SomethingStarWarsRelated said:
Can I ask, how did you go about matching the font? What key words would I Google to look this up? Or is there a good YouTube video to watch?
Short answer is that I used Fontforge and altered a generic NewsGothic Bold font as a starting point. Fontforge isn’t the most intuitive program, but I figured out enough to hack the crawl in a day or two with some googling.
The more involved answer is that I used the camera in After Effects to get a view of the 4K77 crawl in which the letters were no longer distorted. From that render, I took still images of each line as it appeared.
Then I sharpened each line considerably to get more visible edges.
Then isolated the individual letters in Photoshop.
And greyed them out/lightened them so that the Fontforge letterforms would be visible above them
After that it was a process of editing each of the basic letters in Fontforge to match the images, and guessing whenever I ran into a character that had no reference in the original crawl. After rendering the font and installing it, I could try to match the crawl in After Effects. It took about a dozen attempts to get the kerning right for each letter, but eventually the individual words in the crawl could be matched with no letter-by-letter kerning adjustments. Of course, each line had a different overall letter and word spacing due to the fully justified nature of a Star Wars crawl.
I found this helpful when working on it, but I’ll admit that I skipped many steps that would be necessary for a robust polished font: http://designwithfontforge.com/en-US/index.html