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Free Lower Thirds plus Additional Resources

There are a ton of resources on lower thirds. Here’s a sampling of some free templates and tutorials that help leverage or create them in After Effects, Photoshop, and Premiere—and some to automate their production.

In Design Your Own Broadcast Lower Thirds at AEtuts+, Stefan Surmabojov uses simple built-in tools like masks, gradients, shadows and bevels in After Effects to create a broadcast quality lower third design.

Artbeats provided an After Effects tutorial video, Lower Thirds in Half the Time by Steve Holmes, and Ninja Crayon had a funny take on a newish Artbeats collection in Artbeats Lower Thirds?

There are several more tutorials on lower thirds on Adobe TV, one from Motionworks, Transparent Graphics in After Effects from Post Fifth Pictures, and relevant stuff by Alan Shisko in Making It Look Great 2 and Edgy Glints.

To generate things in mass, Adam Everett Miller has a workflow tutorial on AEtuts, Enough Lower Thirds To Feed A Small Country, which uses the well-documented CompsfromSpreadsheet script by Mike Cardeiro from AE Scripts.

Previous to this script, Dale Bradshaw developed a script (CSV to Text Layers) posted at his blog Creative Workflow Hacks in How to use a spreadsheet to generate Lower Thirds, Slates, Titles, etc. in After Effects. It was later updated for CS5.

Also, Harry Frank and others developed expressions for similar tasks; see Expressions and External Documents and Expressions and External Documents – Revised for CS4. These posts generated a good amount of use and follow-ups in their comments; also Lloyd Alvarez commented on a review by Ryan Ragle:

“While expressions are great because they are constantly dynamic, one of the downfalls of using them is that they need to be evaluated every frame in time which can become an exponential rendering problem when you have many layers with many expressions on each one. This particular problem of versioning I think is better solved with a script which only needs to be evaluated once at run-time.”

 

Update: see also the book excerpt from Jarle Leirpoll, Spreadsheets to Lower Thirds in Premiere.

And Using After Effects as an Advanced Titler for Premiere Pro by Chris Meyer has several video tutorials on that subject.

 

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