What Program to make Movie Titles/Credits

[M-5]

I'm trying to figure out what program people use to make their own movie titles and credits. The way that I've been doing it is that I'll find a movie title that I really like, then I'll attempt to find the typeface used with WhatTheFont, and I'll use this font and try to manually place the titles on an image in Photoshop, and I'll use this jpeg in my movie.

It's really cumbersome, so I was wondering how others do this. And do you have to buy every single typeface you want to use individually?

I'm also not sure how people place titles overlaying their films like this (from a film on Vimeo):

Or how does one make a moving title sequence, such as if I want the credits to move from somewhere off the screen on the right side to the center of the screen, and then move away for another credit to do the same.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

iMovie and its limited capacity can help you.
But for proper titles you might take a look at Motion, which can be had for 50 USD from the Mac App Store (MAS), where you can properly animate text and space it and so on. Example.

And yes, if you want to use an individual font and it is not free, you need to buy. But you can also look at dafont for similar looking free fonts.

PS: I use After Effects and Combustion for my title purposes, sometimes even 3 D animation software, but Motion should give you enough freedom and templates to get a very good start.

 

[cgbier]

While Motion is a terrific tool, you can achieve such a simple task like yours in any NLE that allows for key framing.

Move you text out of the left border of your screen. Set a keyframe, then move your playhead further in time, then move your text out to the right. Set another keyframe... done.

And don't use jpegs... use tif.

 

[floh]

And don't use jpegs... use tif.

TIFs are not accepted by many editing programs. PNGs are probably the best way to go. They are compressed losslessly (<- funny word...) and contain an alpha channel for transparency. But yes, JPG is definitely a bad idea for text or anything that has sharp contrasts.

cgbier is right about the rest though. For simple text things, most editing software is sufficient. Apple Motion is great for text, with tons of presets and animations. After Effects is awesome, but I wouldn't recommend it for text, it is overkill and more complicated than Motion to learn.