From the course: Creating a Short Film: 08 Editing

Making rolling end credits

- [Instructor] In this tutorial, we're going to learn how to make rolling end credits in Adobe Premiere. By the way, you might get a font warning saying that you don't have the font that I used for this exercise file, and that's totally fine. You could use whatever font you want. Now, first, I'm gonna show you the quick and dirty way to create credits. And by the way, I went ahead in this project file and included all of the end credits that I used to make the Assurance credits, so the actual files that I used. And I'm gonna go ahead and change this to Fit here, so we can see everything. And I'll right-click in that program monitor to turn off safe margins for now. But if you wanted to scroll through these, you can. And they're at three different frame rates, 24, 30, and 60 frames per second. We'll talk about why that is in the next tutorial. And I also created these in the old Adobe Titler in Premiere, and you could get there by double-clicking one of these. And then it brings up this Titler panel, a series of windows here that kind of all come together to make the old Titler system. But now, we have, if you go to the first scratch sequence, we have a different way of doing things. There's a new workflow in CC 2016, '17, '18, something like that. There's a new system that was added and this is the way we do it now. So I can click the Type tool, and you wanna make sure the Essential Graphics panel is open. If it's not, you can go to the Window menu and choose Essential Graphics, and make sure that that's open here. Also, we don't want to be on Browse side, we wanna be on the Edit side. Now, first, let's look at the quick and dirty way to create credits. So I'm just gonna go ahead and click and I'll just call this Credits. Let's say character stuff. So Ta'ani was played by Eva Jane and Korda'a was played by Natty Perkins, and so forth. So now, what I wanna do is come over here to the Essential Graphics panel, come down to the text area, and I wanna adjust the text alignment. Whether it's aligned to the left edge like it is right now or the right edge like this. And actually in this case, I want this to be centered. But now, it's off kilter from the whole document, the whole program. So I can go Align and Transform and click align Horizontal Center or just the Horizontal Center button. Click that and now, it's aligned horizontally. Now, you've probably all seen a low budget independent film and the credits look just like this. They're not super polished and professional, just everything center-aligned and there's just a big, long list of center-aligned credits. You know, and no judgment, that's fine. That's one way to do it and it's very quick and very fast, if you wanna do it that way. But there's a better way to do it and a more professional way to do it. If we go back to the Assurance credits here and we look at this, and I'm gonna hit the tilde key to maximize this. You could see that we actually have mixed orientation, mixed justifications, I should say. And we actually have all of the justifications. We have center justification in the names of the headings, so like, Cast is center-aligned, Extras is center-aligned, and this group is center-aligned. And then same thing with the orchestra and also, the thanks at the end, this is center-aligned. But this long list of cast and crew and what positions they filled or the characters that they played, they're split up. So the left side is actually right-aligned to make this really solid edge, and then the right side is left-aligned to make this really nice, clean edge here and it kinda creates this visual spine going through the credits, which is very attractive and elegant and looks very polished and professional. So that actually takes a little bit more work. So I'm gonna go back to our credits here. And I'm gonna go ahead and select the credits and click in here to activate these and I'm gonna click and drag to select all of these. Hit the delete key until we just have the word Credits and that's gonna be center-aligned. And then what I wanna do is actually make a new text layer because in Premiere, you can't mix the justifications, text justifications, in the same text layer. So you can't do what we just did or what we just saw with these Assurance credits, you can't do that easily in one text layer. So I have to go to this new icon, this New Layer icon, click it, and create a new text layer. So now, I can come in here and double-click, just select here. And now, I could put in, you know, my character names or whatever, and I could put everything that's gonna be aligned on the left side here that's gonna be right-aligned. So now, I could click Right Align Text and you can see that we're starting to have characters here. Now, I also included in the exercise files, the actual credits that I used, the credit documents that I used. So in the Media folder, in the Other folder, you'll see four credit files that I included. One was kinda like the master file that I used that has all the credits in it, just kinda like how they appeared in the film. And then from here, I started with this one, then I did a File, Save As in my text editor. And you know, the TextEdit's a little bit wacky, but most text editors have a Save As function. And what I did is I saved three copies, center, and then the left side, which is the right-aligned text on the left side, and then the left-aligned text on the right side. And so if I double-click left side, for example, this is just the stuff on the left side. So I can go to the cast, for example, and click and drag the names of the characters. And then with these selected, I can hit Command-C or Ctrl-C on the PC to copy these. Come back over here to Premiere. And I'll go ahead and select this text or hit Command-A or Ctrl-A to select everything, and then I could hit Command-C-- or excuse me, Command-V and Ctrl-V on the PC to paste these in. So now, we have the names of our characters here on the left side. By the way, if you wanted to come down here and change the font or if you wanna change the font size, just make sure you have the entire text box selected. You might actually even need the text selected sometimes. Sometimes, it doesn't quite work right, so you need to go in here and click and select everything. But you can do it that way if you wanted to. Now, what I wanna do is get this text box in place. And we don't wanna center this like we did before. We kinda wanna move it over. And to get a more accurate sense of where this really important left edge should be, that spine, we want that kinda close to the center, I'm gonna right-click in the program monitor and turn back on the safe margins because the safe margins are gonna have these little tick marks here that indicate where the center of the document is. So I could align these up here. There we go. Now, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come over here to the layers in the Essential Graphics panel and this one that we just created for the left side. I'm gonna right-click on it and I'm gonna click Duplicate. Instead of making a fresh one, I wanna duplicate it, so that these are gonna be... The character names or the names of the cast that actually play these characters are gonna be right across the street. So I'm gonna select that, move it over on the x axis here, and it doesn't have to be perfect for right now, and I could go ahead and... Actually, I wanna go back over to my documents and I wanna open up the right side and I'm gonna click and drag to select the names of the cast, the actors in the cast, and then hit Command-C to copy this on the Mac, Ctrl-C on the PC. Come over here and I'll hit Command-A or Ctrl-A on the PC to select all these names once you click in the text box. And now, with all these selected, I could hit Command-V as in Victor on the Mac and Ctrl-V on the PC to paste these in, and there's the names of the actors. And so now, what I could do is change the alignment to left-aligned, and then move this over on the x axis until that lines up. And now, we have really well-formatted titles. And you can see that it's definitely a lot more work. We have something that's center-aligned, and then we also have a bunch of stuff that's left-aligned and right-aligned. And then if we wanted to add, let's say, stuff for the crew. So maybe we went to Credits here and we changed this to Cast, and then make sure that's center-aligned. And then we can come down here, if we wanna make the crew after this, we would have to come in here and hit Enter until we get past that and then say Crew. You see what I'm saying there? So like, it can be kind of confusing and frustrating. Or make another text layer entirely for just the word Crew, if you wanted to do it that way. Now, one of the cool things about doing this though in Premiere is that rolling the credits, actually animating them, is easy. 'Cause right now, it's just text on screen, so we move our playhead here and nothing happens. It's just static text on screen. But to make these roll, this is one of my favorite things. Just deselect everything and then once you deselect, just click in this blank area right here to deselect all of your text layers, and then you'll see this option right here to Roll. Click on it and then Start Offscreen and End Offscreen are selected by default and that's all it takes to have a rolling credits sequence. Just hit Play and there's our credits. Now, they go on a little bit, a little fast, a little ridiculously fast. People aren't gonna be reading those very well. So what I can do is shrink down the sequence, so we could see more of it. And then just extend it out like you're trimming any other video clip. So as I make this longer, it's going to actually slow down the credits. There we go. So it's looking a little bit more professional now. And of course, if we wanted to make this happen faster, we could always trim this and make this a little bit shorter as well. Now, we have a few additional options here. Kinda fancy-pants options, I honestly never use them. Pre-roll and post-roll allow you to add time before the credits start rolling and after they end respectively. You could also slow the credits when they come in with ease in, and slow them when they go out with ease out. But that's not really a very common thing to do, I don't think. Now, another thing that I did that's kinda of interesting. Interesting to me, at least. I went to the Project panel, to the new item button here, and I made a new adjustment layer. And adjustment layers adjust everything beneath them. They're very well-known in Photoshop. They started out in Photoshop and also in After Effects 'cause they have tons of layers. And everything applied to an adjustment layer affects all the layers or tracks beneath them. And so a lot of people don't use them in Premiere, but I find them to be really helpful for a lot of things, including this. So I'm gonna click Blur, do a search for Blur in the Effects panel, I should say, and then apply Gaussian Blur to the adjustment layer. And I'm gonna actually increase the size from Fit to 100% just so we can really see this text well. And this is the text as it is with no blur. And so I just went in and added, like, a two-pixel blur. It just softens those edges and makes it feel so much less digital and more cinematic and filmic to me, so I like that. Again, here's before and after, before and after. So we're not making blurry text. We're not making feathered edges or anything like that. We're just kind of softening this a little bit and making it a little bit more polished, I think. But that's, you know, totally a personal preference, if you wanna do that or not. And just to see the adjustment layer at work here. If I resize this, you could see that I have one adjustment layer with the blur over all of the clips of the credits. So if I went back in and said, hey, you know what, this blur is too much, I only have to turn it off once. Or if I wanna adjust to make it more blurry or less blurry, I only have to make the adjustment once to the adjustment layer, and then all of these credits are adjusted as well. Now, you might've noticed that I have the credits here at 24, 30, and 60 frames per second, different frame rates. And one of the more interesting things that I did is I did a bunch of experiments on using different frame rates for end credits, and I came up with some fascinating results and I really wanna share those with you. And we'll do that in the next tutorial.

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