3. Credits Spreadsheet

The spreadsheet Credits.xlsx/xls/ods/csv in the project folder houses your credits alongside some important metadata. Towards the top, 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:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be Cautious About Formats

For logos, always try to use files with the extensions svg/pdf/ai/eps/ps. These are vector graphics that can be scaled arbitrarily without any quality loss. If you don’t have a vector version of a logo at hand, ask for it. Only fall back to png/gif files if absolutely necessary, as these are raster graphics, which may look bad upon rescaling.

Do absolutely never use jpg/jpeg files for logos. While JPEG compression appears visually lossless for organic photos, it badly messes up high contrast edges, of which there are plenty in typical logos. The result will look very amateurish:

Resize and Crop

By default, pictures are shown in their original size. To resize them, append either “[width]x” or “x[height]”. For example, to make the picture 200 pixels wide, write “{{Pic Cinecred Large.svg 200x}}”.

You can crop the empty space around vector pictures (svg/pdf/ai/eps/ps) by appending “Crop”. For example: “{{Pic Cinecred Large.svg Crop}}”. Cropping can of course be combined with resizing.

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 global settings. We advise you to set it to your main font height, but other choices are also valid if they aid your design.

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. You can move the spine left or right by specifying a pixel offset from the center in the @Spine Position column in the spreadsheet. It’s even possible to have multiple spines run in parallel by just appending “Parallel”:

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:

Break Match (Advanced)

To understand this column, you need to be familiar with the family of match settings found in content styles; namely Match Column Widths and Match Row Height for grid layouts, Match Cell Width/Height for flow layouts, and finally Match 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”, or “Tail” into the @Break Match column:

Page Runtime (Advanced)

You might already be familiar with the Runtime Fine Adjustment global setting, which shrinks or grows vertical gaps to slightly tune the runtime. While that setting affects the entire credit sequence, it’s also possible to tune only a single page directly in the spreadsheet. This might be interesting when you’ve got more than one scroll page:

You may also jointly tune any group of 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 if you include card pages in the group, their runtime will count towards the group’s runtime, but they themselves are of course not modified.