Freebie - Consistency/Simplicity of Titles for album videos (MS Powerpoint)

[GregB]

My video titling preference is 'simplicity'.  And for sanity, when doing videos for an album, I prefer to keep things consistent so, like the music, there is some continuity of the album's 'feel'.  (I also find it annoying to try and invent new visual approaches for every title as well as create the stories).

 

As I'm comfortable with MS Office, I do my video titling in Powerpoint for the following reasons:

• I can export all slides as JPGs in 16:9 at 1920x1080 resolution
• Text/graphics handling is much easier than in a video editor
• It's easy to create a 'Master slide' that contains the common elements for all slides
• If you change the Master slide, those changes will flow through every slide using those components
• You can still customise every slide
• You can still "Hide the background graphics" (i.e. everything in the Master slide) on any slide
• Once you have your basic slides, it's easy to duplicate them and make small relevant changes on the duplicates (e.g. song title, track number, image credits/sources, etc.
• you can 'SAVE AS' ALL slides as JPGs in one go, or just the one slide if e.g. if fixing an error (but you can't export a range!)

 

The available file gave me the following 'look' which was replicated through the 28 videos I created.  Colours/layout/fonts etc. are your personal choice ... I'm just recommending Powerpoint as an efficient manager for your titles.

 

 

I've settled on using WHITE text on a BLACK background.  I add such JPGs as clips above the music video layer, and change clip blending to 'ADD' which drops the black when interacting with the lower layer.  As video is by default black if nothing is on the timeline, then combining fade-in/out of the titles AND the video clips gives an overall effect of white text fading in, the video fading in, and the title fading out.   (If the video is very bright, then I put a dark shadow behind the text.) I've used this process on every video, e.g. 

 

 

This Powerpoint file I've provided uses common features available since Office 2007.  If unfamiliar with them, it'll be worth learning them via the thousands of relevant YouTube tutorials.  Unfortunately, Microsoft keeps f*cking around with old but well-oiled features every few months, so there's no guarantees!

 

Because the Songstuff site doesn't allow for MS Office files to be uploaded, this file can be downloaded indefinitely from my personal Cloud store: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1H5ZvOHOhkwlY-2H5DqLznikNbYGOpobo?usp=sharing

 

NOTE - Feb 2022.  
File availability should be OK for at least a couple of years but, if the link is broken, or the files aren't there, just post a message and I'll resurrect them ... if I'm still above ground and breathing 

 

Cheers,

Greg