Using Photoshop to create "Crawl"

I'm new hear...at least on the Fan Film Forum. So hello fello filmmakers!

I'm a 25 year old filmmaker (by hobby, anyway) from Long Island, NY and I've decided to make my very first Star Wars fan film. Having majored in communications and film making in college and being a huge fan of the medium (not to mention the SW Universe) I hope this will be a rewarding experience. I created a Halloween Fan Film (tribute film) last year called All Hallows Eve and had a blast with it. I have a hunch this experience might be even better.

At any rate, getting back to my topic...I've
read through many tutorials about how to create the opening "crawl" in a fan film. I'm only working with Photoshop and Premiere. I tried using Blender but it doesn't seem to be so user friendly. So what I've been coming up with is a way to alter the "lightsaber" effect (using PS and Premiere) to create the crawl...frame by frame. This must be the most time consuming and tedious method, but it seems to be working...so far anyway (still have a few more days to put into it).

My question is this...have any of you tried a similar method (creating the "crawl" frame by frame in Photoshop using Numeric sizing and perspective)? Success?

Also, I'm not looking to purchase any new software, but if anyone knows of any other shareware/freeware products that can create this effect (other than the dreaded Blender)
I'd greatly appreciate the advise.

Thanks in advance!

 

OK, so this likely not he answer you want to hear, but I'd say stay on the blender path.

Blender is a %$#@! to learn, but you could probably learn enough to do the crawl in less time than it takes to do it frame by frame in photoshop.

I've been using blender more lately, so I understand the tutorial in the faq, but when I first tried it, I had no clue. Also, the tutorial seems to assume some setup that may not be the case. This was my experience.

So, I used the tutorial, with some alterations to minimize blender use. Here we go:

1. Forget the mist. You can do a fade in premiere later.

2. Forget the stars. You can do a star background in photoshop and comp it in with premiere's keyer later.

3. Forget the 'STAR WARS' receding title. You can do that in premiere fairly easily later.

At this point, all you have left to do with blender is the rolling text. Try this portion of the tutorial and when you get stuck, come back here and describe the problem. I (or someone else) can get you past it.

One more thing. There's a member here by the name of Lokmer who is a blender god. Maybe a PM to him can help you.

Good luck

 

thanks KoHai...I'll try that.

 

I may be wrong here, but can't you just type a text layer, rasterize and resize it, and then import it in Premiere? I think that working with motion on this layer over a starfield you could achieve similar results as the movie with a lot less work.

 

You could upgrade to Premiere 6.5.. and do the entire opening roll (yes, roll... it's not a crawl) in little more time than it takes you to type it out. 6.5's title tool is far more advanced and you can pretty much do everything you need to do... minus the starfield (Photoshop star brushes on black background 720x534).... in the title tool itself.

Check out my Minnesota Force linkhere. If you want specifics of how I did it... ask me after you've viewed it.

 

That's about what I do. Technically, the crawls I make are created in Photoshop and animated in After Effects like any other layer.

 

I may be wrong here, but can't you just type a text layer, rasterize and resize it, and then import it in Premiere? I think that working with motion on this layer over a starfield you could achieve similar results as the movie with a lot less work.

I tried this before going the blender route. The layer motion tools in premiere aren't robust enough to provide satisfactory results (in my opinion). The blender solution is not much more work, and the results are much better.

 

Whenever you try motion with a rasterized layer... you're bound for ugly results unless you've got a good motion blur engine... which Premiere does not have on its own.

However, the title tool erases this problem by not actually being dependent upon the layer motion tool... and having it's own roll engine built into it and optimized for rolling text.. such that the motion is calculated pre-render, and the motion frames are rasterized one by one... directly from the unrasterized text roll file. Vector/bitmap logos can also be incorporated into end credit rolls, etc... with theatrical razor-sharp quality. I've done a 7-minute slow-roll segment that looked pretty much like what you'd see at the end of a Star Wars film.