Add text & lower thirds to Premiere Pro

Hi everyone, we are going to create something called a Lower Third. It's called a Lower Third because it's lower, in the third part of the screen. Not half way, not on the top, that's Top Third, there's a Lower Third. Doesn't really matter if it's on the right hand side or the left hand side, we are doing a Lower Third. If you want to call it just text on a screen, that's what it is as well, Lower Third is more like a generic term, for something like-- traditionally it's this, I'll show you. 

So let's have a look, news bulletin, and watch, this guy, stuff appear here. Where is it? Wait for a second, and then gives you, at the bottom, a little Lower Third that says, this guy's name is Robin Brant, and he's a China correspondent. Same thing for this one here. Let's look at another one. So that's like a traditional Lower Third, but you can use it for anything, it's the same term. I use it quite a bit for - let's have a look. - for social media stuff, so when I start talking, you've probably seen at the beginning of this course, just gives you, like still a Lower Third, it's in that position, lower third of the screen. It could be a logo, or text, typically not an image. Yeah, let's work out how to actually do that Lower Third now in Premiere Pro. 

All right, to create our Lower Third's text, we are going to use the Text Tool, there he is there. The bottom of this little tool bar, click on it once, and then click where you want it to get started. I'm going to kind of start it about here, because I know it's going to type off to the right, click once, start typing stuff. Your Type might look different from mine, I'm Daniel Walter Scott. To adjust the text we're going to open up a panel. So we're going to work on 'Window', we're going to go to one called 'Essential Graphics', click on that. Opens with this gang over here. 

So a lot of your time in Premiere Pro, is going to be using Lumetri Color, Essential Sound, and Essential Graphics. So what we want to do is, with our Move Tool have this selected, and just make sure our Playhead's kind of in the middle here. Have it selected and click on this one that says Edit. This is the best way of editing text in Premiere Pro. If you use the old titling thing-- we're not going to use that anymore, just so you know, this is the replacement for titling if you have used it before. So we have that selected, we can change the text up here. 

So let's look at a couple of things, let's change, we won't go through all the text features, because Centered, Left Align, Right Align, you can work out, there's a lot of just basic text features. Pick a font, we're going to pick anything. I'm going to pick one that I'm using lots of, Museo Sans. Museo. That's been way too long, picking font, I'm going to use this one. Size wise, drag it up, drag it down, to, mine feels appropriate about that sort of size. Obviously you want to design for the longest name you've got. If you've got a series of interviews, and it's with, Dan Scott, it's very short. So you can do some stuff, but if you've got, a really long name, I can't even guess a really long name, but Danielle Wallen Tarantino, you know, big long names, you're going to actually have to, make sure that it kind of like starts over here. 

So we're going to get it to about there, and we are-- how am I moving it, that's one question, is back to this Arrow Tool, or the Selection Tool, so Type Tool for editing, Arrow tool, and you can click anywhere on the word and just move it around. So get it to where you want, and pick a font, pick a size. Done that, what else we want to do? Let's look at some of the more unique text features for Premiere Pro. It's down here in this Appearance Panel. Let's have a little look at Shadow. It adds a Drop Shadow, actually let's turn that one off, let's look at Background first, so let's click on 'Background'. 

You notice it puts a background behind my text, just to kind of help pull it out. So let's say that I want to do background, but I'm going to do a black background. So it's got a background behind it. Let's change the color of it, by clicking in this, like little square here, and let's open up on my other monitor. I want black, so black is, see this little circle, you can kind of drag it around to pick your color. If you want to change the hue, see this little slider here, say that I want pink, I slide it down to here, and then I move this around to decide on the shade of pink that I want. In my case I want it to be black, so I'm going to drag it all the way up here, and instead of just kind of like getting it close just drag it past. So I've-- I keep my finger on my mouse, I'm dragging, dragging, dragging, and I'm dragging way past where it needs to go, just so it gets really jammed up in that corner, never let go of my mouse, and I've clicked 'OK'. 

So I've got a black box in the background here. I'm going to change this one here, the size around it. We're going to drag it up, click, hold, drag, drag, drag. I'm going to drag it right up, can you see where it is? So it adds a box around it, and I like the opacity. Say you don't, you want it to be solid, you can play with this slider here. Drag the opacity right up. So have a play around with these, get your name in there, it's probably weird having your name, type it in, put my name. Get the opacity how you want it. Get the size how you want it, and we will look at Drop Shadow. 

How do I show you the Drop Shadow really well? Let's turn Background off, let's look at Shadow. I'm going to do the same thing, for some reason the default is like yucky gray, and then it's transparent out, I don't know why. It's the default anyway, it is at the moment, so I'm going to make it full black, and I'm going to leave the opacity probably. I'm just going to kind of show you the basics for a Drop shadow. You probably know how to do a Drop Shadow, but I'm going to extend it out. 

Let's move it up here to make it easier to see, you can see it there. There it is there. So you've got-- we're not going to cover this too much but you got distance, and you've got how fuzzy it is, it's this last one. Can you see, it kind of gets more blurry, and now if I ring it right in, it's nice and sharp. It's up to you what you want to do. You can expand it around the outside of it. Basically this is what I do, this is the direction. 

Can you see, if I grab the size, and I drag this, you can kind of drag it around. Click it, just move it around, you'll get a feel for it. Can you see it changing up the top here? So what I do is often, straight up and down, oh, I've spun mine around twice. So I'm going to set mine back to 0. So straight up and down, I might go to actually 80°, so it's pointing straight down. I'm going to lower it right down, and I want the blurry right down. What am I doing now, Dan? Just a real simple Drop Shadow, probably the opacity straight up, and probably put that down to maybe something like 2, just a real subtle, maybe 3. Subtle Drop Shadow. There's no right or wrong, the Drop Shadow, but that's my Drop Shadow, anyway. So I'm going to actually leave the Drop Shadow on, and turn the Background on in one go, just because. 

Now a couple of other things I want to show you, is where it appears in the Timeline, I just randomly put it wherever my cursor was. So it's at the wrong time. So what we're going to do is we're going to zoom out, so I'm going to hit minus, ' - ', ' - ', so I can see it. I'm going to zoom a little bit, because what you want to do is grab your Selection Tool, and drag the center of it, trying to grab the ends of it, grab the center of it to kind of move the core of it along. I'm going to kind of move it over here, move my Playhead, and hit ' + ', because remember, you zoom in to wherever this thing is, so if you zoom in over here, zooming in the wrong bit, just get your Playhead where you want it, zoom in a bit. 

And how long do you want it? So the duration is in there by default. You can change the duration of this, how long it appears on screen, in your Preferences, but for the moment, let's just say I want to shorten it up. I could just grab the side and just drag it in. It just gets shorter, just on the screen for a short amount of time. Let's have a look. It's up to you. It's a bit of pacing to see how much information is there, how long does it need to be read. Mine's pretty short, so I'm going to, maybe, I want it to kind of finish at the cut, at the transition here.Could be a Cross Dissolve, and it's going to start here. 

Now a couple of other things when you're working in here, how do you change the text? Grab the Type Tool, and you can kind of just click on it in here, and start working on it. Change the spelling, or you can do it up in here, you can double click it, and just start typing over the top, depends on how much text you have. You might have lots of different parts of text, for the moment I've only got single. So you can just kind of like double click it up here, and start typing over the top. Typing over the top. I'm going to undo. And that is it, position it. 

The one thing when you are positioning text, now when it's going-- it depends on its end format. So if it's going out to television, you need to be a bit more specific about how far away from the edges it is. So if I put it down here, and I'm on a TV that doesn't quite suit my Aspect Ratio, or the shape of my video, it is going to get cut off. So it's very common to have something called Title Safe. Where is it, Dimension In and Out. I'll show you that later on, a bit more detail, but just be wary that it's probably, probably good design as well, just to kind of not have it right at the edges, but know that some screens--

Say you're doing this and it's going to be shown in a-- on a TV inside of a showroom, and go be on loop, you make like some sort of, I don't know, property developer, and it's just going through lots of videos, and it's going to be on loop, it's going to be on a physical TV, and it's going to maybe get cut off, so just keep it away from the edge. 

One last thing before we actually move on is, we-- it just kind of appears, like, ta-ta. What we might do is actually get it to fade in and fade out a bit more nicely. Now there is animation, which we're going to do later but to be honest, to do this we're just going to use a technique we've already used. It's cheap, it's quick, and it works. We're going to go to our Effects Panel. We're going to find, under Video Transitions we're going to find our Dissolve, and we are going to find Dip to Black, no, sorry, Cross Dissolve. Click it, drag it, and dump it on the front here, and we'll dump it on the back as well. 

So we're using transitions normally to transition between two shots, but you can use it just like this, watch. Just fades in, and fades out. Nice, you can obviously extend it like we did before, to have it long fade in or a long fade out, then just kind of time it. Can I read it before it disappears? Probably. Maybe a bit longer. 
All right, that is Lower Thirds, or just text on the screen, in the bottom right hand corner. Yeah, let's get onto the next video.