DV Filmmaking

Creating Scrolling or Crawling Titles in Final Cut Pro

At the end of just about every movie and television show, the credits roll up from the bottom of the screen and exit through the top of the frame. Part of the reason filmmakers roll credits is they’ve become a convention—when audiences see the credits roll, everybody knows the show is over. But rolling credits also fill a practical need: they enable a filmmaker to acknowledge everyone who worked on a program in a relatively short amount of time. If people’s names were displayed on screen as a series of individual title images, often referred to as title cards (also sometimes called slates), it would take far longer to credit the people who worked on a production.

Text that rolls up from the bottom of the screen is generally referred to as scrolling text. When text moves across the screen horizontally, it’s generally referred to as crawling text. In recent years, crawling text has become increasingly common, not so much for use in titles but to announce breaking news stories or severe weather alerts on television.

Like static titles, creating scrolls and crawls once required specialized equipment and highly trained personnel. Now, using Final Cut Pro’s title generator, you can create scrolling or crawling titles just as easily as you created a static title earlier in this chapter.

Creating a scrolling title in Final Cut Pro

To create a scrolling title in Final Cut Pro:

1. To access Final Cut Pro’s title generator, click the Generators ...