Do you want some nice-looking animated graphics in your video without spending years learning After Effects? (Or maybe you don’t feel like paying $50 a month, or designing something from scratch!) Use this tool, and then drop the resulting titles into any editing software on the planet!

The Titlemaker is a tool that allows video editors to quickly and easily produce animated titles for their videos. Just choose a template, enter some text, maybe change some colors around, hit Render, and about 20 seconds later, you’ll have a QuickTime video you can drop into any editing software on the planet, as a title. No need to spend hours designing something from scratch! No need to drop a bunch of money on the entire Adobe suite or some baseline-usable After Effects template from pond5!

Interesting! But how does it work?

The Titlemaker was inspired by two things.

1. Me doing a ton of research online (Sales Safari) digging up video producer pain points in creative communities, and discovering that a LOT of people really just need to get this video shipped without having to spend a bunch of time designing templates from scratch. These people are video editors, not motion graphic designers.
2. One of my favorite video production tools in the world, Open Broadcaster Software, cleverly uses web pages as overlays using its Browser Source plugin. Anything a web page can do – whether it be CSS animation, fancy customized Javascript, interactivity… the list goes on and on and on – you can use as a live, real-time, fully-alpha-channel’d graphical overlay. The closest thing I’ve found to this sort of flexibility in the broadcast world is Ross Xpression, except that this technology is free instead of $x0,000.

My thought: if webpages (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SVG, endless JS frameworks, etc.) have gotten so incredibly powerful and versatile, why limit that to live production? Why not use that same superpower to make the lives of video editors a lot easier?

The Results

The Titlemaker’s stand-out success was the custom-branded version I made for a former employer. It was used extensively by everyone who made videos for the company.

My Conclusion

This was a good idea based on solid research, but I think it’s far from having reached its potential! Custom-branded Titlemakers could very well prove to be a viable business model.

I’m also pondering the idea of turning this into a freemium-ish service. This would allow for things such as saving brand colors and logos, LOTS more title templates, and maybe even the ability for users to develop their own titles!