Any ideas on how to build a credit roll from a supplied CSV file, 3 columns, with 95,000 rows?
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Honestly, I’d do it in Unreal or Unity. Not that I know how to do that, but the Text node is like a car from 1920. It’s liable to break down doing mundane tasks and you’re asking it to haul a couple of big rigs up a mountain.
So what I’m saying is if I had that task, I’d spend the time to learn how to get it into the game engine and how to manipulate it and how to render it out, versus, you know, using the Text module.
Illustrator to lay it out and After Effects for the roll. Make sure the whole thing moves in whole numbers of pixels per frame if you want to avoid filtering jitter. Not everything needs to be done in Flame, and I’m pretty sure you have a CS sub!
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Or Illustrator/Photoshop and After Effects.
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I can +1 this. With how easily After Effects reads Illustrator files, and how straightforward it is to set type in Illustrator, it’s hard to pass this up. The one time I did an end-crawl for a feature, this is what we did.
I also stumbled upon a website called endcrawl.com when I was doing this 5 years ago, and a quick search tells me they’re still rockin’! But that’s the premium option and robs you the pleasure of doing it yourself.
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Great suggestions. Yeah Flame ain’t the tool for this.
Yes, I think Illustrator and AE is the most flexible combination for a budget conscious credit roll. Although I’ve been seeing a lot of well produced films and TV shows using slide-style credits, which is imho a much more manageable and way cheaper system. The credit roll is a throwback to optical titles and makes no sense any more.
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Slide style credits can be easily made/edited by the editor and adding or removing items after the fact is way easier
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And then the streaming services cut off all your hard work at the end. It’s actually really difficult to frame through the end to see your company credits on Netflix, Amazon, etc. I’ve had to take video on my phone off the tv screen in order to find it. 
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Highly recommend www.endcrawl.com . I had tests done within an hour, easy peasy, lemon squeezy. Thanks for the recommend.
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That’s good to hear. That is exactly what I remember experiencing when we used them 5 years ago!
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I do have a CS sub, but, feck me either I’ve been lucky or incredibly shortsighted to not really know my way around Illustrator and Photoshop very well.
In fact, this would be a great Logik Live episode topic. Anybody else out there feel that they could use some absolute basics on Photoshop and Illustrator?
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It’s funny, my early fluency in photoshop and illustrator made my jump to smoke and flame professionally possible, and now I can barely get around either of them. I blame the introduction of adjustment layers.
Which is to say that yes, I would watch the shit out of a logik live photoshop basics session.
Endcrawl sounds great. Do you present versions on the website to sign off?
My curious mind makes me wonder how you charge for this? Do you just add the endcrawl fee and your time?
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Yeah, you can make adjustments in real time to layout, fonts, size, spacing, columns…its amazing. Ya hit render, choose your resolution, can write out a still png in addition to a mp4, and a few mins later you get a download email and you can download it straight from the site. It’s super slick.
My start with computers was in Print with Illustrator, Photoshop and page layout apps so I’ve kept using them from the beginning of my post-production days. I did read a whole book on Illustrator but, for us in video, you don’t need to go so far into it.
I’ve always thought of Apps as tools in a toolbox, the more tools you have, the better you can get a job done.
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Absolutely right about that!
I’m a dummy who never learned After Effects. But I’ve done the layout in Photoshop copy/pasting columns from Excel, save off a 2k x 10k file, and then bring that into Flame, write an expression for y position to be Frame*3 (or4) and render. Maybe a slight 1px vertical blur could help, depending on the font.
Or, ENDCRAWL, as everyone else has mentioned. It’s pretty damned perfect.