3. Credits Spreadsheet

The Credits spreadsheet in the project folder houses your credits alongside some important metadata. It can host multiple credits sequences by having multiple worksheets (e.g., one for opening and one for closing credits).

The file may either be a local xlsx/xls/ods/numbers/csv file, or an url/webloc shortcut that points to an online Google Sheet or EtherCalc table.

To change the format, simply switch out the Credits file. For example, to change from a local to a Google Sheets project, just upload your local Credits.xlsx/xls/ods/numbers/csv file to Google Sheets, put a shortcut named Credits.url/webloc to the Google Sheet into the project folder, and delete the old Credits file.

Towards the top of the spreadsheet, you’ll find the table header, which defines the following columns:

This article explains the meaning of each column, as well as all other aspects of the spreadsheet. For conciseness, the example tables omit columns that are irrelevant.

Head-Body-Tail Blocks

A person’s name often times doesn’t stand alone. Most likely, it’s accompanied by a role name, job title, or some other prefix or suffix. Sometimes, multiple people share the same job title (for example in a list of extras).

Cinecred models all this via so-called head-body-tail blocks. Such a block consists of an optional head text, an arbitrary number of body texts, and an optional tail text. Here are some example blocks as they would appear in the spreadsheet.

• A standalone actor block on a title card could have a single body cell with the actor’s name:

  @Head	@Body	@Tail
  	Alex

• A single credit block could have the head “Gaffer” and a single body cell with the gaffer’s name:

  @Head	@Body	@Tail
  Gaffer	Gustav

• A drivers block could have the head “Drivers” and one body cell for each driver:

  @Head	@Body	@Tail
  Drivers	Dominic
  	Detlef
  	Dora

• A song block could have the song title as its head and one body cell for each credit line:

  @Head	@Body	@Tail
  Loremium Ipsumium	Written by Cicero
  	Dedicated to Brutus
  	Pilfered by Some 60s Typesetter

• An opening title block could have a single body cell with the director’s name and some enclosing words in the head and tail:

  @Head	@Body	@Tail
  A	Dirc	Film

The head and tail may contain manual linebreaks if the content style has vertical orientation. Similarly, the body may contain manual linebreaks if the content style uses the paragraphs body layout.

Tags

Sometimes, it’d be nice to insert a blank body cell. Simply leaving an empty cell would however split the block in two. Instead, use the “{{Blank}}” tag:

As you will learn later on, the look of text is governed by letter styles. To change the letter style of the head, body, or tail mid-text, use the “{{Style}}” tag. It either applies a specific letter style (“{{Style X}}”), or resets to the initial style (“{{Style}}”):

Pictures & Videos

Instead of text, a body cell can also contain a picture or video from the project folder or any subfolder. For example, to insert Cinecred.svg and Blooper.mkv, write:

As you can see, you may omit the file extension. Once added, you will be able to configure the picture or video in the styling window. To separately configure multiple appearances of the same picture or video, append a qualifier:

Image sequences are also supported. Suppose there’s the following sequence in the project folder:

• My Cinecred Project
  • Vanity Card
    • Vanity Card.0000001.png
    • Vanity Card.0000002.png
    • Vanity Card.0000003.png
    • …

To include it, refer to the name of the sequence folder:

Vertical Gaps

You declare vertical gaps between blocks directly in the spreadsheet. An empty row automatically constitutes a vertical gap of 1 unit. Alternatively, you can manually enter a vertical gap in between two blocks, which overrides the automatic gaps:

A vertical gap of 1 unit corresponds to some amount of pixels. You can configure this amount in the project settings. We advise you to set it to your main font height, but other choices are also valid if they aid your design.

Sometimes it might be necessary to specify vertical gaps directly in pixels. This can be done by appending “px”:

Content Styles

Cinecred needs to know how you want each block to be rendered. For example, while a job-person-block usually has the head (job) to the left of the body (person), a song has the head (song title) above the body (song details). And if there are multiple body cells, should they be put in a grid or flown dynamically? Should the body be interpreted as paragraphs? Which fonts should be used? And so on…

All these aspects and lots more are defined by content styles, which you configure in the styling window. You then put the name of such a content style in the spreadsheet to assign it to all following blocks:

Spine Position

The spine is the vertical cyan line in the preview. Cinecred strings together blocks along it, one below the other. The spine is centered by default, but you can move it using the @Spine Position spreadsheet column.

On scroll pages, you move the spine left or right by specifying a horizontal pixel offset from the screen center:

On card pages, you can move the spine to any position by specifying a horizontal and optionally vertical pixel offset from the screen center. This position will be marked as a small cyan diamond. By default, the spine will be vertically centered around the position, but you can append “Below” or “Above” to put the spine below or above it:

On both scroll and card pages, you can have the spine run parallel to the previous one by specifying a horizontal offset from the center and appending “Parallel”:

In cases where a simple “Parallel” is too limited, you can also arbitrarily arrange the spine in relation to a previous one. To do this, write “Hook”, followed by how many spines we have to walk back to reach the spine that the new one will be attached to. Then specify which point in the other spine (“Top”, “Middle”, or “Bottom”) should be connected to which point in the new spine. For example, write “Bottom-Top” to glue the end of the other spine to the start of the new one. Optionally, append a horizontal and vertical pixel distance between the connected points:

Notice that with both “Parallel” and “Hook”, the whole compound is positioned as one big unit, not just the root spine. For example, when you look at the cyan diamond in the image above, you see that the whole compound is vertically centered around the position (-50, 0).

Page Styles

Cinecred supports both title cards and rolling credits. The umbrella term for both is page. Your credits are simply composed of a sequence of pages. The behavior of each page (that is, whether it’s a card or a scroll, and details like the fade duration and scrolling speed) is defined by a page style, which you configure in the styling window. The default template ships with two aptly named page styles: “Card” and “Scroll”.

In the spreadsheet, you indicate the start of a new page by putting the name of a page style there:

Page Runtime

This column sets the runtime (including fades) of a particular page, overriding all styling settings. When used on a scroll page, it shrinks or grows the vertical gaps to tune the runtime, just like the project-wide Runtime Fine Adjustment or the per-style Runtime Fine Adjustment.

You may also jointly tune any group of scroll pages. To do this, specify the runtime only for the group’s first page, but prepend a group name that you then reference from the group’s other pages. Notice that card pages cannot be included in a group.

Page Gap

If you put a timecode into this column between two pages, the credits will show a blank screen between them for that amount of time, overriding the Subsequent Page Gap page style setting. Negative durations are also admissible and cause the next page to commence while the previous page is still running. For example, you could let a copyright title card fade in while the credits are still rolling out of frame.

Alternatively, you can put “Melt” here to absorb the two pages into a bigger page. For example, say that a scroll page is melted with a following card page. The scroll first commences as usual, but then at its end actually includes the card and stops on it; the card then takes over and finally fades out after its display duration has passed. You could use this feature to, for example, stop the credits roll on a final copyright notice, which then gracefully fades out.

By default, the scroll speed change between melted pages is quite abrupt. To make it smooth, put a transition duration timecode and a transition style behind “Melt” (see example table below). The transition style determines how the scroll speed goes from full to 0 at the melting point (or the other way around).

Here’s the page preview for the above table both with and without melting:

And here’s how the smooth melting looks in the final video:

There is no limit to the number of pages you can melt together. For example, you could have an elaborate sequence of cards and scrolls all melt into a single page, which then looks like a single scroll that pauses multiple times.

And finally, here’s a neat trick. You can melt a card with an empty scroll page and combine that with a negative page gap to make the card stop while the rest of the credits scrolls away:

Break Harmonization (Advanced)

To understand this column, you need to be familiar with the family of harmonization settings found in content styles; namely Harmonize Column Widths and Harmonize Row Height for grid layouts, Harmonize Cell Width/Height for flow layouts, and finally Harmonize Head/Tail Width for heads and tails. As you know, these settings harmonize blocks all throughout the credits in various ways.

Now, what if you want the harmonization to not reach beyond a certain point? Say you’ve got two sections of gutter blocks on your page. While you’d like all head and body cells within either section to have the same width, this harmonization should not happen between the two sections. Well, simply put a space-separated list of “Head”, “Body”, and/or “Tail” into the @Break Harmonization column: