psTitles is quite a simple application.You can use the app to create subtitles or slates for FCP, Premiere, DVDSP, Encore, even for Avid, Edius and Vegas.
You need to have Adobe PhotoShop CS installed. Beside the internal work, the app will script Adobe's PhotoShop to create 'Layered TIFF' files.
It can create either just a bunch of those TIFFs or you can use a Spruce STL file to create a timed set of those files. The result of the latter will be: numbered TIFF files, FCP XML (which can be used by both FCP and Premiere, probably Media 100), STL for DVSP and maybe other apps, EDL, Encore Imagescript and a reference file which can be used with FileMaker or Excel to track which text belongs to which graphic file.
To get a Spruce STL you may use the free version of TitleExchange to convert from several subtitle format files to Spruce STL.
Scripting PhotoShop can be a very time consuming thing to create the titles (it takes 1 to 2 seconds per title on my old 8 core - so be prepared to have a coffee break). But it will have some significant advantages later:
1) High quality subtitles (though other apps can create those as well - but see 2)
2) They are editable. Either with a short cut from most of the NLEs or direct from disk with PhotoShop. Since every layer and the text is not rendered to a flat image file (like with other subtitle app's) it's easy to change text keeping the style or effect, or changing the style or effect keeping the text and so on. You can have the same (sub)titles in different NLEs, a change will be reflected in each of them -- might be a risk though.
3) Text is retrievable. For example Boris within FCP or the inline titler within Premiere allow sophisticated settings for titles, but if you want to work with those in a collaborative environment or try to get the subtitle text out of a timeline for translation or something like that it won't be possible in a batch process or export. With Layered TIFFs and PhotoShop that's not a problem using psTitles, even though you only get the plain text without the individual styles/effects. As the text is retrievable it is pretty easy to transfer subtitles from a NLE to DVD authoring system with a different style/effect setup -- but again, it's scripting and this will take it's time.
There are 4 sections for handling: Settings, Sample Text, Create PhotoShop Layered TIFFs and Extract from PhotoShop Layered TIFFs.
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