Best Way to Build End Credits?

[Jonathan Stevenson]

This may seem like a ridiculous question...

I'm building the end credits for my short film. We have a Red 2k 2:1 timeline in FCP. Maybe it's me, but it seems like the Text tools in Final Cut aren't the most crisp and clean ones to use. A friend of mine used to build end credits by making a long, skinny, full res PSD file with text and saving as a PNG into Final Cut. That seems to have really good results.

Is there a better way to have nice, 2k quality text that I'm missing? I'm not doing any kind of fancy credits, just the nice scrolling white text. Or am I wrong in thinking that Final Cut doesn't have as crisp of text?

[Mark L. Pederson]

This may seem like a ridiculous question...

I'm building the end credits for my short film. We have a Red 2k 2:1 timeline in FCP. Maybe it's me, but it seems like the Text tools in Final Cut aren't the most crisp and clean ones to use. A friend of mine used to build end credits by making a long, skinny, full res PSD file with text and saving as a PNG into Final Cut. That seems to have really good results.

Is there a better way to have nice, 2k quality text that I'm missing? I'm not doing any kind of fancy credits, just the nice scrolling white text. Or am I wrong in thinking that Final Cut doesn't have as crisp of text?

Illustrator file animated in AE - keep your text vector based. Try to to have the crawl at a speed so that it takes each line 8 seconds to move off screen.

[Jonathan Stevenson]

Sounds too legit to quit! Exactly what I needed, thank you kind sir!

[Nicholas Warren]

Also motion (in the latest FCS upgrade) now makes it quite easy to do credits - I don't have a copy (still on FCS 2) so not sure how it would compare to Mark's method.

http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/...ing-tools.html - towards the bottom of the page under credit rolls there is an example video.

[Lewis-M Soucy]

Mark just gave you the perfect way. I do it the same way, very long Photoshop layer animated in After Effect. You can also import a Photoshop PNG layer directly in FCP, and animate it there.

If you don't have long lists of names, you can also make several text "blocks" layers in Photoshop an import them directly in FCP. Then you animate and mix them in your timeline layers, and they look like one long scroll as they overlap.

[MichaelP]

Many productions like using Illustrator, not only for the creative control it offers, but the fact that it can easily be exported or printed out for legal review and knowing that corrections/changes to the master file propagate through the process.

Michael

[Stokestack]

Motion.

[J Davis]

Avoid motion, live type, fcp and the apple related software. None of them allow you to kern a letter when needed. Like the man said. Use an illustrator or photoshop file.

[a kines]

The best quality and control is an Illustrator file in After Effects.
There are AE expressions you can use to ensure that the text moves only in whole pixel increments to avoid "sparkle" on rolls. Less of an issue on higher resolution finishing formats but it's better than just adding some blur to kill the half pixel jaggies.

[Ian Andolina]

Apple Motion also imports Adobe Illustrator and PDF files (both allow vector content for less jaggies than pixel formats), and you can apply the credit roll behaviour (new/improved in V4) to that to get smooth motion properly timed. I suspect After Effects has more detailed control of the motion, but motion is slightly more integrated into FCP.