CreditMaker by Erik Walter (see the end of this document for EMail)
Fixes in 1.0.1b1 (yes, yes, I skipped a bunch of version numbers)
Added support for Thread Manager, now you can create multiple movies at once. Added AppleScript support, give it a text file reference or a bunch of text and it will create a movie. Fixed the missing pixels in the bottom corner of the movies (they were white).
Fixes in 0.b7
Fixed an annoying habit it had of ignoring color whenever it was run on 16 bit color devices.
Fixes in 0.b6:
I added a prevue for the credits being created, the speed is not the same as the final movie, but it does show you what you are creating. Many people thought the first version was locking up when it created long movies (actually, any size movie).
I also fixed some minor problems with the offscreen drawing that works nicer now that I have a onscreen pixmap to draw to.
CreditMaker is a little hack I wrote one night when I should've been studying for finals. It is basically for creating little movies that are scrolling credits. You take and combine these movies with your QuickTime movies and víola, you have a way to put rolling credits at the end of your movies.
To create your credits, first create a text file with your credits (TextEdit works nicely for this). Then open CreditMaker. You can change things like the font, font style and color and other stuff. Then choose Make Credits... from the file menu. First it asks you for the name of the final Credits movie, then it asks you to find the text file with your credits. Viola, that's it, the program will create the files from there.
The font menu changes attributes of the font used. I haven't figured out how to add styling, I figure I'll throw that in the next revision. You can change font size, but make sure to change the Leading... (the space between lines) if you change the font size. Also try to use fonts and sizes that are installed (or true type), because they look better.
The scroll speed is the number of pixels that each frame moves. Larger numbers produce fast scrolling, slower numbers are slower.
The movie rectangle is the size of the finished movie in pixels. Your best results are when you choose a rectangle that matches your final output movies. If you make it larger it makes the text unreadable and smaller makes the text look ragged.
I highly recommend using the thread manager with CreditMaker. It's fairly easy to find and it makes a big differance in performance. You can create multiple movies, but more importantly you can move the preview window around, cancel long movies and other nice features.
Currently there is a bug in the AppleScript support for background scripting. If you run a script, be sure to bring CreditMaker to the front in the script.
One final note, CreditMaker doesn't use spatial compression (just frame by frame) so you can often reduce the size of the final movie by opening it with another program like ScreenPlay (for video spigot) or Adobe Premiere and saving it back out using one of the video compressions.
This is MailWare, if you like it and use it, please send me some mail to tell me so. If you have any suggestions, feel free to make them. I would like to continue adding features to CreditMaker, so tell me what you want.
