Movie Cards Generator

A desktop tool for creating professional title cards for film productions — credits, opening titles, and more. Generates transparent PNG images and an FCPXML timeline ready for import into Final Cut Pro or compatible editors.

GUI for cards creation:

Generated card image and the timeline in the editing software (Resolve):

Features

• Card editor — Add, edit, and delete cards with primary text (e.g. job title) and secondary text (e.g. name), with live treeview updates and multi-select
• BBCode formatting — Inline [b], [i], [bi], and [color=#rrggbb] tags in card text; \n for line breaks
• PNG export — Renders transparent RGBA images at your target resolution with full font and colour control
• FCPXML timeline — Exports a Final Cut Pro-compatible timeline with Cross Dissolve transitions and frame-accurate rational-number timing
• Unified session files — Save and restore your full project (cards + all settings) as a single JSON file
• Block positioning — Primary and secondary text move as one unit; a single X/Y anchor and spacing control in the General tab
• Flexible settings — Frame rates from 23.976 to 60 fps, resolution presets (720p to 4K), per-card duration and gap control, fade in/out, independent font settings for each text layer

Requirements

• Python 3
• Pillow >= 10.0.0

pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

python main.py

1. Load a session — click Browse next to Session File and open a .json file (try example.json to get started)
2. Edit cards — add, remove, or edit entries in the Cards panel; changes are held in memory until you click Save
3. Configure settings — set frame rate, resolution, fades, text block position, and font options in the Settings panel
4. Set output directory — click Browse next to Output Dir
5. Generate — click Generate to render PNGs and the FCPXML timeline

Output: a cards/ folder of transparent PNGs + a timeline.fcpxml file in the output directory.

BBCode & newlines

The primary and secondary text fields support inline formatting:

Syntax	Effect
\n	Line break
[b]...[/b]	Bold
[i]...[/i]	Italic
[bi]...[/bi]	Bold + italic
[color=#FF8800]...[/color]	Colour override (hex)

Bold/italic variants are resolved automatically from system font files. The regular face is used as a fallback if a variant file cannot be found.

Session file format

Session files are plain JSON with two top-level keys:

{
  "config": { ... },
  "cards": [
    { "primary": "Directed by", "secondary": "Jane Smith", "duration": 4.0, "gap": 1.0 }
  ]
}

See example.json for a complete reference.

Project structure

main.py               # Entry point
example.json          # Sample session file (cards + config)
requirements.txt      # Pillow >= 10.0.0
core/
  json_reader.py      # load_session / save_session, Card dataclass
  session_config.py   # SessionConfig / TextConfig dataclasses
  font_utils.py       # Cross-platform font resolution (with bold/italic variant search)
  image_generator.py  # PNG rendering with BBCode inline parser (Pillow)
  fcpxml_generator.py # FCPXML timeline generation (rational-number timecodes)
  utils.py            # index_to_alpha naming helper
gui/
  app.py              # Main window and orchestration
  cards_panel.py      # Card list, inline editor, Add/Delete/Save/Clear
  settings_panel.py   # General, Primary Text, Secondary Text tabs