Recommendations on a doing a long credit roll

[Dean Sensui]

I’ve done this by creating Photoshop files measuring 540×4000 pixels.

— Add text with Photoshop’s text tool.
— Be sure to create an alpha channel to key out text if necessary.
— Use the “motion” tab in FCP to get the title screen to scroll at the right speed.

If a single Photoshop file isn’t deep enough, then just add another and have it follow the first one upward.

I haven’t tried it in Live Type but I’d suspect it could probably do it.

Dean Sensui — http://www.HawaiiGoesFishing.com

[Bill]

personally, i would stick with photoshop. creat a template tha tis 720 or whatever width you need and how ever long then just use a simple motion keyframes to mov eit. i do alot of FCC announcments (not by choice) and the title tool/boris takes much longer to render. just save the psd out as a pict or tiff with the alpha and your good to go. fcp5 renders the motion on the text very well. the title tool allows you to make changes faster but much longer renders.

“Reach for the sky cause tomorrow may never come”

-Mike Ness

[Tim Vaughan]

Personally, I live and die by Illustrator/After Effects. I create all my rolling text and layout within Illustrator, import it in to AE, click on the “continually rasterize” / * button, set my keyframes, and render it out as an animation.(Continually rasterize will allow the text layer to be scaled up or down without losing quality) — (I prefer rendering as an animation as it gives a better quality and more stable text lines) But that is just my own humble and personal opinion. There are many, many ways to do this job…

[Michael Garber]

Thanks guys. Only problem – when I do that, still getting jitters. Tried all the different render settings in FCP for high, normal, and bilinear.

Do you set your psd files to anything more than 72dpi?

[Michael Garber]

I will definitely try to render out as an animation. Should render a little quicker too, no?

I had already tried doing it in AE with rasterize on. It certainly looked the best. Fonts were arial, so no weirdness with serif on the fonts.

Any settings in Illustrator I should be aware of?

Thanks,
Michael

[Jeremy Garchow]

I would stick with AE, but that’s just me.

There’s some things to check in FCP. First of all, what resolution are you working at?

Make sure that the ‘center’ keyframes in your motion tab begin & end on whole even numbers (such as [10,102] & not [10.87,102.31])

Also, try adding an extremely slight gaussian blur (like 0.3) and see if that smoothes things out a bit.

If you decide to go the AE route and depending on what version of After Effects you have (you need 6 or above), you should be able to type directly in the application (using the text tool, apple-t) and avoid using Illustrator. You could also put a slight vignette on the top and bottom of the screen to give it a nice soft fade away from the bottom and into the top, but that’s a matter of your particular design choice.

Good luck and good compositing.

Jeremy

———–
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[Foleyvideo]

Hi

I’ve done exactly what is being recommended here — using photoshop to set up the text. Works very well — but as for the jitters — put the flicker filter on it at max. Smooths it out pretty good.

Steve