Piece Guidelines/Suggestions

From YAHWiki

Lower Third Guidelines:

Playing with Photoshop, the font I have that looks closest to what we aired is Lucida Grande, sizes about 30.5 point for the first line, and about 24.5 point for the second. These sizes may not apply to your video editing program. If not, just try to match the above picture. Text appears to be either pure white, or perhaps 90% white. The brightest pixels in the C in Cambridge are about 98% white.

Text is backed by what looks like a 50%-opacity black box. The box starts about 12% from the bottom of the screen, and ends about 39% of the way up. Again, this will be easiest to match visually.

If you are using Final Cut Pro - here is how the lower thirds in episode 2 were produced.

The font was definitely Lucida Grande - at cctv this comes up as the default.

There were no half point sizes - the font originally comes up 36 point in cctv's edit suites. We changed the upper line to a little bit smaller - 32 is what I remember but maybe it was 30 (I don't have final cut or the timeline with me at the moment - Birgit originally chose the settings so maybe she remembers), the second line to 24 point.

Then there is a setting which can be set to "Bar" to produce a background, and another which we set to 40% to get the transparency actually used in the show. In Jim's referenced picture it looks like the transparency affects the foreground too, but maybe the darkening and blurring of the text is the result of transforming the picture before overlaying the extra text.

Sound Guidelines go here

Music & copyright stuff