57 Synch Your Titles and DVD Menus

#57 Synch Your Titles and DVD Menus

One great way to make your productions look more professional is to create a common look for DVD menus and the titles used in your movies. While Premiere Pro has some outstanding titles, Encore has some awesome menu templates that you can easily customize for your own use. For many projects, you should peruse and choose DVD templates before creating your titles.

Choose Your Fonts Well

However you design your titles, remember that simple fonts work better on television, DVDs, and streaming video clips than complex and ( especially ) skinny, artsy fonts. When designing for television display, keep your text at 20-point or larger, since smaller font sizes can be difficult to read.

For example, consider the wedding template in Figure 57a , which is the NTSC_Bride Menu.psd from Encore's menu library. If you bring that into Photoshop, you can easily strip away all the layers of text and button highlights and create a perfect menu background for your wedding titles.

Figure 57a. What a beautiful DVD menu template! The arrow symbol is a "drop zone" you can customize with your own image.

For a recent project, I created the background images for all Premiere Pro titles in Encore, removing the text in this title and dragging in images for each major section in the project ( Figure 57b ). Then I captured each screen and added it to Premiere Pro, using the same font as Encore to create a neat, consistent appearance. The other way to go, of course, is to borrow backgrounds and other design elements from Premiere Pro title templates to build your DVD menus.

Figure 57b. Look familiar? This is a title (with faces blurred out) used in the actual wedding video.

Designing for Streaming

When producing streaming video, test your font and font size choices by rendering small portions of video with a title using Premiere Pro's Render Workspace function to assess their readability. Try to avoid scaling your text down during rendering, since this can distort text appearance. For example, when producing for 320x240 output, use a 320x240 preset.

Whether you crib Encore's menus, base your DVD menus on Premiere Pro title templates, or create your own from scratch, if you're producing a DVD, consider designing your titles so that they appear similar to your DVD menus.

#58 Working with Premiere Pro Title Templates

Where Are Titles Stored?

Unlike previous versions of Premiere Pro, version 2.0 stores all titles in the project file, not as separate files on your hard drive. You can import titles created in previous versions just like any other asset; just choose File > Import and browse until you find the file.

Premiere Pro includes a highly useful collection of title templates, which generally include at least four variants on a theme, and often many more. For example, Figure 58a reveals four variations of medical titles; here's what each category represents:

Figure 58a. Premiere Pro includes lots of useful templates you can use as is or customize to your liking.

Framecontent on the top and bottom, with video showing through in the middle. Side frames have content on either or both sides, with video showing through on the other side.
Lista full-screen title with a list field appropriate for a discussion list or meeting agenda.
Low3a lower-third title, which appears on the lower third of the video screen, with video playing above it. This is a good choice for supplying the name and title of the person in the video.
Titlea full-screen title appropriate for the opening and/or closing title of a movie.

Some templates have "HD" variations for high-definition productions , and "wide" variations for widescreen video.

You can save your own templates via the Template fly-out menu shown in Figure 58b . After saving, the template appears in the User Templates section, and you can choose it as the Default Still menu in the same menu. Thereafter, you can easily create new titles with that template in Premiere Pro's main menu by choosing Title > New Title > Default Still.

Figure 58b. Use the Template fly-out menu to create and store your own templates.

You Don't Have to Save Titles Anymore

Premiere Pro automatically saves every edit made to a title, so you can exit the Titler and you won't lose your most recent edits. The flip side is that if you decide you don't like your edits, you can't close the file and exit without saving; you have to manually undo.

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57 Synch Your Titles and DVD Menus