Friends,

It’s me again, this time with another long question, though slightly related to my earlier question.

Generating Titles for Film – what is the most preferred method?

For "cost" reasons, if we have to go for the “in-camera” (shot) titles, in which ways we would be limiting ourselves of the creative possibilities?

Also, if we decide to generate film titles digitally, what is the best software around to do the job?

Can someone explain the flow chart of
- “shooting the titles in camera”,
drawing a comparison with
- “composing the digital titles and recording on to film”

(who are the personnel involved in getting it done, what file formats are used etc)

It is known that “DV footage blown up into 35 mm film” will have lesser quality because of the low resoulution of the source (DV/HD). Can we offset that problem by “100% digitally generated" titles, where we have control on the resolution to be used, and then record them into films?


Thank You.
bhangima

There are several ways to do titles "in camera" so to speak. There are machine that plug into the camera that are called text generators. These can be rented for fairly cheap.

Another way to do them, is printed on "cards". You would shoot the card, turn off the cam, replace it with the next one, and repeat for all the cards.

Traditionally, if titles were to be seen over the scene, then they were actually printed onto glass sheets that were placed in front of the camera during the shot. However, this is really a pain. If you are looking for titles over your footage, basically any video editing program can handle this. Its just an overlay. For my titles, I usually use Premiere with the TitleDecko plugin.

If you want 3D, or animated title sequences, then you can use After Effects, or your favorite 3D program. I use 3D Studio Max, but before that, I used to use a pretty cool program called Cool3D. Cool3D is a great program to start off with, as it is very self explanitory, and easy and fun to use. Programs like 3D studio max, have a huge learning curve. Cool3D, you can become really good with it in just a day or so.

If you want to have a combination of both 3D/animated titles, AND have them over your footage, then just do one of two things.
Either set the background color to true blue or green, and then use premiere or a similar NLE program to key out (chromakey or color key) the blue and composite it over your footage.
-or-
Set the background color to black, and just use a luminosity key or a matte overlay.

that glass method was used for matte painting, usually if you want titles on a print you made a matte of the letters, placed that in front of the print, then rewound the film and shot the inverse of the matte with whatever color gel you wanted the titles to be, then when the negative was processed, it would have the word mattes printed on it (this is how they did most of visual effects in Star Wars)

On set titles always look really neat, like in School of Rock, the titles are put on a person's jacket, on the flyers on the wall, on the neon.

I like titles that are put into something like picture frame with the name or something, or going through a photo album in the beginning.

if you're talking about making titles for a film print digitally, the you'll need to transfer the footage, then make your titles, then use a digital printer to make a new negative with the titles on it, and i guess most compositing programs are independent of resolution, so it will look good no matter what.

if you're shooting DV and THEN blowing it up to 35mm, you might want to try making the titles in the video editor first at DV resolution, then outputting, THEN printing it on to the negative, so that way the titles don't look way out of place in terms of quality and texture.

Thank You for your respones, friends. That helps.