When it comes time to prepare elements for a title sequence, it can be a messy situation. Title designers often deal with the design team from the graphic design department as well as elements from the production itself and elements that they generate on their own. Bringing it all together can be quite challenging but also rewarding.
When the clients give you the credit list, request that it be as close to the final list as possible. In designing titles and end crawls, something that can easily be fixed in a word processing software package will set you back a while fixing it with design software such as After Effects and the Adobe Suite. Clients might not immediately understand this, so do your best to explain it, but they are going to send you fixes and adjustments to the credit list anyway, so try to avoid setting things up in a way that causes you problems if it needs to be fixed later.
One thing that must decided early is what the title designer will be responsible for delivering. How long should it be? What format will match what the editor’s working on, and what format will the production need for the final presentation? Going back to the very beginning of this topic, remember that if for some reason it is unavoidable that you have to use raster-based type, having to resize later will be a true chore. So, one recommendation is that if you are working with raster-based type, you should set up the original resolution to match the final output size or higher. If the type can remain vector in format, this is less of a concern since the size can be changed later without losing image quality.
In the early stages of production, the title designer should meet with and urge the director, producer, and editor to make a decision as to what the final output is going to be. Now, if that is determined to be a 2K or higher film format, the title designer might be best off working at a lower resolution until the final title sequence is approved and then generate the higher resolution version.
