First of all, I'm super excited. After playing through the beginner game a few weeks ago, my regular dnd group is switching to star wars tomorrow night! I know my players are equally stoked.

So my quick question that's turned into a lot of research. Does anyone know a good way to generate an opening crawl in video format?

A couple quick notes. The official star wars website apparently at one point had a crawl generator, but for at least the last several weeks (probably longer) it has been unavailable. So that's not an option unless someone knows of an alternate link to it that works. I'm also not really looking to spend a bunch of time with editing software right now. Maybe in a couple weeks I'll have more time to create my own from scratch, but ideally there's a cool template out there that somebody has made. I searched and found a similar topic on the beginner game forums, wherein OP created a video version of the crawl that comes written with the game, but no luck there on a working generator.

Any help would be awesome.

for mac SWTSG v1.2.3

It requires some hacking to work properly, but once you hack the background images inside the .app file… works great.

Another option (and it's a surprising one) is Sketchup.

See, Sketchup allows making 3d letters. You can then flatten those letters into a 2d colored image. You can do a flyover by careful use of the movie facility inside it.My results with sketchup were… uninspiring. But I was just doing a proof of concept, and sketchup has had a 3 major upgrade improvement since…

Any 3D renderer can do it, tho.

Gold letters on a flat plane,, a starfield in the far distance, and fly backwards over the letters from altitude with a slight downangle view.

youtube search 'starwars crawl', can be done easily with Windows Live Movie Maker.

pickup 'star jedi' font from dafont.com and install them

There's also an iOS app called "Crawl Creator" which does a bang-up job of creating a Star Wars themed opening crawl.

Voice said:

I've just bought and used this. It's a really good recommendation and really simple to use. Thanks for the tip.

Does anyone know where I can find the original or an earlier version of SWTSG v1.2.3 ? I really need the 1.2.1 version. It appears the 1.2.3 one requires a 64-bit OS and I didn't know that. I bought an old Macbook laptop tonight off a guy on Craigslist just to use this program for my group and now I can't run the program anyhow. The 1.2.1 version would have worked on here. Does anyone have a copy of that older version or can tell me privately where I can get it please?

I am quite desperate now that I spent money for nothing.

Does anyone know where I can find the original or an earlier version of SWTSG v1.2.3 ? I really need the 1.2.1 version. It appears the 1.2.3 one requires a 64-bit OS and I didn't know that. I bought an old Macbook laptop tonight off a guy on Craigslist just to use this program for my group and now I can't run the program anyhow. The 1.2.1 version would have worked on here. Does anyone have a copy of that older version or can tell me privately where I can get it please?

I am quite desperate now that I spent money for nothing.

Sorry, all I can sent you to is this

http://www.starwars.com/games-apps/star-wars-crawl-creator

As for the app you mention there, I doubt you will get it, as it's really, REALLY old (at least in software terms). I do my Opening crawls with Blender3D and Final Cut pro. Blender I set up some ships to do battle or fly by on to a planet or whatever, with Final Cut pro I add eventual explosions, all sound and of course blaster fire.

There is a way though to do the opning crawl text in blender, too. Look for that online.

Here's a post with links to a bunch of HTML crawls that I did. If you can't find the software you're looking for, you might want to just download one of the HTML pages and modify it to your needs.

I've done mine in After Effects and it's not too onerous after you learn the basics of the software (or just follow one of the tutorials on YouTube). The hardest part is the way AE wants to ramp up the speed of objects moving into the z-axis as they recede from the screen; it took a bit of fiddling to keep the crawl from starting off slowly at the bottom and then just rocketing backward after the first paragraph.

The starwars.com crawl generator actually does seem to be working right now, and it's handy, but I'm not a huge fan of the way it drops out the middle section of the music (even if it's for probably perfectly understandable copyright reasons).

This is the one I use:

http://www.starwordz.com/starwordz/

This is the one I use:

http://www.starwordz.com/starwordz/

On the one hand, this has the advantage that you don’t have to learn HTML. Just type in some text and you’re done.

On the other hand, I think that the results are a bit limited, and if you can learn a bit of HTML, then OggDude’s examples are likely to work better for you.

IMO, the official StarWars.com Crawl Creator and the corresponding iPad app both tend to do a somewhat better job than this site.

But, it’s always good to have alternatives, especially in case the StarWars.com site is down or you don’t have an iPad handy.

So I'm trying to use the Crawl Creator on the starwars.com site.

I am having two issues with it.

First, is that when I watch it full screen, the crawl pauses on its own, randomly. The music continues, but the crawl just pauses and I have to click on Play again. Its highly annoying.

Secondly, when I do expand to full screen, the options bar never disappears, so the crawl floats up through the options bar and, again, annoying.

Suggestions?

Suggestions?

Have you tried a different browser? Or turning off things like NoScript, etc… for that site?

IMO, the official StarWars.com Crawl Creator and the corresponding iPad app both tend to do a somewhat better job than this site.

I had issues with the sound in the official Crawl Creator, that's why I use the other alternative I posted.

^{http://www.starwars.com/games-apps/star-wars-crawl-creator}