The Titlers Page.

I figured I’d have a separate page for my titling programs, since the list was getting quite long on the Downloads Page. All of these are for Mac OS X on PowerPC CPUs, or the 3 revisions of the OS that support Rosetta, which are Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard. All these programs are available by request, through e-mail, and a few are now available to download directly from here. If you choose the e-mail option, just say: “John, please send me whatever titlers, and I have a limit of so many MB per e-mail message.” And then I can fix you up with what you need, hopefully within 24 hours. Although now that I have more room, I may upload the rest for you to get.
In case you missed it, what they do, is generate image sequences, which you can use with a program like Quick Movie, to make animated titles for iMovie, or whatever video program you have. You can put a transparent image over the top for your message or whatever, and see the animation where your alpha channel determines what’s seen. Most programs support a background image, but some don’t, if the animation is supposed to be the entire background.
The programs used to require a screen resolution of at least 1280 × 960 pixels, which meant that even my MacBook would chop stuff off. But recently I’ve been miniaturising them to fit in a 800 × 600 pixel resolution. So even early iMac G3s & iMac G4s will be fine now. The output resolution is still 960 × 720 pixels for the 4:3 aspect, or 1280 × 720 pixels for the 16:9 aspect, but you will only see the image with ¼ of the pixels in the program. For those of you with newer systems that don’t support PowerPC software — you’ll need to use something like PearPC, QEMU or VirtualBox. (None of the programs require Quartz Extreme.) I know this might be a pain for some of you, but I’m doing these programs for myself, and you are getting them for nothing.

Program Name:	Sample Icon:	Sample Screen Shot: (Click on any one to see it bigger.)	Archive Size:	Information:
Rising Shapes			1.35 MB	This has white shapes that rise up from the bottom to the top, like bubbles. It currently only supports images as alpha channels to determine what the objects look like. They’re always drawn in white.
Sliding Glows			981 KB	This has several glowing rectangles that slide from left to right across the screen at random speeds.
Cloudy Titler			1.98 MB	This one moves white clouds in either direction across the screen. It can be quite effective over unusually coloured backgrounds.
Sliding Panels			4.26 MB	This moves transparent horizontal and vertical bars randomly about. It sounds a bit boring, but it’s actually quite cool. You can also change the panels to skinnier ones of your own design if you wish. Just get creative!
Falling Spinners			853 KB	This one drops spinning objects from the top of the screen like leaves, snow flakes, flowers and the like. It does have the “white bug” though, which means alpha channels aren’t done properly somewhere in the works. So stick to objects with “sharp” non-glowing / non-soft edges. I could “fix” it, but I can’t be bothered.
Funky Spinner			1.49 MB	Has a centrally rotating object in which 8 non-rotating objects orbit it. They spin around it, but they don’t turn on their own axis. Kind of like a ferris wheel. The orbiting images can be made to be drawn on top or underneath. It can rotate either way, and the orbits can be rotated separately in the opposite direction if you wish. Plus their distance from the centre can be adjusted as well. You can also disable the centre image and the orbiting ones, depending on what you want to do. The central image is also fully smoothed during rotation, so it doesn’t look all rough. Even if you just want a rotating background image behind some text, this program can manage that too. • I’ve now done this as a mini version, which takes up less screen space. It also has better file naming. I may upload it here at some stage. But for now, you can write in and request it. Out of all my titler programs, this one is probably the most sluggish. 200 frames may take as many seconds, or a bit more.
Hypno-Shapes			993 KB	This program draws shapes from a large size, down to a small one in the middle, and colours each one based on those found in whatever bitmap you choose to use. (Although you have to have the images at a set size for each aspect ratio.) As each frame changes, the colours shift along by an amount you can specify, so you get a kind of zooming effect, which can go either in or out. You can use Quartz to draw with anti-aliasing, but it doesn’t make much difference in my opinion. Shape types are: Circle, square, star, hexagon, rectangle and oval. The last 2 fitting more so to your choice of aspect ratio. Like the other programs, you can add your own overlay image (+ separate alpha channel file). This one is a bit sluggish, so put the kettle on while you’re doing 200 or more frames. The end result though is certainly eye catching though. • This has now been updated to version 2 which supports text file lists of co-ordinates to draw more shapes! • I’m now offering the mini version, which takes up less screen space, and will be more suitable for lower resolution laptop Mac LCDs and for virtual machine uses. You can now download this right here, instead of having to request it.
FireWorx			883 KB	This one has 12 colours of glowing dots & also stars, plus a “rocket” glow. You can have the particles spin for a spiral looking explosion, and also a slight gravity effect when they fade. Both of these are optional though. You can select your choice of colour or have the fireworks all random. Have from 1 to 15 fireworks at once, and of course choose your own background and overlay image. This one isn’t all that sluggish to run either. This has also been updated to have optional “trail” effects. You can edit any of the bitmaps for this program, but they must be kept the same size. The included bitmaps are stars, but you could make your own dots or other shapes. Lastly, this program needs to be closed and restarted each time, because currently, it doesn’t reset various variables when you hit the Start button. You can now download this here. (This is still the original large size version.)
Quad-Titler			1.8 MB	This is a 4-in-1 dealie, and offers you the following modes: 1: “Blurries” — customisable moving shapes that blur the background. This mode MUST have a background set, or you’ll just get an error message. You can choose how much extra blurring you want in this mode too, and of course, if you use a “shape bitmap” with a grey colour, rather than black, it will make it less blurry. A shape bitmap determines the shape of the blur per moving object, and every one can be different. (It must have 12 @ once though.) 2: A lava lamp style dealie with tinting of the distant wax, and an optional ripply background. This is actually 2 bitmaps, one of which is offset by 20 pixels, and a ripple control bitmap determines how much of the distortion you see. This is fully customisable as well. 3: Static, like a TV that isn’t tuned to anything. This mode has no background support. Pixels can be from 1 × 1 to 4 × 4 in size, with your choice of pure black & white, 4 shades of grey or 256 shades of grey. With video compression though, you really don’t need much more than the 4 level mode. 4: A plasma “lamp” with glowing edges. The glows are optional, but I recommend using it since it was so much more work! LOL. It is a bit psycho, but I tried to tone it down a bit compared with my Plasma Thing program. Also, the line quality in Quad-Titler is much smoother. You can pick from 12 colours and up to 15 wiggles at once. But 5 looks a bit more sensible. The total size is 1.8 MB, and it comes with 2 colours of wax for the lava lamp, but you can customise the images or provide your own too. Just about all the images in this program can be whatever size you like. Although of course bigger pictures will use more RAM and need more oomph to work with in some cases.
Corner Blender			845 KB	This one blends the 4 corners together using colours picked from a 4 pixel high bitmap, and chooses new colours horizontally from it, as each frame goes by. It will support images up to 250 pixels wide, since that’s the maximum amount of frames. Narrower images will get their colours recycled from the beginning, so if you want fast colour movement, you could even use something like a 64 pixel wide bitmap. Line 1 of the colour bitmap is the top left corner, line 2 is the top right, line 3 is the bottom left and line 4 is the bottom right. If you thought some of my other titling programs were a bit insane, this is quite subtle in comparison. (No background images are supported on this one. Only overlay ones of course.) The archive size is 845 KB.
Super Fire			6.5 MB	Have some nice fire in whatever colour you like. Even black! Have colouring progress over time or over the entire screen area. The fire was a free resource at a super smooth, non-interlaced 50 f.p.s. So, perfect for my own projects. There is a slight issue, that could kind of be seen as a bug, in this program. You must choose what aspect ratio you want 1st, before you set the colouring mode, or the fire will come out white. (It’s basically to do with it recreating an image to save on RAM use.) This one is 6.5 MB, due to the video.
Video Titler			1006.1 KB	This program simply puts an overlay image onto a short segment of video. (500 frames maximum.) Maybe you can do this with the likes of Final Cut Pro (which I don’t have), but I dunno about iMovie 6. Anyway, 6 sample videos are included, which brings this one’s size up to just under 40 MB. So, if you want it sent to you by e-mail, I might have to put it in spanned archives. You can also optionally use a 16:9 aspect ratio video with the 4:3 mode, and choose a piece out of it horizontally. (Obviously no background images are supported here — the video you use is the background.) This is perfect for free stock videos off YouTube, Daily Motion etc, when you want a message with them in the background. You can use pretty much any normal frame rate, but you must specifiy what it is, and it will accept stuff like 29.97 & 59.94 f.p.s. rates as well as whole numbers of course. (Videos must be at 1280 × 720 pixels for the 16:9 aspect or 960 × 720 pixels for the 4:3 ratio. So you may need to resize videos you get off the web or wherever. You CAN use a wide video for the 4:3 mode, as I said above.) One thing to be aware of though, is that due to the way this program works with the video files, their modification date may change during use. So if you have a video which you don’t want the dates changed on, you may need to make a copy of it. Also, do not use read only files, as it will chuck a fit with them. You can now download this here! (Although without any sample videos.) Try this search as a starting point for free background videos. This has now been changed to my mini version, which uses less screen space. You will now only need a resolution of 800 × 600 pixels, instead of 1280 × 960. It still has the same functionality and system requirements, plus some minor improvements to the controls.
Chaser Titler			1.59 MB	This simple program goes through 3 alpha channel images in a repeating sequence, and colours the visible parts in the same manner as Super Fire above. (Choose 1 colour, use a bitmap, or a strip to change colours.) I made it to do like a chasing lights kind of thing. You can also set how many frames it will take for a change to occur, and whether the bitmap strip mode changes colours per frame, or per “glow change”. It comes with sample images, but you can make up whatever you want, depending how creative you are. This one’s about 1.59 MB. I may increase the amount of images allowed in the future, but it is a bit of a RAM hog. (Baa! Oink oink.)
Super Dots			1012 KB	With Super Dots, you simply specify a 2 pixel high, (up to) 300 pixel wide bitmap, and the program will change the background and glowing dots to match the colours found in it. The background colour keeps piling on all the time, fading out the previous dots as time progresses. This is best done at 25 f.p.s., because I found 50 to be a little too fast. The program runs pretty snappy on my Power Mac G5, and is optimised to make use of Quartz only when it needs to, since Quick Draw operations are faster. Output numbering has extra zeroes for better sorting in Quick Movie under Mac OS X Tiger, and this is my first program to use a custom background image for the bottom controls. (You can change it too, if you don’t fancy it.) The glowing dot image can be changed in size and shape, and you can have it black if you want to as well. It’s whatever colour you choose in your “colour strip” bitmap. (A sample is included.) As usual, nearly all the controls have pop-up descriptions to help you on the fly, and a “read me” PDF file is included. (Make sure you ask for revision 1 or higher, as this program initially had a severe bug to do with the overlay images.) • This has now been changed to the mini version, which uses less screen space. (It doesn’t have the custom background strip at the bottom though.) You can now download this here.
The J-Trix			1 MB	A titling animation program that does falling, randomised characters, something a bit like a certain movie from 1999. You get to choose the colours and speeds as well, but the default settings are about right for a 50 Hz video. Download it here. See the included “read me” file for more information.