A title in Pinnacle Studio’s Title Editor is built from elements of four types:

The background layer: By default, the background is fully transparent. For overlay titles, this is normally what you want. For special purposes, or for full-screen titles, you can choose a color, a gradient, an image, or video for the background. For additional flexibility, the Background Settings also include an opacity control. See Background settings.

Video and image layers: The resources that make up these layers originate in the Videos, Photos and Movie Projects sections of the Library. The layers support the same operations as text and shape layers except for the application of Looks.

Text and shape layers: These are ‘vector-based’ layers, meaning that they are stored not as bitmapped images like video and photo files, but as a kind of ‘recipe’ for recreating the images from straight and curved line segments to which properties (e.g. color) and special effects (e.g. blur) can be applied. Like video and image layers, these vector-based layers can be dragged, resized, rotated and grouped, and you can apply Motions to them. Unlike the other layers, however, they can also be customized with Looks from the Looks section of the Presets Selector. See Preset Looks for details.

Motions: Motions are animation routines that can be applied to any layer in the title composition except the background. Motions are selected and applied from the Motions tab of the Presets Selector. Once a Motion has been applied to a layer, its timing can be adjusted in the Layer List timeline. See Preset Motions and “The Layer List for further information.

To create a text layer, either click the add text button in the header bar of the Layer List timeline, or simply double-click an empty area of the Edit Window. A new layer containing default text will appear. The text is automatically selected, and will be replaced if you now begin to type.

To create a shape layer, click the add shape button (to the right of add text), then make a selection on the pop-up menu. The available choices include circle, square, ellipse, rectangle, horizontal and vertical ‘pill’ shapes, and triangle. Upon selection, a new layer of the given shape and a default size appears in the center of the Edit Window.

The remainder of this chapter provides details on editing the background and layers in the Title Editor.