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End Credit Crawl in AE
has anyone tried setting all the text for a long credit crawl in AE?
I usually make an enormously tall doc in Illustrator and import that in to AE to animate, but I’m wondering if AE could handle a really tall comp with live text.Maybe I should break up the crawl into smaller comps and stack them up and link them all together with a null?
thanks in advance
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11 Replies
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ae can create large text layers, but it doesn’t work with them too well, they render very slowly… (well, the last time i tried using large text layer was in ae7, it may be fixed in later versions). i found by using illustrator or photoshop to create the large text layers, ae worked much better, and that’s the way i have continued to work.
if you wanted to see how well ae can handle a large text file, i would create a very tall comp with the width of the final output. create your credit list in that tall comp (it must be tall enough for the entire list). bring that comp in to the final comp and animate the movement of the list comp.
you might compare how well ae handles that list with one created in ai or ps…
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
We used to do single AE files but this proved extremely cumbersome both in typesetting and animation.
I do this all the time and we have developed a workflow that works quite well.
Type is set in InDesign on series of legal sized pages that include a 12 field rastarization box that defines the exact different depth of each page. This is easier to checker in PDF format for the clients rather than a continuous roll
The pages are exported to Illustrator, converted to outlines and inverted. (too much toner is wasted in the checkering stage if the files are white on black)
Then they go to Photoshop to be rastarized 10x oversampled and made into TIFFs.
Then the pages are linked to a rolling null in AE. Very easy to make changes in speed and copy that way.
Most of the process can be automated with Actions.
Eric Fitzgerald
Hollywood Title -
Hi Dave;
I wish I could do 4k all the time. Small type is so resolution dependant. Slight Italic are the worst.
Yes, I have seen frying, among other artifacting. Quite frankly it never occured to me to go to an integer rate on the Y as opposed to a fractional rate. I can see where that would solve that problem. Usually I don’t get the luxury of changing the duration of the roll everytime they change the length. And I would think a single even integer would radically effect the duration on a long roll. Probably not the best policy but I avoid thin serifs and hope for the best with good, oversampled anti-aliasing.
You have given me an idea, though. Might be able to create buffers to absorb changes with spacing and holds on the end. I should hang out here more often.
Eric
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WOW! Dave – thank you so much. That is brillant.
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Yes, it works a charm but what you want to do is export the text layer as a still frame and bring it back in which is the same thing as using a PS or AI layer.
We often create our massive text objects in three or four sections. Each is rendered at exactly the same pixel-per-second velocity so they can be stitched together seamlessly. The advantage comes in the ability o make the inevitable changes and corrections without having to redo everything.bogiesan
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thanks for all the input guys. I think I’m going to stick with one huge AI file and import it into AE. I can always go back to AI to make corrections.
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Hey Dave! How you doing? Good to stumble across you in here.
My problem with AI is that it is a lousy typsetter for massive volumes of type typically found in roll-ups. It is a great vector editor but for typography? Not so much.
Interesting approch using pieces rendered to the same rate of roll. I usually don’t have flexible durations though so the rate must necessarily change. How do you deal with that?
I saw that Brian Williams died. That made me sad. Ever do any Cow PoMo tarot?
Eric Fitzgerald
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[Eric Fitzgerald] “Interesting approch using pieces rendered to the same rate of roll. I usually don’t have flexible durations though so the rate must necessarily change. How do you deal with that? I saw that Brian Williams died. That made me sad. Ever do any Cow PoMo tarot? “
Yar, Brian passed a long time ago now, I cherish the signed books and decks I have from him. I still have thePoMo and, I suppose, I still have Brian’s blessing to use it as the source for answering deeply weird questions about FCP as it did so many years ago on Ye Olde Media 100 Listserve. That was a hoot.
The velocity of the roll is settable in AE but I have not tried to do this in CS4. Duration is a separate function from the vertical velocity. the velocity must be the same for all of the sections of a long roll to seamlessly match. The easier way to do this is to place the four separate segments into a precomp and then set the vertical movement for the precomp. but this usually makes the precomp far larger than 4k and it just gets too huge to mess with.
I think it is always best practice to depend on a competent typographer for serious credits.
bogiesan
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Forgive my ignorance, but why do you use this method when you can just keyframe the Y position? I would like to create a nice-looking credit roll, so if your integer method is better, perhaps you could explain how to do it?
Thanks for your patience.
Best,
Uli.
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Hi,
Thanks much for the tutorial. My question is, in AI, once I have selected the text and hit Type: Create Outlines, how do I invert to white on black?
Then how do the pages “go to Photoshop”? I think I can Rasterize in PS OK, as long as I can find the “10 times oversampling” button.After I animate this in AE, this crawl is going to end up in FCP in a 2048×1024 ProRes offline work picture and also as 4K DPX’s for online. Any advice about that?
Believe me, if I had any money to pay you to do this, you would have cashed the check already. So I’m very appreciative of anything you can tell me.
thanks
Bruce S
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