Creating Video Scrolling Credits With Keynote

You can create professional-looking video end credits with Keynote using only a single simple animation on a single slide. You can incorporate a long list of names, and add shapes, photos or other elements into a group. The result is easily modified and exported as a video to bring into iMovie, Final Cut or any other video editing app.


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You have the ability in iMovie to create simple scrolling text. You can use that in end credits for a project. But if you want something a little more complex you probably need a piece of animation or graphic software. However you could do it pretty easily in Keynote. So let's go, in Keynote, and create a widescreen presentation because the video is probably going to be widescreen. Then we'll just use a black background. Let's shrink down this so we can see what's going on here. Get rid of the text that's here and create a new text box.

In this text box I'm going to insert, I'm just going to paste a list of fifty names randomly generated. Let's say this is going to be our scrolling credits here. So maybe we want it to be a little bigger. Use the sidebar here and increase the font size. Something a little bit more decent. Now the idea is that we want it to scroll up the screen. So we can have it start here at the bottom. I want to check in the Format sidebar under Arrange and see where it is positioned. You can see it 705 is the x position and 1080 is the y position all the way down below the bottom of the screen.

So let's switch to animate and under Action we'll Add an Effect. We're going to add the Move effect. Now the Move effect we want it to go and reposition vertically. So I want to set the x position to be the same 705 that we had before. Then I'm going to have this (y) be something negative so it moves all the way up. If I do negative 2000 you can see it does indeed move up but not quite enough. So we'll try negative 3000. You can see that just covers it there.

So now when I Preview it you can see how quickly it scrolls from not even appearing, through the screen, and then out the top. I, of course, want to slow this down. So I'll slow it down to 30 seconds and I can do a Preview here and you can see now it's a little too slow. Let's try 20. That's a little bit better. But notice it's kind of speeding up as it goes because the Default Acceleration is Ease In or Ease Out or Ease Both. So let's set it to None so it moves at a constant rate. Now it looks like a kind of credits. We can use that certainly right there as our credits.

But we can do even better. Let's go and Remove the Transition. So we get rid of that. Let's bring this back up here. Now what if we wanted to add cute little images like you see a lot in credits. So, for instance, we can add a cute little hat here to the side. We can add another one. A little duck. We can do Command A to select all and scroll everything up. Then continue to add things. So we can add a little microscope here. The idea could be to put them next to people's name or just be something just to color it up a bit. A little palm tree. You know so you can continue to add those. You can add real images, you can add your own drawings, you can add anything you want. Even more text to it if you want. You can have multiple columns of text. You can have things next to each one of these people or something like that. You can have groups of text in here.

It can be a lot more than just one field. It can be a lot. Because we're going to do Command A to select all and then we're going to group them together. Now it's one big group. It's one big object. Now we can bring it back down to the middle there like we had before. We can once again check this to see where it's at. So 592 x. Let's Animate it. So we'll do 592 and then we'll do the negative 3000 again which still should be good. There we go. Now when we Preview it, let's do 20 seconds, we can see it's going to scroll up, oh we forgot to change to no acceleration, so now we'll scroll up and it will have those little objects there as well.

So this is much better than what you get just in plain iMovie. You can really build anything you want and have it scroll up. But with a list of names and some shapes it's quick and easy. Now that we have this here we can export. So we do Export To and we'll do it to a movie. We'll do higher resolution and we'll make it Self Playing. Then we'll save it to the Desktop. Once it's all done exporting we'll have that 1080 movie that includes that. Even though you needed to click in order to go and start the animation in Keynote you don't have to do that here for the export because we set the export up to be self playing.

Now we'll open it up and you can see it starts blank and as we play it it's going to scroll the credits up the screen. Now we can go ahead and import this into iMovie and add it as credits at the end of our project.


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