Creating and Saving Your Text

At this point in the hour , I think you have the tools to create basic text to suit your project. Once you've finished creating your text, select File, Save As and then select a location ”your "scratch disk" is a logical choice. Give it a descriptive name and then click Save.

Once your text is saved, you can always reedit it. If you create a unique text and graphic style that you think will help viewers recognize your productions or give them some consistency, you can simply change the wording in saved text files while retaining the style. This comes in very handy if you've created a standard way to "super" locations or interviewees' names .

Any newly created and saved text shows up automatically in your Project window with a page icon indicating it's a graphic. Drag it to a video track above your project. You can Alt/Option-scrub through the piece to preview it or use Premiere's new real-time preview feature by pressing Shift+Enter.

If you're creating a video project for viewing on an NTSC TV set, you want to make sure your text falls within the so-called NTSC "safe zone." Most TV sets are guilty of overscan ”they cover the edges of the original full-screen video images. So you want to make sure your titles fall within the safe zone. To check that when using the Title Designer, use your workspace's main menu bar and select Title, View, Safe Title Margin. If you want to see the safe zones on your Source and Program Monitors, click the Monitor fly-out menu and select Safe Zones (see Figure 8.20).

Figure 8.20. The Program Monitor with Safe Zones turned on.