Is it possible to fo the star wars title crawl in FCP. I have the whole scrowling part down, im just having trouble giving it the horizontal look for the text.

Insert a regular text roll to your canvas. Then take the top corners and move them in, so it gives it a shape like this /_\.

Its easy on After Effects. Just use the same sort of technique as ochopatas said. But its probably quicker to do it in FCP.

I gave up getting it right in a compositor the one time I tried, and did it in 3D, but After Effects might be up to it.

Now all you gotta do is have it fade to stars in the background and than.... WOOSH [cgi spaceship flies by].

quote:

Originally posted by Blkmamba:
Now all you gotta do is have it fade to stars in the background and than.... WOOSH [cgi spaceship flies by].

Even Microsoft Movie Maker can do the Star Wars title thing, so surely it can be done in FCP.

But does it do it PERFECTLY? With the justified paragraphs that have those wide word spaces, the fade off point in the distance, antialiased text that doesn't flicker as it gets smaller, etc. It's really tough getting all those things right, and if Movie Maker can do it I officially hate the program.

I think on theforce.net where they have all those fanfilm tutorials they have something on creating a crawl step by step.

it's very easy to do in FCP. take your scrolling text clip, open it in the viewer, and go into the basic motion tab where you will see a distort parameter. Twirl down to see the options, which will be 4 two axis points that set each corner of the scrolling text. To make the star wars title scroll, take the top two points and move them equally toward the center of the screen. That's it! Tweak as necessary.

Alternately, you can do it in the canvas window with wire frames and the distort tool.

The way the title crawl was done on EP2 and 3, the titler took a still of the first frame of the movie, and used that as the background (the star scene). He then typed out the text, and layed in on a 3d plane, similar to what is mentioned above.

If you are going to do it though, do it right. The official fonts used for it are:
News Gothic Bold for the main body of the crawl and Episode number, and Univers Light Ultra Condensed for the title of the film.

If you want to fade to a spaceship I would certainly use a 3d package. It just looks much better.

Gotan

I'd be interested to know how a non-3D spaceship would look (and how people would respond).

I think I'd have to smack anyone doing a serious Star Wars movie with a 2D spaceship. Actually I think I'd smack them anyway. There's more lame attempting-to-be-serious fanfilms on TheForce.net then Yoda has backward lines. The universe doesn't need one more.

Yay for student films!