Editing titles

on Wednesday, January 14, 2009

The Title Designer window is one of the most complex windows in the Studio software. If you are working with a predesigned title, double-click it in the timeline to change the text. The title will open in the title editor. To change the text, click once on the title and start typing. Highlight unwanted words and press the Delete key to delete them.
You can change the font style or size for the title if you don’t like it. Select the text you want to change, and then choose a new font in the font menu at the top of the Title Editor. In Figure, I have changed the font to Trendy because I didn’t like the Pretext font that was used in the “Snow Boarding” title. Figure also shows the basic controls of the Title Designer. Some of the most important controls include
  • Roll: Click this to make the title roll vertically up the screen. This is especially useful if you have a long list of credits that you want to roll at the end of the movie. If you choose the Roll option, the Title Editor allows you to scroll down the editing area to add more rows of titles. You can make a roll title as long as you want. Each time you add a new line of text to the bottom of a rolling title, the title screen gets a little longer.
  • Crawl: Click this to make the title crawl across the screen from right to left. Crawl useful text across the bottom of the screen, such as, “Order now! Quantities are limited!” Like rolling titles, you can make a crawling title wider by simply adding more text to the right side of the title.
  • Text styling: Select some text in your title, and then click one of these buttons to style the text. Just like in a word processor or almost any other computer program, click B to make the text bold, click I to make it italic, and click U to underline the text.
  • Text justification: Click this button to open a submenu of text justification and alignment options. You can choose to align text left, right, or centered. If you click the Shrink to Fit button, the text will automatically shrink to fit in the text box if you make the box smaller. If you click Scale to Fit, the text shrinks or grows to fill the entire text box if you make it smaller or bigger. If you want long lines of text to automatically wrap to the next line, click the Word Wrap On button. Otherwise, click the Word Wrap Off button. Click the Close (X) button in the upper right corner of the Text justification menu to close the menu.
  • Add Text Field: Click this button and then click-and-drag a text box in the editing area to create a new line of text from scratch.
  • Text styles: Use these predefined styles to quickly format text. To apply a style to some existing text, select the text in the editing area and then click a style in the list.
When you edit titles in Studio, make sure that the words stay inside the title safe boundaries, which are the red dotted lines around the edges of the title editor window. Text that falls outside of those boundaries may be cut off when the movie is viewed on a TV screen.