Best program to create scrolling credits?

[heartofglass]

Hi everybody,

I'm editing in Final Cut Pro and want to create scrolling credits. As everyone knows, the scrolling text in FCP is pretty crappy. Would After Effects be an improvement over FCP in this regard? I have access to AE on a PC - would there be problems integrating the credits with the FCP file after creating the credits in AE? Does anyone have other recommended programs for creating text?

Thanks for any recommendations!
-Heartofglass

 

[cybersarge]

Try doing the credits in iMovie. Then import it into FCP? Good or bad idea?

 

[esp4ever]

Motion and Livetype have a lot of text capabilities. If you know how to use Motion, which isn't too hard to learn, there is a lot you can do with text but if you just want simple scrolling text you can do that pretty easily as well.

 

[BenB]

Actually, text is hard to deal with in interlaced footage, period, regardless of NLE. What most folks think is a bad scrolling credit generator, is actually they're own lack of education about working with text in interlaced formats.

Ken Stone's site has some very good tutorials addressing this issue. I use FCP's scrolling credit generator all the time and get beautiful scrolling credits. I'd advise learning about the issued surrounding text and interlaced formats first, it'll be very valuable in the long run.

 

[Alessandro Machi]

Actually, text is hard to deal with in interlaced footage, period, regardless of NLE. What most folks think is a bad scrolling credit generator, is actually they're own lack of education about working with text in interlaced formats.

Ken Stone's site has some very good tutorials addressing this issue. I use FCP's scrolling credit generator all the time and get beautiful scrolling credits. I'd advise learning about the issued surrounding text and interlaced formats first, it'll be very valuable in the long run.

Only when dealing with compressed NLE codecs. To be fair to final cut pro, the other NLE systems have trouble as well. Lets not blame all the digital NLE systems shortcomings on interlace. Everytime there is a problem, "Oh, it's because the video is interlaced". How about some honesty here. Compression of any kind can come back to bite one in the butt.

I would be curious to know if scrolling titles "look better" once one goes to a DV 50 codec instead of the DV 25 codec.

 

[BenB]

Actually, it is due to interlacing and how it handles hard contrast edges. It is a well documented fact. It's not the compression. Even uncompressed SD has this problem. It doesn't exist in progressive HD, but does in interlaced HD.

I being very honest, I'm an engineer, and I've been doing this for a living for a long time. It is, in fact, due to interlacing in NTSC. This also happens with certain patterns in photomontages, and for the same reason. Compression artifacts come in the form of pixelation, and are very clearly compression. This is not what causes shakey and bad text problems.