I’ve had a project come to me recently that involves video production. Admittedly most of the video work I’ve done in the past has involved recording of the computer screen. Either that or I was simply the person featured in the video and someone else would create the graphic assets used for titling and overlays.

The start of the project is about a month away so that gave me time to do some testing so that I’m properly prepared when the time came. Just for grins, I recorded a short video snippet at 720p. Once I had that snippet, I wanted to design a title screen for the videos and a variety of overlays.

If you don’t know the exact pixel count for 720p, it is 1280×720 pixels. The number of pixels for 1080p is 1920×1080. My first attempt at creating an overlay was in the video software. I was using Adobe Premiere Pro, but honestly I’d have similar struggles in most any video software. They just don’t offer all of the graphic tools that I want.

So after briefly struggling to do it in the video software, I decided to create the assets required in CorelDRAW and/or Corel PHOTO-PAINT. It is easy enough to import those graphics into most any video editor. One of overlays I wanted was some kind of a colored bar with my name on it. I did this graphic entirely in CorelDRAW. It required a rectangle with a fountain fill and two copies of the text. One piece of the text was filled with a color and the other was filled with black and slightly offset to give me a solid drop shadow. A small version of it is shown below.

Once created in CorelDRAW, I just had to export it to PNG format at the appropriate size. As I wanted it to go completely across the screen, it was 1280 pixels wide. Note that the sample above is only 500 pixels wide so it is less the half of the size of the version used in the video.

Obviously you can use as much creativity as you desire. For the title screen, I wanted to do even more! This graphic started in CorelDRAW as just plain old gray text. A rounded Contour was added in yellow and I played with the size of the Contour until I got exactly what I wanted. Once I had the Contour just right, I used the gray text to trim out the inside of the Contour that would be behind the text.

Now you might think just gray and yellow would be kind of boring and you’re right. Now that I had the two objects I wanted, I put each on a separate layer in CorelDRAW and exported them to CPT format so that each layer became an object in Corel PHOTO-PAINT. Why? Because having each object separate allowed me to apply different effects to them.

I used two different effects from Alien Skin’s Eye Candy to get the job done. For the gray object, I used a brushed metal effect. The yellow object got a beveled gold effect. When I was done, it looked like the sample below.

Once again, the sample shown here is much smaller than my original. As I am planning on various title screens, I used this same technique to do various words that may appear on the title screens. Then it is just a matter of importing the ones I wanted. I used this same technique for the cover of my CorelDRAW X6 Unleashed.

My technique may not be the answer for everyone, but I want you to know it is easy to create assets for video inside of CorelDRAW and/or PHOTO-PAINT. You get to use the software you know and the results look pretty darned cool!

Some of you may be wondering if you can watch the movies I’m discussing. When they are available, I’ll definitely let you know where to watch.