How to add titles and credits to your movies

Creating a credit roll: Adobe Premiere Pro handles this well but it's not perfect. For example, here there’s no easy way to have it centre on the separator between credits and names, so you'd need to add extra spaces to line things up.

You’ve finished your movie — you’ve ‘locked off’ the edit, completed any visual effects, graded the shots, added music and done your final sound mix. So what’s left? The credits! Make sure you get everybody’s name and correct spelling as they contribute to the film. Don’t leave it until the end — you run the risk of forgetting someone, misspelling their name or giving them the wrong credit.

When it comes time to finally do your credits, double-check that you haven’t forgotten someone. This includes any thank yous, sponsors or legally required mentions (like if you use sound effects from www.freesound.org, for example).

Opening and end credits

Watch any movie to get a sense of what credits need to be included and their order. Order is important — over the years this has changed as new roles emerge, but it’s pretty consistent. Many movies include all the key credits in their opening sequence. Some choose to have just a few or none at all and save it all for the end, in which case they tend to run in reverse order. If you do an opening sequence, it can be simple or very complex. Most video editors offer the ability to create simple credits for opening or end titles. Premiere Pro offers a very good title generator for title cards, overlays and rolling credits. But for something more designed, After Effects is better.

For some reason, creating an end credit roll in most video editors isn’t as easy as it should be. Sure, you can enter the text and select rolling, but there’s often not enough control over font types, centring, mixing single-card and compound lists. Premiere Pro isn't perfect either, but it does a much better job than most. You enter several lines of text and it doesn’t matter if it’s too long, since the window will scroll up as you type. You can choose any font and style, and centre your text. You can control the speed of the roll by changing the length of the clip on the timeline.

Create a title in Premiere Pro

1. From the titles menu, select the kind of title you want to create. A Still is a simple non-moving overlay, often referred to as a ‘card’. Roll is when the text scrolls up (or down) the screen. Crawl is when the text scrolls sideways from left to right or vice versa.

2. Whatever your choice, the title will appear as a new item in the content window and open the text editor. Click in the screen in the middle and begin typing. You can change the font, hit Enter for multiple lines and all the usual formatting tools are available. You can also choose a text style using the icons at the bottom.

3. Drag the new title clip onto video track 2 on your timeline. If you have an image or video clip underneath on video 1, the title will appear as an overlay. You can always double-click to open the editing window again and see the changes directly on your timeline preview. If you want the title to appear over black, simply place it on track 1 with no other images below it. As with any still image, you can extend the clip on the timeline to make it longer (or shorter) and add dissolves or other transitions to the beginning and end.