I use Videotagger. It's not free, but also not expensive. ($30)

Here's a demo of some credits I did:


The best thing is that I make the credits from an MS Excel file. If there's a mistake, correction or addition, I just fix it in the XLS file and remake the credits AVI file.

You can get VideoTagger ar:
http://www.electrichappiness.com/VideoTagger_Support_Information.jsp

When you buy it, tell Adam (at Electric Happiness) that I sent you.

Steve,

There is a free version, but no information on the differences between paid and free.

Dave T2

Steve, thanks for the tip. It looks very professional, and there was a $5 off coupon on the site.

I tried the free version first, but it puts a watermark in the middle of the screen.

A whole lot better than the old titler in Vegas Pro.

Free is watermarked.

I've done long lengths of credits via the credit roll event. That's how I found a bug in it (~3 or 4 minutes long I think).

I also do scanned pages & use pan/crop to "scroll" them. I find both pretty effortless, I use whatever one the situation calls for.

The speed of the credit roll makes a lot of sense to use the media length (not the event, that's separate). It works just like changing the speed of media: shorter time = faster, longer time = slower.

One of the worst things in Vegas is the credit roll and from Vegas 3 on up. The quality of the text is awful. It's like shoveling sand against the ocean. And I am being very nice with my comments.
JJK

Back in the day i was doing a star wars spoof video for the youth group and we wanted to present the "story so far" in that "floating away through space" effect. I printed the entire thing out in yellow type on black, 4" wide and 14 feet long on my inkjet printer (using 3 black cartridges!) and spliced the pages together into a continuous strip. Then i mounted the VHS camcorder at a steep downward angle about 3" above the table with the lens set on macro. With the table covered in black i started pulling the long strip slowly past the lens. I couldn't get the movement smooth enough so i built a little geared roller & crank jig out of Lego pieces. It lasted about 40 seconds of screen time.

The kids all jumped up and cheered and applauded to see their story like that on the big screen!!!

Was it an insane amount of work? Yes. Was it WAY harder than using Vegas' titling tool? Insanely. Was it worth it? Youbetcha. :)

Actually, at the time very few affordable tools could have done the effect that way in 3D space, and i couldn't really afford to farm it out to ILM. Vegas hadn't even been imagined yet.

Two things I regret not having the space to buy are a real plate reverb unit and a monster animation table. The later was the size of a room, made of steel and hand an XY gantry with a camera mount. With that you could pan around a terapixel sized piece of artwork. Both wonders from the past were sold at auction for scrap metal prices.


I've downloaded the free version of Videotagger. Really cannot complain for the asking price and being able to import the credits from an Excel spreadsheet is a serious plus. Unfortunately it seems it does not support real typography, not even bold or italics much less super and sub scripts and no support for Opentype. PTT is miles ahead in this regard. If the two could be melded together then someone would have a real winner. PTT is both a joy and a nightmare.

Bob.

"Unfortunately it seems it does not support real typography, not even bold or italics much less super and sub scripts and no support for Opentype"

VideoTagger will use any font you have installed. If you look at my example, I used Arial and Arial Bold. VideoTagger also lets you sync an image file inside your credit roll.

Super and Subscript in a credit roll?? Who would ever need that?

Who would ever need that? Why, those who need super & subscript in a credit roll. That's who.

And it would be nice if it supported bold, italics, underline, etc. because not all fonts have alternate versions.

Super and Subscript in a credit roll?? Who would ever need that?Well, most credit rolls include the registered trademark symbol - ® - and certainly the copyright symbol ©. Most style manuals call for these to be superscripted. The same is true of the trademark symbol: ™.

Fractions require some sort of super- and sub-scripting, if they are to be set correctly.

Ordinal numbers (e.g., 7th, 1st) require that the text should be super-scripted (unlike how they are shown in this message because this forum doesn't provide super-scripting capability).

I could go on, but the point is that a credit roll very definitely needs to be able to use the full range of typography.

As for other typographic niceties, kerning is incredibly important for large type sizes which would normally be used for the major headings in the credit roll. In fact, the HD world means that the "real typography" that Bob refers to is a lot more important than in the relatively crude world of 720x480 video.

Use standard Sony Text and use the placement feature. I've done lots of this and it's awfully easy.

Grazie

Bob I use Heroglyph for crawls/ticker. I simply import the txt file from the client as is. Pre laid out. all I do is use my skill sets to set duration.;-).. Regardless of the line spacing and pt. size it can be fixed to time,frame or pixel screen size.

Thanks for all the suggestions.
I should explain a few things. Firstly the guy doing the online has agreed to do the credits, using Adobe's titler. Good luck to him. There's 1,300 words over 500 lines of text and he doesn't know this...yet :) I'm only soldiering on with this as I think it isn't going to happen in time, I could very easily wash my hands of this but I figure it's a good learning experience. I've done credit rolls using Vegas with a few tricks to add a bit of subtle bling to them, all good.

These credits are not only LONG, each section is formatted differently and all I have to work from is a Word document that isn't remotely formatted or done with any real consideration as to how it could be formatted to fit a frame. They will hopefully get some exposure on the silver screen so they need to be clean.

So far, of all the tools at my disposal that I've tried doing these with, After Effects is the easiest. Simple things like human friendly numbers for position put it ahead of PTT, font size defined in point size instead of some number that looks like Boltzmann's Constant. AE also has grids and guides. Don't get me wrong, even with AE this is no trivial task.

The list of cast credits is being a PIA, not everyone has a screen name so descriptions are being used e.g. "Officers of the Court – John Smith, Paul Baker".

Yes, I do need superscripts for things like "2nd Unit Directors of Photography".


One thing I did realise and getting back to the original question is getting multiple text events to scroll at the same rate in Vegas isn't that hard. Put each section on its own track and slide them around so they sit over one another. It's then pretty easy to eyeball if they're scrolling at the same rate and adjust accordingly. Once done just slide the events into the appropriate place so they scroll in sequence.
I did try putting all the text in Vegas's titler in one hit and that really isn't viable at 1920x1080. I could break the titles up into sections to keep things sane. If I didn't have AE this is what I'd do. When I was trying this in Vegas the grid overlays that my new Asus ProArt monitor has proved to be useful.


Bob.

Instead of "2nd" say "Second". Same thing, looks better and avoids all the headaches of making it superscript.

I don't recall credits on movies I rent using super or subscript. Maybe on something like a studio logo, etc.

I agree with DaveT2, use Photoshop or AE then import the resulting image into Vegas and scroll through it. You can change the number of columns as required and use multiple typefaces, sizes and effects easily and quickly.
I used this technique for a project for a county in New Jersey that had something over 100 credit lines. I included graphics to separate the various sections of the credits from each other and made several images, all the same width and length, which was easier to deal with. Having identical lengths took care of the scrolling rate issue.

I can't recall ever seeing super/subscripts in a Hollywood DVD credits. I would not be surprised that some do, but the font is already almost unreadable, super/sub script would only make it smaller. I also don't recall seeing the Copyright or Trademark except in a logo. One of the things we look for in the credits is the year, and it's always something similar to: "Copyright MCMLXXXIX" Not "(C) 1989".