Yellow “Star Wars” Opening Text Crawl Tutorial!
Written by Darel Rex Finley, 2007.  Notice: The title “Star Wars,” and other text, imagery, and graphic sequences described/simulated herein are copyrighted by their respective copyright holders, and are used without permission in this website/app for non-commercial, informational purposes.  Commercial use is prohibited.  Not affiliated with any companies or individuals.

This is pretty much the coolest software ever written.  —Neal Acree, Music Composer for Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis You bestride the earth as like unto a god.  —Brian Pratt, Seattle WA I am flipping out.  This is the best thing I’ve ever seen a home computer do.  —Ozzie Grenardo M.D., Denver CO Brilliant.  Absolute class.  —Pete Hamilton, Herts UK JAW-DROPPING.  That is phenomenal.  Better than expected, better than imagined.  —Rod Galindo, Simulation Systems Analyst, Kansas City KS “Thank you” just doesn’t quite cut it.  I’d swear it was done in a professional studio.  —Dustin J. George, Burbank CA

Video demo created with Snapz Pro X
Result video

So you’re making a Star Wars fanfilm, and you want that authentic-looking, opening yellow text scroll?  Plus all the other nice frills that go along with it?  You’ve googled the internet for tutorials that show you how to do those things, but it seemed like a lot of hard work, using expensive software packages that you didn’t want to buy?  And even then the results were a little bit less-than-authentic looking?

At ease, my fellow Jedi!  The Force is with you.  The search for your movie’s opening is over — with this tutorial, you can make a super-authentic looking opening sequence, super easy, and with no new software packages.  In fact, the only software package you will need to buy is a movie editing application, and you probably already have that since, after all, you’re making a movie.

1.		Grab a few blank CDs or DVDs, write down the URL to this tutorial, get in your car, drive to your nearest Apple store (preferably not during peak hours), and park yourself in front of one of their speedier Macs, such as an aluminum-enclosure Mac Pro with dual, quad-core Xeon processors.  (If you happen to already have a Mac, you can skip this step. And no, a Mac Pro is not required; any Mac made after 2002 will probably work if it has a few gigs of free hard drive space and at least OS X 10.4.) Congratulations!  You’ve just completed the hardest step in this tutorial; everything else is amazingly easy.
2.		Download SWTSG v1.1.4 and install it on the Mac.  Once it’s installed, launch it! (Note:  It’s probably a good idea to Quit any apps that might be running on the Mac Pro, especially processor-hungry video players that might be playing massive, HD, demo movies.)
3.		In the control window, enter the name of your fictional distributor and a tagline of distributor info.  The image preview window will show how your distributor logo will appear.
4.		Enter the name of your fictional film company and a “limited liability” tag.  The image window will show a preview. Note that this is just a simple, green silhouette of the logo — when you generate the whole sequence, it will look better.
5.		Enter your intro text that will appear just before the big text crawl.  The image window will show an image that looks like this:
6.		Enter your title logo.  The image window will then show this.  (Note:  In the final render, there will be stars in the background of this title logo — this preview image does not show them.)
7.		Enter your crawl text.  The image window will then show this.  (Note:  In the final render, there will be stars in the background of this text crawl — this preview image does not show them.) Any single-row paragraph will be automatically centered, and if it is also in all upper-case, it will be vertically stretched to about twice the normal line height.  This is useful for starting your text with something like this: Episode THX A NEW NAME (If you want to manually control the positioning of the text, you can do it by putting any number of spaces at the beginning of the line.)
8.		Click over to the “Generate” tab, and select your movie’s pixel dimensions, frame rate, and destination folder.  (If you are using the SECAM system, choose the PAL options which are identical — mes excuses.) Note that the default folder, “Star Wars TSG Frames” does not exist, and you will need to manually create it. Warning: Do not choose your desktop as the destination! If you do, hundreds of image files will be created there, and the OS will probably grind to a halt just trying to manage the desktop user-interface!  (Note:  The app now warns you against this if you try to do it.) Question:  I chose an “Anamorphic DVD” resolution, but the image is letterboxed.  Aren’t anamorphic widescreen DVDs supposed to be without letterboxing in their images? Answer:  Not necessarily.  See this page to understand why.
9.		Click the “Go” button.  Your sequence will now generate.  This may take a while, so you might want to hide the app (Cmd-H) and go find a Starbucks.  (But first tell a store employee that you’re running a long render, so maybe they won’t stop it while you’re gone.)
10.		Your sequence is now a very large number of individual BMP files, each showing one frame of video.  This is not the best format to work with, so let’s turn it into a single, reasonably small QuickTime file which can be imported into any movie-editing package and converted into whatever your movie’s final format needs to be. (Note:  For some reason I don’t understand, these BMP files may not be openable by Leopard’s Preview and QuickLook — but don’t worry, they’ll still convert to an .mov file.) Click the QuickTime logo in the dock, and (after it finally lets you close its advertising window), choose File > Open Image Sequence (not Open File), then select the first frame (frame number zero) from your destination folder.  You will also be prompted for a frame rate — be sure to choose the exact same frame rate that you chose in the SWTSG app.  After what might be a long pause with no progress bar (be patient!), your sequence will now open in a QuickTime video player window. At this point, you might be able to actually play back your BMP files in real time, if the images are small enough and the Mac is fast enough, but don’t bother with that yet — instead, choose File > Export to save your sequence as a single, QuickTime movie file (i.e. an .mov file). Warning:  Do not use File > Save As!  That works too, but makes an enormous file.  Using Export allows you to use a good codec and choose a compression rate and other settings. The compression settings will probably be defaulted to the H.264 codec with high image quality.  That’s what we want; just go ahead and render it with those settings. (Note:  If you’re doing this at home, and you don’t have QT Pro, you will need to use another app, such as iMovie, to render your sequence as an .mov file.  That can be done as described here by Karl Petersen.)
11.		Now just burn the .mov file to a blank CD or DVD, like so:  (a) Insert blank disc and wait for it to appear on the desktop;  (b) drag the .mov file to it;  (c) open the blank disc’s window, then click the Burn button.

That’s it!  Hope you enjoy it, and don’t hesitate to send me feedback.

Sourcecode now available here — if you are attempting a port to Windows, Linux, iPhone, or any other platform, please e-mail me your homepage so I can post it in this box.