Crawl

Crawls are your secret weapon for credits, end titles, and legal text blocks — they scroll vertically through the frame while your film is running or afterward. In the edit, you animate them using keyframes, in DaVinci Fusion or Premiere with a text layer that you move from bottom to top. It sounds trivial, but it's technically trickier than it looks: the timing must be right, readability must be maintained even with compression, and the speed must not be rushed — your viewers should actually be able to grasp the names.

You don't need to worry about them on set; that's purely post-production territory. In the edit, you place the text layer on your black or thematic background sequence, set the font size and kerning — usually sans-serif, high contrast, at least 18pt for cinema, depending on the target format. Then you keyframe: Y-position above the frame (e.g., –1080px) to 0 or out of the frame at the bottom. The curve must be linear, otherwise it will be jerky. Some DoPs incorporate subtle color treatment beforehand or a slight vignette to frame the text — this optically enhances it when the background is chaotic.

Practical tip: Always use Safe Zones. The text at the top and bottom must have at least 5% distance from the edge of the frame, otherwise it will disappear on smaller screens. Check your timing on color televisions and the web — what looks perfect on the cinema DCP will be torture on YouTube. The scroll speed depends on word length and contextual structure: credits per person are shorter, legal notices need more time. Rule of thumb: approximately one second per two lines.

Get motion graphic templates from your NLE when you're under pressure — but adapt them. Standard crawls are often too fast or boring in their typography. Export the end titles in isolation and test them before color grading, not after; moving text can suffer from aggressive compression. If you're cutting a real feature film, rely on the DCP standard and test on actual hardware — a crawl in a real cinema is a different experience than on a monitor.