Credit roll looks awful….

[Aaron Neitz]

Can’t say about Boris – but if I were doing a credit roll in After Effects for 60i, I would make sure I field rendered it, not frame rendered.

the problem with “your monitor” in FCP is that you’re only seeing 1 field – it’s a progressive display – so anything going to a interlaced monitor is going to look and behave differently.

Truth is, rolling credits are always tough. 60i, 24p, 25p…. Pick a hearty font without fine serifs and don’t let it scroll too fast.

[Keith Golinski]

I’ve never gotten around the terrible credit role problem. I’ve either had to use still frames for credits or made them in After Effects.

After Effects may take longer but the end product really does look much better than the FCP Studio solutions.

[Jimmy Stewart]

I agree. Use a slow roll, or I prefer to use static cards with 10-15 credits on each….woody allen style.

[Gary Alan]

Have you tried the Deficker at the top of the Boris control panel in FCP? it’s a checkbox.

gary

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Didn’t help, in my (DV-codec) experience. What did help a bit was putting the credit roll over a midtone image background, rather than over black.

[Bret Williams]

This has been discussed so many times. The answer is fairly technical, but the gist is that because of interlacing, the only way to truly have a credit roll look perfect is to run it at a speed that is an even multiple of the field rate per second. (see adamwilt.com for details) In other words, in the motion tab, your text must move upward 120 or 240 pixels per second (in NTSC). 240 is really fast, and 120 is pretty legible if you space out the elements a little. Or, if like most credits, you don’t REALLY care if they’re all that readable. They’re just supposed to be there.

It’s so ridiculously simple I uploaded a template project consisting of a psd and a fcp project file to my website.

bretwilliams.com/cowstuff (You’ll find a .zip called croll.zip.)

The psd is simply a 720×3000 with a text layer in times. Yes times. Even serifs are no problem.

It’s a 30 second roll, and if you look at the keyframes you’ll see it moves upward 3600 pixels over 30 seconds. That’s 30×120=3600. It’s just that simple. Credit rolls done this way are solid as a rock. No artifacts, no waves, etc.

The beauty of this template is that you can just change the psd file to change the roll. If the new text is shorter, then it’ll scroll nothing for the remainder. Just cut off the blank portion. But don’t move the keyframes. If you need a longer roll, simply put two back to back. I think FCP is limited to 3000 pixels.

Have fun.

[Todd Skougor]

Nice post.
This will help many of us.

Thanks,
T

[Bret Williams]

I read that in Creating Motion Graphics years ago. A book on After Effects. They cited Adam Wilt. The detailed info is on his site.

Hardware CG rolls used to confine you to good speeds. They might even increase or decrease the leading of your text to make it fit a particular duration.

Avid Media Composer did this with their old hardware based roll effect. It was smooth as glass.

But with software like FCP and After Effects and Boris they don’t lock in speeds. They try sub pixel rendering (which FCP sucks at), or blurs, or nothing at all and just let you create rolls at any speed you like. it all looks like junk with small text sizes.

[Billy Mabou]

Bret, that’s awesome that you provide this zip file for download. I just came across this post searching for something else, but I’m going to make use of the files, I guarantee!

Thanks a lot,

B.

[Marta Velasquez]

Hi! I tried to follow the math for making the scrolling titles within a 1080i50 environment,
I worked out that perhaps I needed a 2500 pixel by 1080 pixel photoshop document. I wasn’t sure about resolution. I tried 75 as the template is set to this but then had to increase the size by 3 times when I imported it into a motion HDV 1080 project. So I stuck to resolution 300.

Then I keyframed my photoshop credits at the bottom of the frame just before entering and at the end of 500 frames I moved it up so it went just out of the top of the frame.

I then exported this using the project settings for HDV and ended up with, to my disappointment… A jittery scrolling credit movie…

Am I missing something???

Thanks!

Martita