Scrolling Text Generator
Scrolling text generator for a ticker that never runs out: one line slides across the frame in your font and color, then saves as a looping GIF, MP4 or WebM.
What is scrolling text?
Scrolling text is a line sliding across a screen or a sign, which lets a long message fit in a narrow strip. News tickers came out of electric signs. In 1928 The New York Times lit up the Motograph News Bulletin, nicknamed the Zipper, around the Times Tower in New York.
On the web it turned into the marquee tag, a non-standard HTML element from early Internet Explorer that's deprecated now. A video file of the crawl goes where no tag can run, like a stream overlay, a lower third or a social post.
How to make a scrolling text video
Start on the blank canvas, or load an image or video for the ticker to run over. Type your message in Text. The Marquee motion is already on, at a Size of 0.2 of the frame's height.
Speed controls the pace. At 1 the line travels two text heights a second, right to left, and 0 holds it still. Font, Weight, Size and Colour style the text, and Position Y sets how high the strip sits. A marquee doesn't use Position X or Amount, so those are hidden.
This Marquee is also one of ten motions in Kinetic Typography Maker. And if you want the line going round a ring, Text on a Circle does that.
Settings for a stream ticker, an LED sign and a marked join
Stream ticker: Size 0.06, Position Y 0.95, Speed 1.5. Because pace is counted in text heights, a small ticker crawls slowly in pixels. At Size 0.06 and Speed 1 it covers only about an eighth of the frame's height per second, so the smaller the text, the higher you'll want Speed.
LED sign: set Font to VT323 (terminal) or Press Start 2P (arcade), Colour to #ff3b1f and Size to 0.3. Pixel faces keep that blocky dot-matrix look, and at this size a word or two fills the frame at once.
Marked join: trailing spaces in Text get trimmed, and the copies sit 0.6 text heights apart. Finish the message with a mark like • and it runs as OPEN LATE • OPEN LATE •.
How long should a scrolling text GIF be to loop?
The strip looks identical every time the line has moved its own width plus the gap. So the loop length is that distance divided by two text heights times Speed. Take a line half as wide as a 16:9 frame at Size 0.2: it's about 4.4 text heights, 5 with the gap, so it loops every 2.5 seconds at Speed 1 and every 5 seconds at Speed 0.5.
Put that figure in the recording's Duration and keep Seamless loop on Off. A crossfade would show two tickers sliding over each other for the whole length of the fade.
Saving a ticker
GIF is fine for a short sign loop of a few seconds. A lower-third ticker running 20 or 30 seconds comes out smaller and sharper as MP4, where little moving letters don't have to squeeze into 256 colors.
The strip is drawn on black. If you want it over your own footage, load the clip first; layering the export afterwards won't work well.