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.