Creating titles

[Mike Velte]

They are 3 different animals….a still is …well still. A tornado warning crawls along the bottom of the screen and movie credits roll up the screen.

[John Smith]

So you mean they are self-animated? That you don’t have to keyframe their positions? I get the still and crawl, but not the roll. What do you mean by tornado warning?

We don’t have any tornado warning so I’m not sure how it is.

[Mark Hollis]

A “tornado warning” is text moving along the bottom of a television screen from right to left. It’s commonly used to alert viewers of something happening in their locality and it is usually broadcast over currently-running programs to warn viewers of weather or flooding issues that may affect them. That’s a crawl.

A roll is text moving from the bottom of the screen to the top, as you see for credits at the end of feature films.

A still is simply that. It’s text that stays motionless — unless you move it with the Motion effect in your effect controls.

Generally, when I need to do a lower third or put text on a screen using the character generator, I’ll hit [F9] and bring up the titler. I have certain settings, like typeface, drop shadow and so on set up so that I can quickly type what I need (or cut and paste from a WordPad Document sent from a Producer) and position the text appropriately. For lower Thirds, my style fits into an effect I created with the show name on it, so I have a box to type on that is good for three lines of type.

I don’t do rolls or crawls for the show I edit, as it’s news and never has credits. I’m not sure I’d want Premiere Pro to animate text that much anyway.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[John Smith]

That’s weird, yesterday I tried to add a crawl and a roll. I entered the text, dragged to the timeline, but it stays still. Do you need any additional steps?

Anyway is it possible to animate text manually in Premiere?

[Mike Velte]

[Fabian Terh] “Do you need any additional steps?”

well yes!

Start with a crawl…enter lots of text and note the scroll bar at the bottom of the screen. It is used to review things like spelling. Next go to Roll/Crawl Options and choose “Start off Screen” and “End of Screen”.

Once on the timeline, stretch the duration of the title way out and preview it.

[Mark Hollis]

You literally have to create your text by entering it in “crawl” or “roll” in the titler. If you have your titler set to be still (first), the text will always be still.

Unless you set keyframes for it in the motion tab. But that is a really bad way to do a credit roll where you have lots of titles because there is no easy way to edit or correct misspellings and such.

So start with your titler in roll or crawl mode and you’ll be all set.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?