Sir Ridley said:
Illustrator is probably not a bad idea once you know how to format everything. I did it inside After Effects just so I could tilt and edit the text on top of the real crawl and line everything up.
Yeah, I get that. I’m relying on the dynamic link and have to switch back and forth but ultimately I think it’s worth it.
So, specifics. My text is in a separate 4K composition where I do all the movement (excluding gate weave, getting to that later) and fading of the text. Apparently my focal length is 50mm. Don’t know how I ended up with that number, but it works. Although I have to stretch the text layer about 200%. Maybe 23mm and no stretch works just as well, but this is what I ended up with. 36mm film. Aperture 25,5.
I believe 50mm is the default. It seems to be working fine for you, with the proper adjustments. I’m a bit anal about that kind of stuff, even using 23mm is annoying me just because I know it’s not a very common focal length so maybe doubtful that they would have used that back in the day. But then that gets me wondering, did they shoot the original crawl on 65mm? So should I be factoring that in? It’s a rabbit hole, I guess you ultimately just have to go with what you like.
The angle is -79,8 (for matching the TFA crawl). Since this composition is where I edit the text I also keep a guideline layer to see how wide the paragraphs should be. And on the text layer I have a bunch of effects. A yellow Glow, to make the text a tiny bit thicker. And then a Refine Hard Matte which makes it a bit thicker again and smudges out some details when it goes blurry in the distance. And then a 0,5% Camera Lens Blur which doesn’t do much. And then a Set Matte which adds that little gradient fade in the distance of the text. A Simple Choker which makes the edges a bit less soft and more contrasty. A soft red Drop Shadow which makes the edges of the text warm and cozy. And finally a Fast Blur that just softens everything a bit. Now, all this may sound like nitpicking (and it is), but have a look at this with/without effects image and you can see it’s not completely pointless: https://i.imgur.com/SvKgO9O.jpg
Nah this is good stuff. I guess the angle isn’t really useful because you’re using a different focal length, and I do have a gradient ramp which works in to fade the distant text, but I’ll look into the other stuff for sure.
And then on to the composition where I put everything together. I scale down the text layer to 50%. And then for the gate weave I put a Transform effect on the layer (you could use the built in Transform property, but this way it’s easy to turn on or off). Alt-click the stopwatch for Position and type in the expression: wiggle(6,0.5). This gives the text a slight jittery motion. Aaaand that’s it. Sprinkle some film grain on top if you want.
Yeah I was wondering if you used the wiggle expression. I’ve got the “wiggler” effect on there which I imagine is mostly the same, except it actually generates adjustable keyframes rather than nebulous ones. I didn’t know about the wiggle expression at the time, but since I have I’ve been wonder if it’s worth it to make the switch. I am curious to know how the math involved in that works, mostly just because I wonder if an object will appear to jitter more or less when it is scaled down (this is more for the logo). Although now that I’m thinking about it I should probably add the wiggle effect to the logo comp, rather than the logo itself, so that the wiggle effect won’t scale down with it.