Star Wars Type Titles

ADinelt wrote on 1/13/2004, 6:01 PM
I have seen some questions on the forum regarding creating Star Wars type titles. Not sure if anyone has done this yet, but here is what I did to get close to the effect.

1) From the Text & Backdrops tab, select Credit Roll then choose Plain Scrolling on Black.
2) Adjust the text, color and font size to suit your needs.
3) Then go to the Video FX tab, select Deform then add Squeeze Top to your title.
4) Set the Top parameter to .380 and the Bottom parameter to -1.000.
5) In Pan/Crop, expand the Pan/Crop frame so it is almost 1.5 times larger than the video frame. Keep the Pan/Crop frame aligned with the bottom of the video frame. The circle in the middle of the 'F' appears about 3/4 of the way up from the bottom of the black video frame.
6) Holding down the CTRL key, drag the right side of the title to slow it down as it plays. I slowed my title down by about 2 times and it plays just nicely, giving plenty of time to read the title.
7) Press play and watch. It is not 100% exact, but in the example I am playing with it comes pretty close to the Star Wars style. It looks a bit choppy in the preview window, but once rendered it scrolls quite smoothly.

Add a star background, some John WIlliams music and give Mr. Lucas a run for his money!

One other thing. On my PIII - 650 with 384 meg RAM, it takes about an hour to render a 14 second title. Oh, one day I will get a fast computer dedicated to video...

Hope this is of some use...
Al

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 1/13/2004, 6:49 PM
Can you upload a sample project file for us to take a look at?

http://www.vegasusers.com/vegshare/
djcc wrote on 1/13/2004, 8:03 PM
This is exactly what I would love to see more of.... an explanation of an effect people like, coupled with a specific project example we can all see for ourselves!!!
IanG wrote on 1/14/2004, 1:38 AM
>Add a star background

You can get some wonderful images from Astronomy Picture of the Day or create your own using Universe.

Ian G.
ADinelt wrote on 1/14/2004, 3:08 AM
I uploaded StarWarped.zip to the web site Chienworks suggested.

I put together a quick little Star Wars clip which includes the star background, titles, panning down to a planet and rebel blockade runner flying past overhead. The project, a couple of bitmapped images and a .mp3 file are included in the zip file.

Please remember that I am still relatively new at this whole video thing and there are probably many more (and better) ways of accomplishing the title effect. My audio editting definitely leaves a lot to be desired. This was just for fun anyways.

I am always open to suggestions as to how things can be done better or more efficiently.

Thanks...
Al
Steve Grisetti wrote on 1/14/2004, 6:27 AM
MovieMaker 2, a free download for Windows XP from the Microsoft site has, I believe, the Star Wars titling (and a couple other cool titling effects).

You can create it in MovieMaker and then export it as an AVI.

Unfortunately, then you have the added step of using free download VirtualDub to change the type 1 AVI to a type 2 AVI so MS3 can read it -- but, for the price (free), it might be worth the extra work to save some effort, if that's not a contradiction of terms;)
ADinelt wrote on 1/14/2004, 6:46 AM
Does MovieMaker work under Win 98SE or do you require XP or later?

OT: Windows 98 gets a reprieve...
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/TECH/biztech/01/13/windows.support.ap/index.html



Thanks...
Al
Steve Grisetti wrote on 1/14/2004, 8:32 AM
Unfortunately, MovieMaker only works with XP.
jack221 wrote on 1/14/2004, 11:23 AM
This was VERY cool. Nice job. I found that you have to render it to really get the full effect, in preview mode the scrolling was kind of jumpy. Great examples of how to do some neat things.
ADinelt wrote on 1/14/2004, 3:04 PM
Thanks very much jack221.

Love this stuff and it's great to have software that works so well!! Thanks Sony!

One thing I did notice when viewing this on the TV, is that the stars sort of show through the blockade runner. Does anyone know why that might be happening? This is really the first time that I have tried chroma-keying objects other than titles.

Al
djcc wrote on 1/14/2004, 4:49 PM
Nice job Al. I don't know if it makes a difference in rendering time or not, but you could have set your title text to a transparent background, rather than black, which you then chromakey out.

The other thing I wondered about was your spaceship.... I'm no chromakey expert, but I was wondering if you could have had a transparent background there too (alpha channel??) on the original graphic, rather than using chromakey.... I'm hoping one of those with substantially more experience than I can answer that question....

=Don=
ADinelt wrote on 1/14/2004, 5:50 PM
Thanks Don...

I will try setting the text to a transparent background and see if that makes a difference in rendering time. As for the blockade runner, that was just a graphic I grabbed off the internet which was originally on a white background. I use Paint Shop Pro 5 and will look into whether it can make a background transparent or not. It would probably simplify things a whole lot if it can.

I will let you know how things turn out...
Al

Hmmmm... my dad was right. Two heads are better than one...
ADinelt wrote on 1/14/2004, 7:38 PM
It does indeed appear to have a dramatic impact in the rendering times if you use transparent backgrounds vs. chroma-key.

By making the text have transparent backgrounds as well as the blockade runner graphic and removing the chroma-key effects, the render time dropped down to about 1/3 of the time it took before.

I had to save the graphic as a PNG file instead of a BMP as BMP does not support transparent colors (at least according to Paint Shop Pro 5).

Thanks again for the tip Don...
Al
djcc wrote on 1/14/2004, 9:09 PM
Happy to hear it worked out! Most of the folks on this forum have already forgotten more than I will ever know about video editing, but its nice to know I actually came up with a worthwhile suggestion for a change! lol!

=Don=
Lessp wrote on 1/16/2004, 4:28 PM
For detailed instructions and an example of how to use Windows Movie Maker to add Star Wars and other type titles to movies made with Screenblast visit
http://www.video.ncsparks.com
hbwerner wrote on 1/17/2004, 6:33 AM
I notice midway in this dialog that someone mentioned using Microsoft MovieMaker to get a clever animated title directly without all the playing around to do the same thing in MS, noted in the first message. MovieMaker came bundled with XP when I bought my latest computer last summer, and, while it doesn't have the ability to alter title animation, it has a nice variety of clever animations which you just click on to use. I still use it to do some titles which I save to .avi, and the load into MS. It's actually a lot quicker than doing them in MS. Further animation can be added in MS if desired. Two animations that MM has that MS can't do are a paint drip transition in a title, and a newspaper with photo inset and typeable headline, with built in zoom to the photo. It would be nice if MS had more basic title and transition animations that could be used when you don't want to go through a bunch of steps to do the same thing. Of course, it would probably cost twice as much.
hbwerner wrote on 1/18/2004, 11:29 AM
I looked at Lessp's reference, and wondered why I was able to use titles directly from MovieMaker saved to .avi and opened in MS? The reference says to save to DV in MovieMaker and then use a conversion program to get the usable .avi. It also mentions .avi1 and .avi2, and I wondered what the difference was.