How to add titles in Premiere Pro CS4

Hey, everybody Dave Basulto at filmmakingcentral.com. We are back in Premier Pro CS4. We’re going to look at adding titles today to our video footage and I have loaded some of my wonderful artbeats.com footage, my golf footage and this gentleman is sitting in a really nice long hat. And we’re going to add some lower thirds and some text to let them know what the name of this is.

It’s really simple to do in Premier Pro. All you have to do is go up here into the title area, select new title. And we have an option of Default Still, Default Roll and Default Crawl. I like to start off with Default Still. You can also do base on templates if you have some kind of template you can bring in. I like to do Default Still because I can start there. I can do rolls and crawls from that if I want to by key framing.

So let’s just take a look at Default Still and it’s coming in and we’re going just to call this title for now and click OK. And it brings up to Adobe Title and now my title is right here, I’m going to drag this right now up into the titles because I like it to be nice and neat. So now we’ve got our titles going on here. This is the title here and you could see on the left hand side here, I got all my tools my Rotation Tool, Text Tool. I can do text horizontal or vertical and I can also make paths which is really cool and an area type tool.

I’ve got my pen tools where I can add some different anchor points. My rectangle tools that I can draw you know ellipses, rectangles and we’re going to do that in a second. This shows what color my font is and everything. And down here is a line center distribute when you're doing text. On the right hand side is going to be all the properties and we’re going to take a look at all that but very simple tools to use. If I just choose my text tool, type in here and write “I’m typing” and go back to my selection tool. I have some type, it’s really simple, it’s overlay. I can go over to the right hand side here and adjust my opacity.

I can adjust the positions. I can also do that by dragging, width and height, I can do the rotation or I can do some kind of fun thing. And here I can choose fonts, so I want to do and change my font to something different. I can choose any font that I like. I can choose Regular Bold font size so maybe this is too big. I want to go down to 50%. It will let me do that, my aspect ratio so I want to make it wider and narrower.

Leading, Kurning and tracking, all of these things that would see in any kind of text editing type of a word or pages or anything like that. Down here I have an opportunity to do my fill. So right now I have it filled with a solid and it’s solid white. Let me just choose something a little brighter so we can all see it and maybe a little thicker. That’s pretty bright. Let’s see a little less bright, there we go.

So and we got this layer now. If I want to choose a gradient I have enough to do linear gradients here and we can do something like that. And we can choose, I think for saving a project. We can go into a radial gradient, for color gradients, levels, eliminate which I don’t know why I would do that and ghost. So I’m just going to stand the solid for a moment and we’re going to choose our color once again.

And I can also go into choosing textures if I wanted to, add something in there. We’re going to get texture in, sheen, I think there should be some kind of sheen and we can change the angle which is kind of cool like little glare there. We don’t need that for now. We don’t need texture so close that up. Strokes, we want to add an outer stroke. We can click add and start doing depths like you're a little bevel look there kind of cool. Let’s just get out of that for now and of course drop shadows and make that 3D look. You need this dense and change the angle a little bit.

And it’s really simple to do, right? Down below here and let’s just get out of that. Let’s go back to the basics, down below here are a bunch of title styles that you can choose that are presets. So if I click there, this one I’m typing kind of cool. I got black, just really cool simple stuff on the file that you can start with and then completely tweak out as anywhere you’d like to.

So it comes with the bunch of style, very simple to do. So let’s get out of this and let’s create small lower thirds so maybe I want to have a bar going across here and put the name of my company. So I’m going to be a little artistic and I want to go something like this. Actually, I don’t want that let’s get rid of that. I believe it’s because I have this selected still I just want normal.

Let’s just go here and my bar going across and these lines here are title safe line so if you’re watching on television on this movie screen you’re going to want to have this on for the web, it’s not that big of a deal but so I’ve got my background. I’m sorry we just reselect it. Now let me just change the color because it’s hard to see something, let me get something little orangey.

So I have this bar I made just by clicking here and dragging. I can go into the handles here and change the height and change the width, do anything I’d like. I can add a shadow to this if I wanted to. I don’t know why I would. It can add strokes. It can add other stokes and of course change the colors of them. So do anything you like there, very customizable. Then I want to add text, so let’s go in here. I’m going to put “in da hole” for caddy shot and entertainment.

Direct my Selection Tool, I selected the wrong thing. I got my text spring it up here for a second. So now I want to have it more centered and there I just did click the center button as you would in the text editor. Obviously, it was the wrong color. Let’s take a look at making it smaller as well so maybe I want to go onto 40% just to play around. And I want it over here. Of course, you should use the right and the left arrow keys to move things around and more precisely. And then let’s go in here and bring down the opacity to maybe 75% and maybe I want something drop shadow.

I got the wrong thing selected. Okay, so I’m using a pen and sometimes it’s a little touchy. We don’t have drop shadow there just to bring it up a little bit and that’s it, you’re done.

You can do, you can add circles. You can do lines if you want, tons of things to do, your hearts content. Now all I have to do is click out of this and my title is now here and I just drag it on top. And let’s say I wanted to kind of fade in here, so I’m going to click that and go into my effects controls and we’ll go right at the beginning.

And from there I’m going to go into my opacity and change this to zero and it makes a key frame for me. I’m going to go ahead a few frames and change this back to 100% and let’s just play this through and you could see it over here. That’s going to be ready to pot, it hits the pot and the whole entertainment.

It’s simple to do Premier Pro CS4, adding titles to you’re footage. I hope you enjoy this, look for other tutorials on our site film making centrals and as always we love your comments so leave one or email us at info@filmmakingcentral.com. Thank you very much and have a great day.