Creating a basic lower third with the Avid Title tool

In this movie, we're going to cover how to create a very basic lower third title using the simple Avid Title tool. If you're following along with the exercise files and you're just jumping in now, again, please join me in the Hot Glass Chapter 2 project. And you'll just need to perform the AMA reeling step that I show you at the very beginning of the fourth movie in this chapter, Basic Editing. All right, so our glass blower, Suzi, needs a title to identify herself. There are a few different titling solutions in Avid Media Composer, but the simplest is the Avid Title tool.

So we'll cover it here in this movie. But later in the course, we'll be taking a look at Avid Marquee and the NewBlue Titler Pro. I'm going to park on the frame where I want the title to go, and then I'm going to come up to Tools, and Title Tool Application. And here, I'm going to choose the Title Tool. Now by default, we see the frame that the play head is on in the timeline. If I want to change that, I can just come back to Avid, and move my play head like so, okay? And then when I go back to the Title Tool, it updates.

If I don't want to create a title with an alpha channel, or a transparent background so that I can see my video, I just click on this little V button, and then I would create a title with an opaque background. Then I could come into this Background Color box and choose a different color if I wanted to. But we do want to see the background, so I'm going to click on V. Now, let's type our text using the Text tool over here, okay? I'm just going to type in, Suzi Perret, like so, and then I can use my selection tool and I can move this around.

I'm going to move this to the lower right, right inside my safe title lines. All right, so if I come over here, hopefully most of these controls are fairly obvious. They let me change my font. My font size, my justification here, and I can bold or italicize the text, and down here is my Kerning and Leading. Kerning is the value between letters, and leading is the value between lines. And even though this only has three values, loose, normal and tight, you can also just type in here.

So if I want these letters to be just slightly looser, I can just type in a three here, and I'll have a little bit more kerning. All right, so I will go ahead and change my font to Arial, and I'm going to leave everything else alone. And then I'm going to come over here, so that we can talk about color and opacity. First, you just want to make sure that your text is selected, which it is, and then I'm going to click on this box here, right to the right of fill. When I do, a color picker comes up and I can choose the color for my text.

I can either choose from this color spectrum, and you can see that it live updates in the monitor here. Or, you can use your eye dropper here and choose that color from the background. So, I'll choose this orange-ish yellow color right here, and I'll close this. And most times, that's all there is, just one color. But if you want, you can also add a gradient. So again, with my first box selected right here, you can see that I now have two other boxes to the right of it. So, if I click in this box, I can choose a color in which I'll keep my orange-ish yellow color here.

But I'll come to this one and I'll give it more of kind of a more true yellow color here. And so right now, I have a gradient going from left to right. If I want to change the direction of the gradient, I just click in this box, and drag however I want the gradient to go. So I'll have the orange on top and the yellow on bottom. Just sort of a very gentle subtle gradient. Now, to the right of this Fill Color Selection box is the Fill Transparency Selection. If I click on this, this allows me to make my entire title either opaque or transparent.

Okay, go back to opaque. It also allows me to gradually change my opacity. So if I, for example, wanted my title to sort of disappear into the background, I could click on this one right here and I'm holding the mouse down by the way to get this menu. But you can kind of come in here and adjust this like so, and it's sort of disappearing into the video. Not what I want, so I'm going to come back to opaque. All right, now, lets come down to shadow. I'm going to click on Shadow, and right away, I can choose a color. And this is going to do me no good until I actually display my shadow.

So let me close this for now, and I display my shadow by coming to the Shadow, Depth and Direction box. If I click out here, and release, you can see that my shadow appears. I'm going to sort of exaggerate this a little bit because I want to show you right here, I can change this from a drop shadow, to a depth shadow, okay? So I will leave it on depth, but I won't make it so drastic. I'll go ahead and go back to about 5 here. And now, if I click on shadow, I can change the color of my shadow.

Not really what I want, so I'm going to go back to black. And I can change the opacity, so I will do that. I'm going to go ahead and click on this box and hold down my mouse, and maybe bump my opacity down just a little bit, sort of soften that just a bit. And then finally, the last group of boxes is my Border. Again, setting the color and the opacity. Right away, it brought up the color picker when I clicked on that, but it's not going to do me any good again because I don't have a border by default. Okay, I have to actually come over to this little tool right here, and choose my border width.

A dotted line, means no border, so I'll just give my self a very thin border. You can see that it was added here. And again, so if I click on my Border Color Selection tool, I can choose another color if I want to. And this actually also allows me to adjust the transparency. Again, I'll just leave that alone. Now, let's say I absolutely love this, and I want to save it out. I just come over to this drop-down menu here, and choose Save As. And I am going to just call this Golden Gradient.

And you can see that I can cherry pick exactly what I want to save, okay? So we changed most of these actually. You can see that here's my Fill, my Shadow, my Border controls, but I'm just going to leave them all checked, and I'll say Done. And you can see now that if I click on this, it is an option that I can apply again to other text. All right, so one last thing, if I want to maybe apply an accent shape behind the text, I can. I will go ahead and get my square and rectangle tool and just drag a rectangle across this entire frame, like so.

And I have my lovely golden gradient going across. I am going to take away my shadow, so I'll just put a 0 in here. And I will also take away my border. And I will bring my opacity way down. So I'm going to click on the Fill Transparency Selection box, and bring it way down here, okay? Maybe not quite that much. And let's just send it behind my text. So I'm going to come up to Object, and Send to Back. And maybe just one other thing, instead of having a transparency across the board that is uniform, let's go ahead and have it be around 78 here, but let's have it disappear completely, like so.

So right now, it's going from left to right and it's disappearing, and I'm just going to adjust this so it's up and down, oh, wrong way. Okay, so that's kind of what I want. I want a barely there accent shape on tops, and it actually disappears as we go down. I can move that down just a bit. Okay, let's go ahead and save this back into Media Composer. I'm going to come up to File, and Save Title. And, I'm just going to call this Suzi Lower Third. And, I will save it in my 2.8 bin. And it's going to my media drive.

That resolution's okay. I'll say Save, and close my Title tool. And you can see that it loads right into the source monitor. And because I have my principle video on V1, and then my B-roll on V2, let's go ahead and add another video track, V3, Cmd+Y. And I want to patch V1 to V3. And let's go ahead and turn off all of these. And, I'm just going to mark an in and an out around the area that I want this title to go. And I'm going to park in a little bit because this is two whole minutes of a title here.

And in case I want to fade up, I don't want to go at the very beginning. And I'm just going to overwrite this. So again, overwrite is b. And if I play this right now. >> We're harnessing that energy making it respond to our- >> All right, so it sort of pops on and pops off. I can add a title fade by coming to the timeline Fast menu and going to this little E button, and I like a title fade of 8 frames up and down. And I'll say OK, and let's look again.

>> We're harnessing that energy and making it respond to our- >> And if I ever wanted to revise the title, I'm just going to park on the title, click on the Effect Mode button, and then click on Edit Title. And then that brings up my Title tool. And it wants to know if I want to promote it to Marquee, the other program. No, I want to stay in Title tool. And here I am, back in the Title tool, all right? So that was the very quick and dirty dime tour of the Avid Title tool. It will be only time we go over it in this course, but I did want to show it to you so that you can create those quickie lower thirds if you ever need to.