Supered titles

[Marty Hamrick]

Back when 100% of my work was film,supered titles were shot on a high con black and white stock (can't remember the emulsion number,but I remember it was an Eastman stock High Contrast Positive) and spliced opposite your picture in the A and B rolls.Very simple,especially if you shot reversal which was about 75% of what I shot then.Neg was a little trickier,we had to make an IP of the scenes that needed the titles,shoot A wind titles (backlit Kodaliths,reversed),make an A/B roll cut of the titles and scenes and make a dupe neg from that.

Since everything is electronic now,how do they do supered titles?At what stage do they go in?

Marty

[David Mullen ASC]

Titles over picture generally where not "burned in" with A-B rolls because of a certain transparency that still resulted, even with reversal. Often you used positive and negative hold-out mattes in an optical printer to create black letter shapes with a drop shadow that you then dropped the white letters into.

 

So basically you'd make a color IP of the background, bi-pack that with clear film with black titles (hi-con b&w film) and then project this onto a color IN so that the letter shapes were left unexposed by the hold-out matte, and then you'd expose another pass with clear letters on a black background in the projector side of the optical printer. So the white letters would then be exposed into the black (unexposed) letters on the IN.

 

Titles are still done this way, as well as digitally. In that case, the background would be scanned in, titles added in a computer, and recorded back to film negative. Or for video-only (like TV), the background just gets telecined to video and video titles added in post.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

Pet hate: interlaced title animation on a progressive production. You can even tell in fades, but often there's other flashiness going on these days. Worse, for me this generally means a TV movie that's been mastered in NTSC, so it's 30i titles on a 24p project which has been 3:2'd, which is a hideous unholy combination and looks cheap as hell.

 

Phil

[Marty Hamrick]

Thank you gentlemen,I remember sending cut scenes to an optical house for the work to be done with drop shadows and titles with animation.For the most part,clients for industrials just cut the supers in in their A and B rolls.I would've thought it was all electronic these days and then burned in at some later stage.Good to hear optical printing isn't dead.

Marty

[Michael Nash]

Pet hate: interlaced title animation on a progressive production.

Yeah, that always screams "cheap" to me even, even when it's done on an otherwise big-budget network show. It probably doesn't look as bad on PAL is it does on NTSC!

 

It's refreshing to see some newer shows posted on 24P HD with the appropriate titles. "Crossing Jordan" comes to mind, where it looks like the supered titles are added in 24P HD before it all gets downconverted for conventional broadcast. It helps the titles "sit back" onto the plane of the image by matching resolution and temporal motion.

[Alvin Pingol]

You can even tell in fades

I wasn't really aware of this until I tested it myself a few months ago. You really can see a noticeable change, and I think it makes a big difference.