Appendix 1

Titles for Digital Video and Film
Photoshop is an incredibly powerful image processing and editing system. While it was originally
created to edit photo images, it has become an indispensable image editor used in all graphic processes
including motion picture special effects, animation, and graphic design (see Figure 8.2).
Figure 8.2 Photoshop title
While Photoshop is a pixel-based image processing system, on later versions, the shape and text tools
are vector based. Fonts and shapes can be created and moved, resized, recolored, and rasterized into
pixels at any image size.
The images must be rasterized into the proper size for import into Final Cut Pro. The images can be
imported in a size larger than the editing format being used in Final Cut Pro and resized and rendered
in Final Cut Pro. But, rerendering such titles in Final Cut Pro into a larger size or a different video
format, especially taking SD to HD, it will degrade them severely. There are two workfl ow options
to solve this problem:
• Render two versions, one in the fi nish format and one in the working format. Edit the working
format into the off-line and take the fi nish version to the online for integration into the edit.
• Render only a fi nal version of the title and edit it into the off-line. Scale it to fi t the screen in the
off-line format and render. It may not look good, but it will suffi ce for the off-line. Keep the
original in a separate folder and replace the resized off-line version in the online.
There is an assumption that there is no point for images to have more rows of horizontal pixels than
the number of lines used to display them. Two pixels being displayed on one line is, after all, still
one line. As there are only 480 visible lines in DV, normally, there is no point in creating an image
with more than 480 vertical pixels. This concept limits the number of horizontal pixels to 640 (480
× 1.33 = 638.4). To improve the horizontal resolution, a new standard was developed for the DV
format, NTSC CCIR 601 where the pixel aspect ratio is not 1 : 1, but approximately .88 : 1, or,
narrower than tall. This allows the number of horizontal pixels to be 720, or an image size of
720 × 480. DV uses this same 720 × 480 size in a 16 × 9 aspect ratio. In this aspect ratio, the pixel
is now wider that tall. The difference is how the CCIR 601 format is displayed. A fl ag can be set in
the “metadata,” information recorded along with and embedded in the video, that this should be displayed
at 16 × 9.
121