Subtitles of the Movie

Motion 4 has a new Scroll Text Behavior which replaces the old roll and scroll behaviors of the past. It's very simple. This behavior just scrolls the text up like a movie credit roll. The improvements to this mainly have to do with better rendering with interlace video. Now, this does not work like the Text File Generator, even though you need to use an external Text file. This time you can use an RTF file type because it supports formatting internally. So, the first thing, just import the Rich Text File, or RTF, like any other object. There it is. The Import and now it's in our Canvas. Now, up to the Add Behavior Tool, Animation, Scroll Text. The behavior defaults by having the text off the screen at the bottom so if you want to see it, just move the Playhead forward in time and you may need to center it up a bit. Like other behaviors, the speed of the scroll can be set by the length of the track, which is the automatic setting in the behavior itself, so by the time the Playhead reaches the end of the track all of the text has scrolled off the top of the screen, or you can change the Speed Control and the Behavior Tool to Fixed and it gives it a pixel rate, or set it to Custom, which lets you set beginning and end values, which can be keyframed by the way, so it's not a consistent scrolling speed. I'll set the Speed Control back to Automatic. The Scroll Rate Multiplier is a quick way to bump up or slow down the overall speed of the scroll if you want to. Now you can also set the scrolling to be horizontal with this Parameter at the top, but you lose your formatting which you probably don't want to, so make sure you click on the Allow Layout Override and this keeps the text in its original formatting. Let's look at the Reduce Flicker option. You can choose between None, which leaves your speed alone the way you set it, or to Progressive or Interlace, both of which may change the speed of your scroll to reduce flickering. The speed adjustments these options create is Motion's attempt at optimizing for a monitor that shows one whole frame at a time, which is Progressive, or for a monitor that displays a frame split into two fields alternating one field with the other, which is Interlaced. My advice is that you don't count on the reduced flicker controls of this behavior. Designing text for either Progressive or Interlace monitors is largely a formatting issue. This means keep your font choices to something without serifs, or with thick enough serifs, instead of scroll speed that isn't even a multiple or fraction of your vertical dimension of your frame. Better yet, invest in a video card and a broadcast monitor to check your scrolling while you work.