Digital Photography Hacks

Create a Rolling Movie Title

A cake isn’t really dessert without icing, and a movie isn’t complete without titles. Here’s a simple way to create tasty Hollywood-style rolling credits.

We’ve been working in QuickTime Pro for the previous movie-editing hacks [Hacks Section 5.11, Section 5.12]. QuickTime is featured in this book for a number of reasons. First, it’s cross-platform, so Mac and Windows users are on equal footing. Second, it’s extremely powerful for its cost (US$30). Third, it’s essentially the native format that your digital camera uses to record movies, so why go through nasty conversions when you don’t have to? But finally, and just as importantly, QuickTime is very hackable. This hack illustrates that point beautifully.

Rolling credits and titles are a Hollywood tradition. They have graced movies made by Charlie Chaplin to Woody Allen. And they can add a professional touch to your digicam videos just as well.

I’m not going to get into the various movie-editing applications that require you to convert your QuickTime footage just so you can add rolling titles. Instead, I’m just going to use QuickTime Pro and your favorite text editor.

Using Text Tracks

Text tracks are low-bandwidth, vector titles you can add to your movies. The QuickTime web site (http://www.apple.com/quicktime/tools_tips/tutorials/texttracks.html) explains how to add text to your movies. The problem is, you can’t easily control how the text looks by using the basic method that most tutorials describe. ...