 Point Garbage Key is under Video effects -> Keying -> Sixteen-Point Garbage Matte

By dragging and dropping this on my "You Want It" clip I see this.

Around the outside of the preview window there are sixteen yellow points that can be dragged around to crop parts of the video. You can see that I have moved the point that was located in the bottom right corner to more towards the middle of the screen. This just cuts out the IGN logo but leaves the majority of the particle effects behind the You Want It lettering.

When I first played it back it substituted the background as black (which is what I set it up to be when creating the original sequence). However the black really stood out from the black of the original clip. To try and minimise the effect since I had really only substituted one eyesore for another I decided to try and put a matte behind the video where the black was showing through and have it match more closely the black used in the original clip.

Initially I tried colour sampling from around the area that I was hoping to mimic but after a few tries it didn't seem to be working too well. It was either noticeably too dark or too light. I therefore decide to go for a shade that was a little too dark and then adjust it in the colour picker until I had something I was happy with. I settled with colour #130A07 which didn't seem as disruptive as the others I tried.

Whilst it is still visible to me others that have viewed the trailer said they didn't notice it at all so it seems to be doing it's job.

The last technique I used to alter a piece of the vide was on the bunny clip. I wanted to include as much of the bunny clip as possible as the way it pans from a happily playing rabbit to a decapitated head on a stick gives the sequence impact, plus fans of the original Doom games will know what is coming anyway. Not having the start and end though lessens the overall impact of the piece however due to the time constraint I didn't have enough time to show it in it's entirety. It's about seventeen seconds long and I had a seven second window. In order to fit it all in I had to speed up the clip which is really just one long panning sequence anyway.

To speed it up I used the Rate Stretch Tool. I dragged it from it's normal 17 seconds down to 7 seconds and then moved it into position on the timeline. I could then make minute adjustments to get it to fit perfectly.

Upon playing it back the sequence was sped up but didn't look too bad considering that the majority of the clip static anyway - it's just panning from right to left over a picture.

Those were the techniques I used along with basic editing ones to achieve my trailer. I'm sure with more time and knowledge I could improve it in a lot of ways and create more of the effects from scratch myself but I'm happy with how it works at the moment. As with all my pieces, time permitting I will have another pass at them if I think of any things that could b improved quickly to enhance how they are presented.

My next blogs are likely to be about my summary of how I think each piece has gone and what I would do to improve them.

Thursday, 17 April 2014

Premiere - Getting the Sound Right

Following on from my last blog I wanted to go through how I edited the sound in my trailer to get it sounding right, at least as to the effect that I was going for.

As the beginning of my trailer was telling the story of how both aliens and demons invaded Earth on the same date and what prompted Duke & Doom guy to join forces the first part of my trailer I wanted to have appropriately sombre music.

I liked the music which was at the start of the Doom 3 trailer and since I would assume they already own the rights to it using it in my game trailer (which is a collaboration between Gearbox & ID Software) should be fine. I would need to check with the composer and check the licensing agreement that they had with ID Software to confirm that ID held the rights to use it whenever they wished to but for my purposes I will assume that ID and therefore by extension, my game do have the rights to use the music in the trailer.

By dragging a clip of the trailer onto my timeline I add both the video and the audio to the timeline. However if I just want to have the audio and not the video I need to unlink the audio portion from the video portion. To do this I right click on one or the other - both should become white to show they are selected. I then need to select unlink from the context menu which appears. Once I have done this I can drag around and edit either the video or audio portion without changing their counterpart. In my case for this first backing track I only wanted the audio part anyway so I simply cleared the video part from the timeline and just kept the audio part.

One of the really clever bits of Adobe Premiere is that you can extend a bit of audio from a clip and it will then refer to the source file it comes from to add any extra missing audio from that. It meant that I could extend my short 20 second clip to 27 seconds and not have it stretched and sound odd or I could adjust it back down if needed without affecting the timing. This makes editing audio to fit a specific time frame very easy.

To add extra time to an audio track simply select the piece you want to extend and then with the selection tool selected hover the mouse next to the edge of the audio piece which you wish to extend and wait till the cursor changes to look a red line with an arrow pointing in the direction that you want to extend the piece of audio. Simply left click and hold to drag the audio size to fit the correct space and then let go.

With my first piece of backing audio added to the timeline I now needed to make adjustments to the volume levels so that some pieces of in game audio, specifically Duke Nukem saying "Dammit, why do they always take the hot ones". I wanted to have the audio fade out at this point so you can just hear Duke speak.

In order to adjust the volume up and down you use a similar method to adjusting opacity on the titles in that you add key frames to the piece of audio where you will be able to drag the volume up and down without changing the volume of the whole piece of audio.

In CC to first make the volume accessible you need to left click and hold in the middle of the piece of audio and drag up until a little black line with a white outer stroke appears - this dictates the audio volume.

In order to add keyframes to the audio levels you need to have the pen tool selected (press p). You can then add several key frames along the audio level. Once these have been added you can then drag these points up or down to raise and lower the volume at specific points.

Hopefully you can make out in the above image that I added 4 keyframes on the audio line. The first one just before the "Ladies" video clip featuring Duke where I start to fade out the backing soundtrack. I positioned this slightly before the Duke piece so that the sound was low enough when h started speaking to not distract the viewer. The next 2 points were where the audio was at it's lowest and could not be heard. The last one was again positioned slightly after the Duke piece finished so that the soundtrack did not interfere with that segment at all.

The next part of the trailer is again quite sombre. Initially I tried running a short segment of the music which accompanies the video as it is quite fitting. However in order to appreciate the change in music from initially very cheerful and happy to the macabre twist and change in music style I needed it to be at least 15 seconds long, time I didn't have. Having only a small bit of the music in there just made for quite a harsh change in sound which didn't last very long. It was even more jarring going into the next Duke monologue. I therefore decided to lose the original music that came with the clip and revert back to my original soundtrack piece. This seemed to work better than having two very short different pieces of backing music. If I had of been able to make a longer trailer I would have preferred to have both pieces of music in it.

I again faded the soundtrack out during the next Duke monologue about Kicking ass and chewing bubblegum.

The next bit of music I wanted was something with a heavy dance beat to it - similar to that found in the Doom 3 and Duke gameplay sequences. his should match the intense gameplay sequences I recorded and make the gameplay seem fast paced and frenetic. In fact I ended up going with the same piece of music used In the Duke Nukem Forever trailer. It's a piece of music called Invaders Must Die by The Prodigy. Given the elements of my game it seemed very apt. Also since Gearbox has licensed the music in the past it seems likely that they would be in a position to license it again. Plus fans of the past games would recognise it from the trailer, I certainly did without realising what the track name was.

Again placing it into the timeline and listening to it allowed me to make changes to the length and starting point of the audio clip. I wanted the bit of the song where it gets heavy to be my starting point and for it then to run till the end of the trailer. I faded out the volume at the end. I didn't need to fade it in since it was coming off a blank piece of audio at the end of Duke's second monologue and I also wanted the music to be impactful so having it come in at full volume seems correct. Given that the video has also just changed quickly to frantic in game footage I think the transition works ok.

There was one issue however. The in game audio at the beginning features a loud gun firing continuously at the start which was initially drowning out the music completely and therefore lessening the impact of the dance tune. I therefore lowered the volume of the first gameplay clip so that the start of the music could be heard more clearly. By the second gameplay clip the music had established it's presence and so I was able to keep the remaining gameplay footage at full volume.

That was pretty much it for the audio side of things; in the next blog I will look at the video and any transitions or effects that I used.

Tuesday, 15 April 2014

Premiere - Titles and Mattes

One of the main things I wanted to tell in my trailer was a bit of a background story similar to the Duke Nukem Forever and Doom 3 trailers. Since they were both two and a half minutes long and my trailer can be no more than 60 seconds long this presents a severe time constraint on telling a meaningful back story.

Therefore I would need to utilise onscreen graphics to tell the story whilst other things are going on. Two important features of video editing software are Mattes and titles. Titles allow you to add your own lettering to the video which can be superimposed over the video or put onto a background colour, a Matte.

Matte's are designed to be a non-reflective colouring - these are mainly used when recording live footage so that I studio conditions you do not have light reflecting off any part of the background from the studio lighting. A matte is different from a gloss in that they do not reflect light whereas a gloss does.

There are various parts of my video trailer where I would like to use a uniform black background over which I would add lettering. This would need me to setup a black matte.

To do this you go to the File drop down menu in Adobe Premiere and select New. Then from the list which is displayed to the right select Color (sic) Matte. You then see this screen.

This already has several options selected in it such as width, height, timebase and aspect ratio. These match the settings I used to set up my original sequence. I just leave all these settings as they are and click ok which then gives you this popup window.

Here you can pick any colour you want by using the slider in the middle to designate the range of colour and then selecting a point in the colour box to the left. Alternatively you can enter a colour number in the box at the bottom with # next to it. In my case since I want it pure black the number 000000 is appropriate.

Once I click ok the matte is created and I can now move it to the mattes bin that I created. From here I can drag it onto my timeline and edit the duration that it appears on the screen.

You may notice that there is a title track above the Matte on video track 4. The positioning of the title is actually very important. If I had positioned the title on Video 2 below the Matte the Matte would be the only thing showing when I came to playback my trailer. Much like in Photoshop in what order you display your layers is very important and it determines what will be seen. Similarly in Premiere the layer on the upper video track will overlay anything on the video tracks below them. Hence my titles are always on the uppermost video track with mattes and my video clips on lower ones. In this way I ensure that my titles are always visible on top of whatever else is displayed.

Creating a title is very similar to the way that a Color Matte is created. You go to File, New and then select Title.

You then see this window popup. Again, it is populated by default based upon the sequence that you originally setup.

Once you have entered a name for your title and pressed ok you now have this window shown.

You can see several white boxes. These represent the visible areas on different screen ratios and the inner box represents a safety area. Ideally you would always want to keep any titles within the innermost box so that they are always visible no matter what display they are viewed on and will not be really close to an edge of a screen. Obviously if you are planning on scrolling your text from one side of the screen to the other then you may well want to have the text box stretch throughout the safety area to the next box.

The text box option should be selected by default so in order to start writing you just need to click somewhere inside the main area and you can then start typing.

You can use the options on the right to alter the colour, orientation of the text or to add extra effects to them such as a shadow or even a texture.

There are also sample preset fonts that you can select from down the bottom. These can be used as is or amended and used in an altered form. Here is one of the texts that I created for use in my trailer.

It has a yellow fill with an orange outer stroke.

You can then move the text box around by using the select tool which is the top left option on the panel to the left and is represented by an image of a mouse pointer.

In order to save the Title to use in your video you actually have to close the screen. This will add it to your project tab and you can then drag it to your Titles bin if you want to. Dragging it onto the timeline will add it to your video.

There are many effects you can use with titles including getting them to scroll, up, down, left to right but the ones that I wanted to utilise a lot in my trailer was getting the titles to fade in and out to lessen the impact of them appearing.

In order to do this with your title selected on your timeline you go up to the top left window and select Effect Controls.

Any effects that you have added to the title will show up in here but one of the default ones is the one that I am interested in. It is the one labelled opacity. This dictates how much light is allowed to pass through it, in essence how visible it will be onscreen. For example, 100% opacity means that no light is let through and the title is fully visible. A 0% opacity means that all light is let through it and therefore it is invisible. By adjusting the opacity from 0% to 100% and then back again I will give the tiles the appearance of fading in and out.

In order to do this I need to add several keyframes. To add these you need to ensure that the little stopwatch icon by the Opacity option. Then I will add four key frames. One at the beginning to mark the start point where the title will be invisible, ie 0% opacity. Then next at 100% opacity. Another again at 100% opacity but this will mark the start of the title fading back to invisible. The end mark where the title is once again invisible.

In order to add a keyframe simply move the yellow head to where you want on the timeline of the title duration on the Effect Controls window. Then click the little diamond button to the right of the opacity option. It is very small but looks like this.

Once you have put in the 4 keyframes your Effect Control window timeline should look a bit like this.

All the keyframes will be set to 100% opacity by default. We want to change the first and last to 0% opacity. Simply move the head (and corresponding red line) over these two keyframes and in the opacity % option in yellow to the left of opacity move this option to 0% by clicking and holding your left mouse button and dragging to the left. Alternatively a single left click will allow you to enter any percentage you want.

Once the first and last key frames are set to 0% opacity the title should fade in and out when previewed.

I tended to use this effect for most of my titles. The main one I didn't use it for was between my error number 3 - "But the biggest mistake they made" - "3. THEY STOLE OUR GUM!!!!". This worked much better as an impact title where it is thrust into the viewers face and I felt it resonated more effectively not fading in. I wanted to emphasise it and having it show up at full opacity immediately does emphasise it compared to the other titles which do fade in and out.

My next blog will focus more on the sound tracks and audio and how I edited them to fit the various sections and to try and make them work together over each other.